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Today was another day of chaos and confusion on the global markets that will have ramifications for a long time to come.

Here in the UK, the building society Bradford and Bingley (B&B) has been nationalised, in the US, Congress has voted down the much vaunted financial rescue package, and banking stocks are tumbling around the world.

Under the nationalisation of B&B, the government will take control of the bank’s £50bn mortgages and loans, while B&B’s £20bn savings arm and branches will be bought by Abbey and its Spanish parent group Santander.

B&B currently employs about 3,000 staff. Speculation had intensified in recent weeks that B&B was approaching a funding crisis, leading to a growing number of customers withdrawing their funds.

B&B had fallen into financial difficulty as a result of the credit crunch removing the option of raising funds through the global wholesale money markets. The company’s focus on the buy-to-let market intensified its problems as that market has seen a large rise in bad debts as
UK house prices have fallen.

In London, shares in HBOS closed down 18% while Lloyds TSB slipped 13.5% and Royal Bank of
Scotland lost 13%. The losses contributed to the FTSE 100 index’s biggest one-day fall since January, down 5.3% to 4,818 points.

Global shares also fell sharply, France’s key index lost 5%, Germany’s main market dropped 4% while US shares also lost ground.

Meanwhile, this evening the lower house of the US Congress has voted down a $700bn (£380bn) plan aimed at bailing out Wall Street. As news of the vote came through, traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange apparently stood around dumbfounded.

Analysts say that without a bail-out the banks will be left to handle all their own bad mortgage debt as best they can and more of them will be in danger of going bust.

While the market is in turmoil the financial institutions will be nervously watching each other to see which will be the next to either collapse or sink into Government ownership.

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Barclaycard has been fined £50,000 for consistently pestering customers with silent phone calls. The regulator Ofcom levied the maximum possible fine after a lengthy investigation into a high number of complaints.

Silent phone calls occur when call centres with automated systems dial more numbers than staff can deal with. When customers answer the telephone and no agent is available to talk to them, it results in silence on the line.

Ofcom investigated Barclaycard from October 2006 to May 2007 and found that people receiving calls had no idea where they were coming from.

Rules on silent calls laid down in 2006 stipulated that abandoned calls must carry a short message identifying where they came from and must account for no more than 3% of all live calls made in the space of 24 hours.

Ofcom did not say what Barclaycard’s silent call rate was, but said the number of silent, abandoned calls made by Barclaycard was substantially more than the 16,000 calls for which Abbey National was fined in a previous case.

The regulator also found that some of Barclaycard’s call centres had no procedures in place to prevent people receiving repeated abandoned calls over a short period of time.
Barclaycard issued a statement saying, ‘we recognise that all calls, irrespective of the purpose, should be made in the right way and we accept that our processes, in place at the time of the review by Ofcom, were inadequate. As a result, we offer a full apology for any inconvenience and distress to our customers that these calls caused.’

There is no doubt that silent calls, especially if repeated several times in a short period can be a real nuisance and so this fine is, in my view, entirely justified.

I’m worried however, that the maximum fine of £50,000 is not going to be enough. To a large company such as Barclaycard that fine will be peanuts and while it will make them consider their procedures, it is certainly not high enough to guarantee that this will not happen again.

Barclaycard probably feel that they have avoided any real punishment for this breach of communications regulations, despite their PR people making contrite noises.

Has the time now come to raise the maximum amount companies can be fined and perhaps make it a percentage of their profits? That would certainly make them think twice about flouting the rules.