Well the bankers ensuring their remuneration stays high, and the share price recovering are two different things.

It's an idea - but I can't help feeling it is a solution we should have turned to 10-20 years ago (the time when Thatcher, Clinton, Major, Bush Snr. etc were busy make it easy for businesses to organise transnationally - not to mention signing away rights that were hard won in the first place) . Big business, the "corporatocracy" - call it what you will - has since loaded the game to such an extent that it can now summon and bring to bear a vast array of political, economic and social weapons that make it almost impossible to resist.

Capital flight is one obvious method of blackmail and it is arguably the most potent (certainly against poorer nations such as those in Africa). Britain decides to, say, introduce a Tobin Tax and take a slice out of individual transactions and suddenly the FT is awash with rumours about large sums of money being withdrawn from the country.

I agree that organisation is the key. But even around the turn of the century when your average worker was far more engaged with labour rights it still wasn't easy for the first guy to say no when the police and hired thugs were waving blackjacks and pistols under your nose.

Yes but Russia had this problem with the oligarchs and Putin dealt with them.

In Yelstin's time the oligarchs had got rich off the fall of the Soviet Union and used their wealth and influence to dictate government policy, and evaded taxes at will. In Putin's early days he tried to pass a bill raising taxes to close Russia's budget deficit and the oil bosses bought off enough MPs to block his bill going through the Duma. Unfortunately for them Putin's background is in the KGB and he knew the oligarchs were bent as anything and just got the security services on the case to gather evidence to put before the state prosecutor and bang the ones he didn't want were in jail.

I would not give up on the power of the state just yet, it needs someone strong enough to enforce it and use the intelligence and security services to take on the bankers. Mrs Thatcher used them against the miners.

The bankers are now the enemy within. If I was the PM every big fish banker would have it made clear to them that the security services were going through every bit of their life and their past and if they ever do, or have ever done, one small thing that contravened the law or evaded 1p of tax, the full force of the law will come down on them. If they ever do anything that would be of interest to the tabloid press, the tabloids will hear about it from the intelligence services.

The Russian oligarchs form only a small subset of a far more powerful, influential and potentially dangerous group of trans-national corporate interests (many of whom are responsible for cycling half the US GDP through global markets daily) that has become remarkably adept at neutering socially conscious governments, politically aware electorates as well as legislation that in any way attempts to restrict the torrent of money flooding into collective coffers. It's a complex, dynamic and often uneasy alliance of disparate entities, divided loyalties and conflicting interests sharing a mutual and overriding precept that the only people that can be trusted less than themselves are the people. Self-determination is bad for business.

I give credit to Putin for taking down Berezovsky, Malkin, Khodorkovsky and the rest of the robber barons. But there's just no comparison with the task we are currently facing. Real power doesn't need to break the law to make money because it [iwrites the law[/i. I mean, spend some time looking into the mechanics of the WTO, "investor rights" and "national treatment" if you want to understand how power games the system in its favour.

If you're right, it looks like Rollerball the film was a prophecy.