Jim Armitage: The Bank of Mum and Dad may be unfair, but at least it’s safe

Tread carefully

The human memory tends to take seven years to forget its biggest traumas. So it’s surprising it’s taken nearly a decade from the collapse of Northern Rock for the first 100% mortgages to reappear.

Barclays’ new loans, dubbed a bailout of the Bank of Mum and Dad, aren’t quite the highwire act of old.

The spoilsports in the risk department are insisting the parents set aside 10% of the purchase price in cash for three years.

But suicidal financial products always start this way. A financial “innovation” finds an acceptable chink in the safety rules; another nudges the hole open further, and so it goes until underwriting criteria are flushed away by the flood of eager money.

Regulators will have run a careful eye over the Barclays product, but they must be super-vigilant about its inevitable successors.

The Bank of Mum and Dad may be unfair, but at least it’s safe.

A welcome check

Speaking of financial amnesia, I hear debt being taken on by private-equity firms to fund takeovers has shot back up to pre-crisis levels.

Those would be the levels that saw private-equity firms bomb out, leaving a trail of bankruptcies in their wake.

So I didn’t weep this morning to read that barbarian of private equity, KKR, was complaining private-equity deals had halted due to uncertainty over Brexit.

Every cloud…