Beyond Vickers

The interim thoughts of the Vickers Commission have been well-trailed - and generally well-received. Robert Peston has analysed the practical and political implications at length, in today's post and many previous ones.

But we should be clear on one thing - even if the Vickers Commission does everything it is supposed to do, it will do very little directly to raise the long-term supply of finance for ordinary British companies.

As we know, the crisis has highlighted the enormous downside of having a financial system that punches above its weight; when things go wrong, it was all of us who had to make up the difference between the banks' punch and their actual weight. It may or may not end up solving it, but the Vickers Commission addresses that issue directly.

It does not address the other potential downside of playing home to a "world-beating" financial centre - which is that the financing needs of the average domestic company start to look pretty uninteresting to UK bankers. Put it another way, the UK financial system is much better at serving the needs of the global capital market than serving the needs of the average UK company.

Of course there has been plenty of debate about the banks' unwillingness to lend to companies as the economy struggles out of recession. It's easy to forget that the British banking system was doing a poor job of getting credit to companies in the growth years as well.

As Lord Turner, the head of the FSA, has pointed out, lending by the UK financial system roughly trebled in the decade before the crisis, but all of that new lending went to just one sector - commercial real estate. Total lending to manufacturing companies was actually slightly lower in 2007 - the peak of the credit boom - than it was in 1997.

Lord Turner and Mervyn King disagree on many aspects of this debate, but they agree on this point: In the years before the crisis, the UK banking system became too cosmopolitan for its own good. Bankers were drawn to high risk, high return activities - and the only domestic sector which could come close, in sexiness terms, was property. Financial and human resources were diverted into real estate, and a handful of other highly lucrative, leveraged and global activities - at the expense of pretty much everything else. The average non-financial SME - and even supposedly sexy technology start-ups - were struggling to get traditional sources of funding in the UK, even in the mid-noughties.

It's a depressingly old problem - both the MacMillan Committee of 1931 and the Wilson Committee of 1976 were set up in response to more or less the same concerns. But it's a very important issue for our economic future, which recent trends in global banking seem to have exacerbated. The Vickers Report may do many good things for the UK banking system, but on this broader point it can only be one small step in a better direction.