The blame game - This is Money podcast

Share prices around the world this week have been falling like dominoes in a record-breaking dominoes falling over attempt.

London loses 2% in a day, New York opens and falls 2% then in Asia the sell-off continues, slashing 2% off its market value. London opens again and mirrors the previous losing sessions in Asia and the USA and so it goes on. And on.

The FTSE 100 index of leading UK shares found itself at a three and a half year low.

But why?

Central bankers whose job is supposed to be to prevent this kind of mess know how to talk the talk but there is growing evidence that they don’t really know how to work the bank.

Their policies of handing taxpayer money to bankers - rather than prison sentences - and of cutting interest rates to less than nothing have left them stuck in a hole without room to manoeuvre.

Jobbing bankers lost any credibility in the last crisis. But without punishment or a conscience could they be to blame again this time?

Or is it simply that traders aren’t human any more but mere automated algorithms that react to preprogramed instructions? Computer says sell.

This is Money editor Simon Lambert, consumer affairs editor Rachel Rickard Straus and Share Radio money guru Georgie Frost try to work out where the blame lies.

Also in the show.

Apart from the free money and long-term benefits, what’s the point of a pension?

Why do our privatised, apparently competitive energy companies raise and drop their prices by pretty much exactly the same amount?

Why won’t idiot bankers lend to safe-as-houses people with secure incomes just because of their age?

What’s so great about Hatton Garden – the jewellery capital in the capital?

And what if…

Crumbling share prices are nothing to worry about at all – just a great excuse to start investing?