Shameless labour

Degenerate

IronWolf wrote: »

Its hard to speculate on what would have happened if we had let the banks fail

Not really, one only has to look back to 1930s America, or 1990s Argentina.

the losers would have been those with money in those banks, and the government would have had to cough up a lot of money to cover the guaranteed savings, but there still would be a lot of p*ssed off people in the country who lost a lot of money through no fault of their own. So it was either a proportion of the population bear the brunt of the losses, along with a lot of businesses, or the tax payer shared out the losses equally.

Sorry, but when you talk about liquidating major banks in terms like a normal bankruptcy you merely betray your ignorance of the role the banks play in our economic system. You can't liquidate a significant chunk of the banking sector without them taking numerous otherwise solvent companies, and a large chunk of the economy with them. Losing a third of our economic output and having a third of our workforce unemployed is entirely concevable in such a scenario.

Im not opposed to the bail out in theory, but I cannot agree with how it has turned out, the government should have imposed some very strict sanctions for the bailed out banks, who cares if it would make them "uncompetetive"

I would suggest the shareholders should care, as their competitiveness obviously affects the resale value of the shares. Who are the largest shareholders now?

they lost every right to be competetive when they failed, they should be dead and buried in the ground, they have failed in the free market and deserve nothing more than to be bankrupt. The fact that the government bailed them out is not to save the company, its to save the rest of the country from suffering for their mistakes. IMO the government should bleed these banks dry for every £ they can recover from paying off their black holes of debt.

Your righteous anger is misdirected. The people who held bank shares before the crisis did lose - they saw a huge amount of their equity wiped out in the crash. Some individuals managed to sneak away from bankrupt institutions with some loot (eg Fred Goodwin) and I'm not going to defend that, but to punish the banks now in ways that affect their competitivness would be cutting off our nose to spite our face.

StevieJ

Good post.

ash28

1984ReturnsForReal wrote: »

[/CENTER]


Can you quote any of the other dozen or so messages left for the incoming administration by the outgoing?

Or do you think that this is the only comment ever left by Chief Secretary for Chief Secretary?

Reginald Maudling to James Callaghan - "Good luck old c0ck...sorry to leave it in such a mess"

He also told him before the election, not to panic - but if ever did become Chancellor of the Exchequer he might want to apply to the Central Banks for a loan.

It's rumoured that Alistair Darling left a note, a bottle but no revolver for George Osborne.

This sort of thing normally comes out in their memoirs - not on tv or the newspapers of the day.

Losing_the_way

nembot wrote: »

Yeah, I got the information down the pub - whilst reading a little paper called The Independant.



Perhaps that's why the anticipated losses didn't materialise, or would you like to put more of your own personal (self serving, in denial) spin on it?

To quote from http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=206

"The unadjusted measure of public sector net debt expressed as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), was 154.9 per cent at the end of December 2010 compared with 157.9 per cent at end of December 2009. Net debt was £2322.7 billion at the end of December compared with £2248.4 billion a year earlier."

That figure was quietly released yesterday, for some reason must have been a good day to bury bad news. Its common knowledge that in the last few months of the last government they went on a scorched earth policy using the public cheque book. Its one reason that GBP has been so buoyant.

Losing_the_way

Degenerate wrote: »

Your righteous anger is misdirected. The people who held bank shares before the crisis did lose - they saw a huge amount of their equity wiped out in the crash. Some individuals managed to sneak away from bankrupt institutions with some loot (eg Fred Goodwin) and I'm not going to defend that, but to punish the banks now in ways that affect their competitiveness would be cutting off our nose to spite our face.

How is the financial sector dealt with so as to stop the fraud that caused this mess?

1984ReturnsForReal_2

ash28 wrote: »

Reginald Maudling to James Callaghan - "Good luck old c0ck...sorry to leave it in such a mess"

He also told him before the election, not to panic - but if ever did become Chancellor of the Exchequer he might want to apply to the Central Banks for a loan.

It's rumoured that Alistair Darling left a note, a bottle but no revolver for George Osborne.

This sort of thing normally comes out in their memoirs - not on tv or the newspapers of the day.

I bet half of them if published in the newspapers of the day would have provoked as much controversy as the latest.

These notes are nothing new & I have been trying to find a list but have been able to.

They are pretty much British culture. Cheers

julieq

OK, shall we actually read the article rather than just the headline? (From 2009 incidentally):

"The commitments include buying £76bn of shares in Royal Bank of Scotland and the Lloyds Banking Group; indemnifying the Bank of England against losses incurred in providing more than £200bn of liquidity support; guaranteeing up to £250bn of wholesale borrowing by banks to strengthen liquidity; providing £40bn of loans and other funding to Bradford & Bingley and the Financial Services Compensation Scheme; and insurance cover of over £280bn for bank assets."

In other words the "cost" is actually not costs, it's provisions. As none of the banks have actually failed, the losses haven't crystallised. And in fact the taxpayer may end up breaking even or conceivably making a profit.

This is the SAME article that is being quoted as reporting a loss, remember, and the paragraph I quoted isn't even buried in the small print. Of course if you want to believe that the deficit is all from bank rescues you're probably just going to quote the headline in the pub.

On the other hand, the money spent by Labour on the public sector is genuinely gone. The private sector couldn't support that level of deficit, and as a result everyone's income is going to have to get squeezed to remove it.

StevieJ

ash28 wrote: »

Reginald Maudling to James Callaghan - "Good luck old c0ck...sorry to leave it in such a mess"

He also told him before the election, not to panic - but if ever did become Chancellor of the Exchequer he might want to apply to the Central Banks for a loan.

It's rumoured that Alistair Darling left a note, a bottle but no revolver for George Osborne.

This sort of thing normally comes out in their memoirs - not on tv or the newspapers of the day.

I think it was a question of ill thought out opportunism from a party lacking in class and devoid of power for many a year,

Graham_Devon

Graham_Devon wrote: »

To be honest, I'm a little bored of labour blaming the tories, tories blaming labour, and every man and his dog slagging off the lib dems.

One thing I do wish, is that Labour would just stop attacking absolutely everything without any justification of what they would do themselves. Ed Balls was on the radio agian this morning....same old attack, so the question "what would you do".

Ed: Well we set out a plan to cut x amount over x years, unlike the tories who are just slamming the brakes on.
Presenter: But how would you do it
Ed: We set out plans, we were on target, we didnt do everything right but slamming the brakes on is the wrong way to go about things.
Presenter: Yes, but how would you do it
Ed: By two measures, we had set out plans, but look, if you slam the brakes on you are going to halt any recovery and send the country back into recession, its what we have been saying.
Presenter: So you can't tell me how you would do it
Ed: As I said, we had drawn out plans which didn't include raising taxes and cutting spending as the coalition are doing and slamming the brakes on growth.
Presenter: What about the 50p tax rate

And so on...Yawn.

LOL, he got owned on BBC breakfast too.

Explaining why growth flat lined, excluding snow:

Ed: The begining of the impact of the actual spending cuts this year
Sian: But there have been no spending cuts
Ed: *mumble* (releases an embarrased mirroring of what shes said, classic symptom of finding oneself screwed).
Sian: There was growth actually in the last quarter that we are talking about, there was growth in government spending
Ed: Sure, but
Sian: Of about 5% on the previous year
Ed: but but, in certain areas of construction in particular, you've had the building of schools cut....but the second thing which is more important (and moving on swiftly!)

....YAWN.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12283916

Oh, and this is what I said about Ed Balls only days ago:

Then you have Balls, with his slimey face, grinning whenever he twists the truth which makes it so stupidly obvious, that many people feared would be the chancellor if labour won again.

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showpost.php?p=40452436&postcount=8

Check out his face in the interview. Smirking away while twisting the truth, sian corrects him, no smirking now, serious face on.

Moves swiftly on from the first point he's been rumbled on.....smirk smirk smirk.

He's so see through it's stupid. If anyone is going to tarnish labours own recovery, it's him and his wife.

DervProf

Flyboy152 wrote: »

When did they say that?

They imply it by saying that the current government are cutting spending too deeply/too quickly. It's arguable that the cutbacks that have so far been announced aren't going to make much of a difference to the defecit. Labour make it sound like they were going to pay off the debt through economic growth, more than anything else. Hang on a second, didn't economic growth under the previous administration not come largely from increased spending ? Were Labour going to suddenly find a way to grow the economy through some other means than spending more than they earned ? It's a bit like a supermarket cashier with £20K of credit card debt saying "no need to cut back much on the CC spending, I`ll just get a better paid job". Yeah, right.