Bankers

Academics at the Management Centre at Bangor Business School claim that they are ready "to step in to help senior banking staff learn how to avoid the sort of mistakes which triggered the credit crunch which crippled global financial markets over the past year".

You could argue that is a case of shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted, especially as the "top business school in Europe in the specialist field of finance and banking studies" (their words not mine) has already been undertaking research and training programmes for the banking sector for the last thirty years,

However, the conundrum is that this statement seems to suggest that the courses run from Bangor have previously failed to prepare thousands of banking staff for such eventualities. Indeed, one has to wonder what they are teaching if, as one of their own members of staff states, "the top management of banks has not fully understood these financial products created lower down in the organisational structure – and therefore the risks have not been understood by the people at the top"?

I also thought that millions of pounds of public money spent on the Management Centre at Bangor, including £1 million from Gwynedd County Council, was established to help local firms and not to provide large multinational banking organisations with training facilities. But then, what would I know?