What the Dickens?

Summary

Podcast Summary: More or Less — "What the Dickens?"

Date: December 24, 2010
Host: Tim Harford (BBC Radio 4)
Theme:
A playful, satirical Christmas special in which Tim Harford and guests retell A Christmas Carol—recasting Ebenezer Scrooge as a modern banker. Through humorous dramatizations and incisive commentary, the episode probes what went wrong in the financial crisis, examines systemic weaknesses in banking, unpacks the true costs to society, and debates the future of financial regulation and banking structure.

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Main Theme and Purpose

The episode uses Dickens’ classic as both framework and metaphor, reimagining the infamous miser Scrooge as a banking executive haunted by the Ghosts of Banking Past, Present, and Yet to Come. By weaving expert voices, narrator asides, and Scrooge’s own justifications, "What the Dickens?" brings economic analysis, institutional critique, and differing philosophies to life, tackling critical questions around banking:

• What actually caused the financial crisis?
• Who is to blame?
• How much did it cost society?
• How should we regulate banks in the future?

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Ghost of Banking Past: How Did We Get Here?

[01:03–09:56]

• Banking Boom and Bust: Jacob o’ Malley’s (Marley’s) ghost describes the property bubble, excessive lending, and what it means to be a "zombie bank."
• 2008 Financial Crisis:
  • Robert Peston [02:52]: Describes the shock and fallout from the collapse of major banks like Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch.
  • Simon Johnson [04:07]:

    "The banks got out of control ... believed that they had figured out new ways to make money that weren't risky ... And those of course blew up in their faces and caused massive social damage."

• Ethics and Risk:
  • John Kay [06:05]:

    "These profits were in fact largely luxury. It was money that was borrowed from the future ... Paid out the alleged profits in advance and then we had to pick up the bills when it turned out these profits had never existed in the first place ... A lot of very greedy people is at the heart of it."

  • Complex financial products weren't serving customers but shifting risks to unsuspecting parties.
• Regulatory and Philosophical Debate:
  • Jamie White [08:03]:

    "If there's a subsidy for risk taking, it would be very irresponsible of the management of a bank not to take it... It's the government's policies that perverted the system, not the individual choices of bank Management."

2. Ghost of Banking Present: What’s the Cost?

[09:56–16:05]

• Bank Stability and ‘Profit’:
  • Scrooge is transported to present-day London, questioning the health of banks post-crisis.
  • Andy Haldane [11:09]:

    "If you do the back of the envelope calculations ... for UK banks this implicit subsidy last year would have been of the order of 100 billion pounds, roughly the budget of the National Health Service." "GDP relative to its trend path pre crisis is around 10% lower ... Do the numbers, you can easily get to a cost of this times crisis in the UK of anywhere between say annual GDP and five times annual GDP."

• The Role—and the Scale—of Banks:
  • John Kay [13:42]:

    "Countries without any financial services sector do very badly ... It's not clear we need a financial services sector of the size and scale we have."

  • Emphasis on the importance of basic banking functions vs. complex and risky financial products.
• Defence of the Industry:
  • Angela Knight [15:05]:

    "Most banks actually did manage the crisis well ... It brings huge business, huge tax ... We can say we don't like that industry ... that would be a real blow to the UK ... We have to keep the industry here."

3. Ghost of Banking Yet to Come: Where Are We Heading?

[16:29–24:58]

• What if Banks Remain ‘Too Big to Fail’?
  • Robert Peston [17:07]: Imagines a future collapse of ‘British Bank PLC’ that the government cannot or will not rescue.
• Systemic Change, Not Just Scrutiny:
  • John Kay [17:45]:

    "The object is not to prevent banks going bust ... We want these kind of organizations to go bust ... What we need to ensure is that it's possible for them to go bust without it screwing up the whole of the rest of the financial system." "Risk taking organizations ought to be small ... banks that you and I deal with every day ought to be the rather kind of boring institutions that banks used to be."

  • Simon Johnson [19:35]:

    "When things go wrong, the banks should become smaller. They should become small enough to fail ... At the moment of disaster ... your choice: total collapse or unsavory bailout? ... That's the power that the banks have."

• Counterpoints on Small vs. Large Banks, Apologies, and Tax:
  • Angela Knight [21:10; 24:21]:

    "Small banks have proven, unfortunately, as a generality, to have had the most difficulty in riding the crisis ... Those who have been most successful have been the so called universal banks..." "In October 2008, I stood on a public platform and I apologized on behalf of the industry. ... I was always sorry then that it never got reported."

  • Andrew Lo [22:29]:

    "The answer of allowing banks to fail ... from an economic point of view it may be the right answer, I think that from the political perspective, it really is untenable."

• Debunking Bankers’ Claims:
  • Tiny Tim Harford [25:13]:

    "After all, banks pay almost a quarter of all tax."
    "Actually, it’s more like an eighth. We checked."

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Jacob o’ Malley’s warning to Scrooge [01:16]:

  "The chains which bind me now threaten you, Ebenezer. Heed my warning and the three spirits who will tonight visit you."

• Gillian Tett cameo, as 'the voice of reason' [03:44–03:55]:
  • Playful exchange between the narrator and the Ghost over her identity.
  • Harford: "I'm the omniscient narrator and I also work at the FT with Gillian."
• Scrooge’s transformation [26:03]:

  "I am light as a feather. I am as happy as an angel. I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. ... I have seen the future. And it is a place filled with joy, sunlight and civility. And love, Cratchit. ... We're moving to Switzerland."

• Fact-checking banker claims with characteristic More or Less wit [25:13]:

  "Actually, it’s more like an eighth. We checked."

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Key Segments & Timestamps

• [00:00–02:33] — Dickensian introduction; Scrooge meets Jacob o’ Malley’s ghost.
• [02:33–09:56] — Ghost of Banking Past: Causes of the crisis, ethical challenges, regulatory failure.
• [09:56–16:05] — Ghost of Banking Present: The costs, social effects, defense of banking sector, size debate.
• [16:29–27:05] — Ghost of Banking Yet to Come: What could happen next? Small vs. large banks, potential reforms, apology, and final transformation.

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Tone and Style

• Tongue-in-cheek Dickens pastiche, layered with economic critique
• Sardonic, witty narration (Tim Harford as omniscient Tiny Tim)
• Dramatic, self-important Scrooge; earnest expert testimony
• Playful but pointed—cuts through jargon while lampooning the culture around banking

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Conclusion

"What the Dickens?" offers a lively, compact crash course in the causes and consequences of the 2008 financial crisis, mixing drama, fact-checking, and expert debate. It ends with acknowledgment of the messy complexity of banking reform—not just about villains and heroes, but about hard trade-offs, the perverse incentives in regulation, and the need for genuine change in both banking culture and policy.

Ultimately, even Scrooge can be redeemed... by moving to Switzerland.

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For listeners wanting to understand the crisis, challenge received wisdom, and enjoy their economics with a festive twist, this episode is for you.

Transcript

[Ebenezer Scrooge]

Thank you for downloading more or less a weekly excursion into the world of numbers. The programme is presented by Tim Harford, the Financial Times undercover economist, and is a BBC Radio 4 and the Open University co production. Merry Christmas. What right have you to be merry? You're poor enough. Bah, humbug.

[Narrator / Tiny Tim Harford]

Ebenezer Scrooge threw a wad of bank notes on the fire.

[Ebenezer Scrooge]

Quantitative easing is one small mercy.

[Narrator / Tiny Tim Harford]

And sat down before it to take his gruel. His glance happened upon a disused servant's bell, and it was with a strange, inexplicable dread. But as he looked, the aged chairman of British Bank PLC saw it begin to swing.

[John Kay]

Scrooge. Scrooge.

[Ebenezer Scrooge]

How now, Jacob o' Malley's ghost? You are fettered. Tell me why I wear the chain I forged in life. Is its pattern strange to you, Ebenezer? I fueled a great boom in property. But when my debtor sunk and I could borrow no more, O, woe is me. I became the living dead, withering slowly, dragging my fellow Irishman into the deader's prison. A zombie bank. I have heard of such a thing. But what do you want with me? Upon my soul, my bank is sound. The chains which bind me now threaten you, Ebenezer. Heed my warning and the three spirits who will tonight visit you.

[Narrator / Tiny Tim Harford]

Scrooge examined the door by which o' Malley had departed. It was locked, as he had locked it by his own hands. Unable to sleep, Scrooge considered the spirit's words. Was he treading in Omarley's doomed footsteps?

[Jacob o' Malley / Ghost of Banking Past]

I am the ghost of banking past.

[Ebenezer Scrooge]

You are the ghost, then, whose coming was foretold to me.

[Jacob o' Malley / Ghost of Banking Past]

Rise, for there is much for you to hear.

[Robert Peston]

For Wall street, it's probably been the most extraordinary 24 hours since the late 1920s that Merrill lynch, one of the proudest investment banks, is steering itself into the clutches of bank of America, no longer confident of its future as an independent, is almost as shocking as. As the demise of Lehman Brothers.

[Ghost of Banking Present]

Nobody knew where credit risk was going. Nobody knew who actually held the loans. And above all else, nobody actually knew who would be on the hook for loans if they turned bad. And nobody had any incentive to keep monitoring who was actually lending to who and whether they'd be able to repay it. The problem, though, as far as the bankers are concerned, is that although they weren't the only ones who screwed up badly, the bankers were the only ones who walked away with very large payouts.

[Ebenezer Scrooge]

Spirit, who is that woman?

[Jacob o' Malley / Ghost of Banking Past]

It is the voice of Raisin, Scrooge.

[Narrator / Tiny Tim Harford]

It is in Fact. Gillian Tett of the Financial Times, author of Fool's Gold.

[Jacob o' Malley / Ghost of Banking Past]

How do you know?

[Narrator / Tiny Tim Harford]

I'm the omniscient narrator and I also work at the FT with Gillian.

[Ebenezer Scrooge]

The voice of reason, you say?

[Jacob o' Malley / Ghost of Banking Past]

Bah.

[Narrator / Tiny Tim Harford]

The swirling vision of Gillian Tetch dissolved to be replaced by another Simon Johnson, formerly the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.

[Simon Johnson]

The difference between Ireland and the UK in a nutshell is that the Irish banks became somewhat bigger, somewhat more out of control and when they blew up, the government handled it somewhat worse. But those somewhat are pretty small differences actually when you look at it from a distance. So I think the UK could well be next. And the UK still has the same structure. Your structure has become more concentrated and the big banks have more power to take on these irresponsible, crazy, mismanaged risks. The banks they got out of control. They believed that they had figured out new ways to make money that weren't risky. And they persuaded the regulators on both sides of the Atlantic that they should be trusted to take what turned out to be huge and totally inappropriate risks. And those of course blew up in their faces and caused massive social damage. I am not too stressed about the unproductive nature of many of these activities. I am much more worried about the socially risky angle that emerges from all of the dangerous products that they produce and all of the ways in which they structure themselves and all the debt that they take on these very high, very high degree of indebtedness, very high degree of leverage in the financial sector around the mega banks that are cross border. And there's no way to deal with, with the failure of a cross border bank. So this is not about not whether or not they're a little bit unproductive. This is about can they bring down the world's financial system? And the answer is clear to all of us. Yes they can. And we must stop this.

[Ebenezer Scrooge]

Why are you tormenting me with this? We know what caused the banking crisis. Do we need to be reminded?

[Jacob o' Malley / Ghost of Banking Past]

It is as well to be reminded. It is a of matter matter to which some economists have given much thought. Bah.

[Ebenezer Scrooge]

A ghost I could believe in. But do you really expect me to believe in the Council of Economists in

[John Kay]

effect a simple way of describing what happened up to 2007.

[Narrator / Tiny Tim Harford]

That's John Kay, economist, was banks announced

[John Kay]

they were making a lot of profit. These profits were in fact largely luxury. It was money that was borrowed from the future and had to be paid back. And they paid out a very large proportion of these profits to each other so that they'd Paid out the alleged profits in advance and then we had to pick up the bills when it turned out these profits had never existed in the first place. A lot of very greedy people is at the heart of it. And very poor management of very large and as a matter of fact effectively unmanageable organizations. There were always two stories really about what these complex products were for. One was that they were finally tailoring every individual's security exactly to some individual's particular demand and appetite for risk. And the other version was that actually people who knew a bit about what they were doing was selling on risks to people who really didn't understand them. And it became pretty clear in 200708 that it was mostly the latter.

[Ebenezer Scrooge]

Your witnesses spirit are decidedly hostile. Is this to be a spiritual show trial? I am a man of business. I fulfilled the only duty I know to my shareholders and I acted within the law. If anyone is to be blamed, it is those who made and enforced the laws.

[Jacob o' Malley / Ghost of Banking Past]

Maybe so, although it is a deluded drunk who blames the landlord. But take heart, there are those who agree with you.

[Narrator / Tiny Tim Harford]

The spirit conjured another vision, that of Jamie White, the libertarian philosopher and banking sage.

[Jamie White]

The fundamental cause of the crisis is the system of guarantees offered to to bank creditors. So people who lend money to banks, guaranteed effectively by the government. Now this is explicit in the case of so called retail depositors, but it was also believed to be there by many wholesale depositors, that's to say investment funds, pension funds and so on, who buy the bonds issued by the banks. The government backs the banks borrowings regardless of the risk. This allowed banks to get up to leverage ratios of something that were 40 or 50 to 1. And this would have been strictly impossible without the government backing. If there's a subsidy for risk taking, it would be very irresponsible of the management of a bank not to take it. And that's to say not to take those risks. It would be negligent towards the shareholders. And indeed the shareholders were egging them on. And the share prices were going up as they should have gone up because shareholders effectively hold a call option. That's to say they can get all the upside, but they have limited downside because of limited liability. So they love risk. Shareholders ought to favor risk provided it doesn't cause any costs, which it doesn't so long as the government subsidizes bank borrowing. So they acted perfectly properly in the interests of their shareholders. It's the government's policies that perverted the system, not the individual choices of bank Management.

[Ebenezer Scrooge]

A philosopher. Bah. Philosophy will butter no parsnips.

[Narrator / Tiny Tim Harford]

As the ethereal vision of Jamie White drifted like smoke in great swirls through the closed window, Scrooge turned to look at the Ghost of Banking Past. But she too had disappeared, Replaced suddenly by a jolly giant of a spirit smiling at her long brown curls.

[Ghost of Banking Present]

I am the Ghost of banking present.

[Ebenezer Scrooge]

Come, Mr. Scrooge, and know me better.

[Ghost of Banking Present]

I have much to show you.

[Angela Knight]

Robert Weston is our business editor. Robert, how serious is this warning about, I suppose how the danger to British banks?

[Robert Peston]

Well, Sarah, I mean, the bank of England does say in its quarterly review of the financial system that Britain's banks are stronger than they were. But it also points out that there are some pretty big icebergs ahead. And I suppose the most topical.

[Ebenezer Scrooge]

Spin it. Conduct me where you will. If you have aught to teach me, perhaps I may profit by it.

[Ghost of Banking Present]

Profit is just the thing.

[Ebenezer Scrooge]

Your bank seems profitable again. But is it?

[Ghost of Banking Present]

And what does your misadventure cost? Your fellow citizens?

[Ebenezer Scrooge]

Touch my robe.

[Narrator / Tiny Tim Harford]

In an instant they were no longer in the banker's gloomy bedroom, but out on the snowy streets of London. And then pushing open the great door of the bank of England.

[Andy Haldane]

I'm Andy Haldane, the Bank of England's Executive Director for financial stability. The fact is that in most crises, both this this and previous ones, the taxpayer is typically paid back. But I would argue that's a potentially significant understatement of the true costs of this times crisis to the wider economy. So let me give you two alternative ways of thinking about the costs of crisis. One measure would be how much implicit support has been provided by the government to the banking system over the course of the crisis. How much of a saving in their borrowing costs do banks experience as a result of the implicit promise by the government to see them? Right. If you do the back of the envelope calculations on that, what you'd find for UK banks is that implicit subsidy last year would have been of the order of 100 billion pounds, roughly the budget of the National Health Service. These are non trivial sums and they exist year on year on year. A different measure again of the cost of crisis would ask what has been the loss of output or employment that has resulted from the crisis we've been through. And those numbers would be larger again. In the UK we know that GDP relative to its trend path pre crisis is around 10% lower. But the ultimate cost of course is a multiple of that because that 10% loss occurs year by year by year. We know from past financial crises that they leave a permanent scar, that the level of output often never returns to its pre crisis point. Turn that into pounds and pence. Do the numbers. You can easily get to a cost of this times crisis in the UK of anywhere between say annual GDP and five times annual GDP. Anywhere between 1.7, 1.8 trillion pounds and 8 or 9 trillion pounds. Those are big sums.

[Ebenezer Scrooge]

A learned man, I'm sure. But in days gone past people respected bankers.

[Ghost of Banking Present]

I can live only in the present,

[Ebenezer Scrooge]

as must we all. Spirit. Even now as they curse us, they surely need us.

[John Kay]

We do need financial services. Countries without any financial services sector do very badly. Think North Korea or Burma, John Kay. But it's not clear. We need a financial services sector of the size and scale we have. Most of all we need banks to enable us to make payments, to pay bills, to withdraw cash, to receive our salaries and so on. We need banks to be a store of value to preserve our savings. And we need banks to make loans when we want to take up mortgages, when small and medium sized businesses want to raise capital, to export. We need banks for all of these things. Whether we need people trading in complex securitized products which are themselves derived from other complex securitized products. So they're very complicated packages and nobody quite understands what's in them. Whether we need that is another matter altogether.

[Ebenezer Scrooge]

Is there none who will stand full square behind me?

[John Kay]

Very well.

[Ebenezer Scrooge]

What is this place? This Scrooge, is the British Bankers Association.

[Narrator / Tiny Tim Harford]

And with that the vision of Angela Knight spoke.

[Angela Knight]

Don't forget that most banks actually did manage the crisis well and the run up to it and have managed well since. We have two industries operating in the UK in financial services. One is a large domestic industry and and the other is a large international industry and it's mobile and it moves around. What it does do as well is it brings huge business, huge tax, I should say, into the UK because it's quartered here, doing business internationally, pays tax locally. We can say we don't like that industry and that would be a real blow to the uk. We would lose not just those jobs and what they bring, but also the jobs that hang off it. We have to keep the industry here. We have to be surely an open, free trading nation. And because there may be something that we don't like, surely doesn't mean that we want to say goodbye to the jobs.

[Narrator / Tiny Tim Harford]

Scrooge awoke in his gloomy bedroom and looked about him for the ghost and saw it not. He recalled the prediction of old Jacob o' Malley and lifting up his eyes beheld a solemn phantom, draped and hooded, coming like a mist along the ground towards him.

[Jacob o' Malley / Ghost of Banking Past]

You are in the presence of banking yet to come.

[Ebenezer Scrooge]

Why do you plague me? Spirit, I know how we became embroiled in this crisis, what it has cost and where it has left us. But that was banking past. I know we remain in precarious times, but the future is rosier. My bank is strong. Spirit, I say to you, My bank is strong.

[Jacob o' Malley / Ghost of Banking Past]

See the shadows of the things that have not yet happened. Scroll.

[Robert Peston]

When I first reported on the Credit Crunch In 2007, some 10 years ago, the G20 agreed that we simply couldn't let such a crisis overwhelm the global economy again. But that's exactly what's happened this morning. I can reveal that during the night, frantic attempts to organise another bailout for British Bank PLC have failed. It seems the government regards the bank as just too big to save. There's now massive anger directed at its long standing chairman, Ebenezer Scrooge.

[Narrator / Tiny Tim Harford]

The spirit conjured all the ghostly witnesses before Scrooge, John Kay and Simon Johnson spoke first.

[John Kay]

Let's be clear. The object is not to prevent banks going bust. It's in the nature of capitalism and market economy that badly run organisations go bust. Northern Rock and Lehman were badly run organizations and actually Lehman was a particularly badly run organization. We want these kind of organizations to go bust. What we need to ensure is that it's possible for them to go bust without it screwing up the whole of the rest of the financial system. And that was the problem, not that these organizations failed. And that's why it's a mistake to think the route we should go down is one of the supervising them. So they won't fail. Firstly, all that will do will be generate a lot of bureaucracy and it won't stop them failing anyway. We have to focus on the system, not on the individual institutions. Risk taking organizations ought to be small or there are rather close relationship between the people who actually put up the money to take the risks and the people who make the decisions about the risks. And the banks that you and I deal with every day ought to be the rather kind of boring institutions that banks used to be where a very large number of fairly ordinary people take in deposits and make routine loans and manage millions of transactions competently every day without making very many mistakes. So in the case of a business like Barclays, the critical thing would be splitting it up between the traditional retail boring bank and the speculative risky investment bank in which the greedy people get large rewards when things go Right. And hopefully make large losses themselves.

[Simon Johnson]

When things go wrong, the banks should become smaller. They should become small enough to fail. Anytime you try to run a capitalist market type economy with some players having a get out of jail free card, bad things are going to happen. At the moment of disaster, at the moment of a Lehman Brothers about to fail, or maybe the day after you've already had one Lehman Brothers fail and somebody comes to you, you're the President of the United States, you're the Prime Minister of the UK or you're running the G20 and your top adviser says, look, here's our choice. Either we let this bank go or this cluster of mega banks, we let them fail and cause a greater depression than what we saw in the 1930s or we provide them with an unsavory and politically unpopular bailout. Those are your choices. Total collapse or unsavory bailout? Which one are you going to choose? Which one would any responsible politician choose who wants to plunge millions of people into poverty around the world? You don't. And that's the power that the banks have. And anyone who refuses to confront that, anyone who refuses to talk about it, is misleading themselves, they're misleading the public and they're playing into the hands of the bankers.

[Andy Haldane]

We need a system where birth and death aren't exceptional.

[Ghost of Banking Present]

Pressure on the financial industry to keep chasing every last dollar, every last pound,

[Jamie White]

and a generally safer banking system.

[Andy Haldane]

Birth and death are terribly dangerous.

[Ghost of Banking Present]

Overall effects to the very edge.

[Ebenezer Scrooge]

You have not assembled a commission of inquiry spirit, but a hanging judge and a firing squad. And Angela Knight, what of her?

[Angela Knight]

If one looks around the world as what has happened in the crisis, it's the small, narrow banks which have been the overwhelming number and predominance of failures. And we're seeing that in Spain at the moment where they're trying to sort out their cajas, as they call them, and in Germany they have a similar situation. So small banks have proven, unfortunately, as a generality, to have had the most difficulty in riding the crisis. And those who have been most successful have been the so called universal banks and the large universal banks. So the reality of what has been the model that has survived best has been the one that most people are attacking. What we can do, though, what we can do is we can have a banking sector that is closer to its customers. We can have an environment which attracts new entrants. We can have a banking arrangement which has small banks and large banks, which has universal banks and has narrow banks.

[Narrator / Tiny Tim Harford]

Her features shifted. A new face took shape. That of the American economist Andrew Lowe.

[Andrew Lowe]

My sense is that next time we encounter another Northern Rock or another situation where a large number of individual depositors and more importantly, individual voters are affected, then it's just too powerful a political force to ignore. So I think the answer of allowing banks to fail and not doing anything about them, while from an economic point of view it may be the right answer, I think that from the political perspective, it really is untenable. We need smarter regulation. But I think before we go down that path, it probably is worthwhile to reflect on the fact that the banking industry is probably the most highly regulated industry in the world. I think that before we make wholesale changes in the industrial structure of this very, very industry, it may serve us better to think more carefully about what the nature of the breakdown was, and in particular to try to understand how we might change the system in a way that will allow it to grow organically so that we're not constantly having to change these regulations every fifth or tenth year, but we can allow the industry to grow as the needs of the population change. So I would suggest that. That while narrow banking is certainly a useful concept, or making banks smaller, the fact is that there are situations where having larger banks meet needs that simply aren't met by the smaller versions.

[Ebenezer Scrooge]

Is that not a reasonable view? Spirit? People forget that small dominoes can fall as easily as large ones, and the consequences can still be spectacular. It is not black and white. Perhaps the mood of the country would change if we bankers were to offer an apology for our past mistakes.

[Angela Knight]

In October 2008, I stood on a public platform and I apologized on behalf of the industry. I said then, you know that we shouldered a collective responsibility and we apologized. There's about 150 people in the audience, about 15, 20 journalists. I was always sorry then that it never got reported. We put it out at the BBA as a press release several times, but nobody ever picked it up. And it was genuine then and it's genuine now.

[Ebenezer Scrooge]

They say they want us broken up, but they want us to be competitive in the world. They say they don't like bonuses, but they like the tax my traders pay. After all, banks pay almost a quarter of all tax.

[Narrator / Tiny Tim Harford]

Actually, it's more like an eighth. We checked.

[Ebenezer Scrooge]

They want us to lend more, but they blame the crisis on reckless lending. Even when we apologize, they do not wish to hear it. But enough. I will live in the past, the present, and the future. Oh, Jacob. Oh, Marley. The spirits of all three shall strive within me. Open the window, Cratchit. The better to hear those cheerful souls. Yes, sir. Crush it, sir. What's today, my fine fellow?

[Angela Knight]

Today?

[Ebenezer Scrooge]

Why, Christmas Eve, sir. Are you feeling all right? Cratch it. I am light as a feather. I am as happy as an angel. I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. Yes, sir. There is so much work to do. Of course, sir. For the shadows of the things of the would have been may be dispelled. I am transformed, Cratchit. I am redeemed. I have seen the error of my ways, good man. I have seen the future. And it is a place filled with joy, sunlight and civility. And love, Cratchit. In the future there will be love for the likes of you and me. For I know now what I must do. And what is that, Sir Bob? We're moving to Switzerland.

[Narrator / Tiny Tim Harford]

More or less. Christmas Carol was performed by the Giant Olive Theatre Company whose own Christmas Carol is on stage now at the lion and Unicorn Theatre in London. Robert Peston was played by himself. Your narrator was me, Tiny Tim Harford. And the producer was Richard Silent Knight.

[Andy Haldane]

Goodbye.