Personally I’d argue that the overall cost to society as a whole in letting the current corrupt system of privatised water companies extract money from the country and funnel it into the pockets of hedge funds and fail to fulfill their basic responsibilities continue is greater than the temporary squeezing of lending on certain companies.
I think the extractive setup can be resolved without clearing the existing debt, so there’s a half way house where we don’t do anything to spook the banks.
The tradeoff there is in the one hand deterring investment and in the other not having massive debt on the public books. And you could argue that the principle is that banks should be reluctant to lend to such exploitative profit extractors. But I don’t think the banks will learn that lesson, because they’re not set up to work that out (and it won’t always be obvious) so I think the “temporary squeeze” would last for a long time…
Personally I’d argue that the overall cost to society as a whole in letting the current corrupt system of privatised water companies extract money from the country and funnel it into the pockets of hedge funds and fail to fulfill their basic responsibilities continue is greater than the temporary squeezing of lending on certain companies.
I think the extractive setup can be resolved without clearing the existing debt, so there’s a half way house where we don’t do anything to spook the banks.
The tradeoff there is in the one hand deterring investment and in the other not having massive debt on the public books. And you could argue that the principle is that banks should be reluctant to lend to such exploitative profit extractors. But I don’t think the banks will learn that lesson, because they’re not set up to work that out (and it won’t always be obvious) so I think the “temporary squeeze” would last for a long time…