A controversy flared up these last few weeks about European banks. It revolved around the point that banks are getting the rules under which they operate made more flexible so that they can offer greater financial support to enterprises and citizens that have been adversely affected by the corona virus pandemic. In this way, it is being ensured that banks themselves do not end up badly hit by what is going on and what they need to do. Many billions of euros are being kept ready for any emergency by the European banking authorities.

So should not these same banks promise – or be made to promise – not to pay any dividends to their shareholders during the coming year and a half? It does not make sense for them to get a huge financial backup, while they pass on to their shareholders, part of the funds they squirrel away as a result of such intervention.

There is no consensus on this matter. The governments of European states are themselves divided. There are those who claim that the aids being given to banks are not designed to give them a leg-up, but intended to reinforce the economic activity that might be going on in Europe and prevent it from being snuffed out.

All parties concerned are partly right and partly wrong on this issue.

***

ARE WE FOLLOWING THE RULES?

I’m being told too many stories about people and establishments that are ignoring the rules, supposedly in force, about how people should behave in the company of others and how clients are to be met when entering a shop.

To be clear: personally I have not witnessed these abuses live. I made few tours of the relevant sites, except as necessary. But I was impressed by the number of people who came to complain about what they could see happening around them. Now some of them perhaps could be seen as nitpickers ... Not the majority though.

As we do our best to go back to “normality”, it would be a mistake to forget the safeguards against what could abruptly swing the clock back towards the high point of the pandemic crisis. 

***

FASHION

Fashion exists all over the horizon – not just in what is beautiful and attractive but as well in dismal, ugly areas... such as the domains of waste. Indeed, every period can be classified by way of the waste that becomes most fashionable while it lasts. That at least was the lesson a friend of mine tried to give me.

I invited him though to really explain his point. He said: Our country has kept up with public cleanliness less that we would have liked it to. And perhaps more than anything else, what we see discarded and dumped in our streets shows best the levels of development we have reached.

For instance, there was a time when all over the place, you would find strewn about the streets, crushed cigarette packets, later carton boxes and paper bags in which Mac Donald hamburgers were sold.

At other times there would be condoms and drug syringes lying around.

There are times when street litter is awash with the colours of political candidates. Elections would be due.

What you do find these days, dumped wherever, are the masks one should be wearing to enter a shop.