A bank's lot is still a lot

What do the banks know that we don’t? The Spanish bank Santander is on an aggressive recruitment drive – looking to fill up to 6,000 jobs. Even the banks you and I own, Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds are hiring people whilst continuing to get rid of backroom staff.

How can you have a boom in retail banking when much the rest of the country is debating whether they will have a job next week, and whilst others still muse on a double dip recession?

We learned last week that our banks – including Northern Rock are already on course to provide the treasury with £30bn.

I was talking to a former treasury minister only last week. He told me that that £30bn is expected to grow very considerably and rapidly. So are the banks that got us into the financial melt down now going to be the agents of our recovery? It sounds alarmingly symmetrical. Does it also say something about what happens when a state decides to run a bank? I certainly never had a problem putting my pocket money in the Post Office Savings Bank as a kid.

I was at dinner last night with half a dozen well informed individuals who were discussing the demise of the UK economy. They were startled by my claim that Britain remains the sixth largest manufacturing economy in the world.

“What on earth do we make?” one asked (vast numbers of cars, for a start). Another reached for her Blackberry and Googled “manufacturing economies”. To her surprise, and that of the other people at the table, I am right. The US, China, Japan, Germany, Italy (yes, Italy) and then the UK. China overhauled Japan during the summer. Overhauling the US, despite its current economic difficulties, will be a little time coming yet. The US economy is 14 times the size of China’s.

What do any of us know, but I’m beginning to wonder if the state of UKPLC is quite as parlous as the politicians tell us. You pays your economist and take yer money. It is rapidly becoming apparent that serendipity is a key economic factor. Who remembers those horrific projections that Northern Rock, RBS and Lloyds could collectively cost us £250bn or more?