George (Soros not Gorgeous) UK warning

ianmr65

lilac_lady wrote: »

George Soros has been proved right many times before. He's a billionaire who is an MSE-er in practice. He still lives in a house he bought for around $60000 dollars in the 1950s and gives a LOT of his money to charity.

And almost singlehandedly, got the uk gov to pull out of the erm, sent sterling into freefall, and caused an intrest rate increase to 15%.. so i guess a man that's worth paying attention to . NB he's been shorting the uk housebuilders for months.. :eek:

anyone know where i can get a deal on razorwire....

dean_ham

brit1234 wrote: »

You just can't continue to borrow your way out of trouble, pay back day was always going to come.

Mr Brown (and many brits) will do this till the dieing end to get out of the s**t

ianmr65

dean_ham wrote: »

Mr Brown (and many brits) will do this till the dieing end to get out of the s**t

Unfortunatly Mr brown doen't just have the ability to borrow, he has the ability to print more of the stuff, and is doing, at a rate of knots... Sooo the pound in your pocket will be worth less, as prices go up. Still i'm not even 10% convinced that Mr Cameron would do any different....

Happy days!!

dean_ham

moanymoany wrote: »

I heard the other day that we have £1trillion+ of personal debt.

yes i heared £1.4 trillion

yes

£1,400,000,000,000 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


whos to blame for this?
whos to blame for making credit so freely available?
whos to blame for making mortgages so freely available?


i know one thing gordon brown/tony blair has yapped on and on over the last 10 years saying how good the economy is and how much better it is under them than the tories, what they failed to mention was that it was all paid for by easy loans and easy remortaging ever increasing house prices to fund it.

motch

dean_ham wrote: »

Mr Brown (and many brits) will do this till the dieing end to get out of the s**t

thing is they wont get out of the s**t

thriftybabe

Australia is look good to move to

WTF?_2

pickles110564 wrote: »

I know.......... but lets hope it aint worse than the yanks or we will really be in trouble

Now you're getting it!

I don't think we'll see the same scale of devestation as the USA but I do think it will overall be worse - just that it will last longer and take place at a less frenzied pace. What seems to be happening in the US is that the market is just rapidly correcting. They don't stand on trying to keep up a pretence when things go wrong, they just bail immediately and cut their losses.

In the UK on the other hand, things are being dragged out as slowly and painfully as possible. By many measures, the level of debt in the UK is even worse than the USA.

One way or another, prices are going to have to reach some sort of reasonable level. If we don't see rapid, sharp falls in the market we will see slow, gradual, protracted decline with the accompanying economic under-performance. Possibly like the last decade for Japan but without the comforts of high levels of personal savings and a solid manufacturing, exporting base to lessen the pain.

Lotus-eater

So what he is saying, is that interest rates will stay where they are until we are in full recession and they will then drop, previous announcements forgotten? Is that right?

WTF?_2

Lotus-eater wrote: »

So what he is saying, is that interest rates will stay where they are until we are in full recession and they will then drop, previous announcements forgotten? Is that right?

Of course. Once things get bad, targetting inflation goes out the window in the scramble for a quick fix. Twas ever thus.

We're already seeing the start of this with calls for food and energy to be dropped from anything to do with inflation calculations.

The excuse given is that they are external inflation which nothing can be done about - this is b****x. Higher interest rates and a tighter monetary policy would boost the value of sterling and bring lower prices on these to consumers.

And the real problem here is monetary inflation. There is just too much loose cash in the system relative to the amount of goods and services. When this happens, asset class bubbles are the inevitable result.

We had the dotcom bubble which turned to bust - so Greenspan went for inflation and we got a long lasting property bubble which has now burst - so governments are responding with yet more inflationist monetary policies (to 'combat the dangerous deflationary effects of the credit crunch') which is leading to a bubble in energy and food.

Whenever these bubbles burst (and they will sooner or later) something else will massively inflate in price, the pattern continuing ad infinitum, until the inflation is purged from the system. That means allowing much of the money inflated into existence in the last 5-6 years to be 'destroyed' in an overall deflationary period.

The powers that be are terrified of a 1930s style deflationary depression but until we tackle inflation we can look forward to bubble after bubble until there's nothing left to inflate and we get a huge global depression regardless of anything the central bankers try to do.

Austin_Allegro

I'm pretty sure Mr Soros was saying exactly the same things on a BBC tv programme a couple of months ago, so I don't think it should have much influence on the FTSE etc.

My personal view is that the 'worst case' scenario is a period similar to the 1970s/early 80s, over the next few years, with high inflation, unemployment, energy cuts etc; with an eventual partial recovery based around servicing the BRIC countries' booms. I certainly don't think we'll go back to having two car families spending their leisure hours in shopping centre car parks.

Of course, anything's possible, and it's conceivable we might go to a sort of 'second world' subsistence economy like Eastern Europe or, say, Eire in the 50s, but I think it's unlikely.