Comments on: Who’s to blame?

By: Reinsmith

Reinsmith — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 20:57:32 +0000

What a great post! I really like the fact that you have expressed your opinion, but yet not forced it on anyone You put out the information and let others make up their own minds. Keep up the good work.

By: dr whitmarsh

dr whitmarsh — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 20:53:50 +0000

Uncontrolled tax avoidence and the medically damaging and morally insane cost of prohibition the pot-capone’s of new labour are the two other disasterous policies. There is over £100 billion there for us with a few simple overnight laws.

By: Redwood spots 10 errors leading to the financial crisis « Lightwater

Redwood spots 10 errors leading to the financial crisis « Lightwater — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 17:10:02 +0000

[...] Redwood’s article – Who’s to blame - provides the information needed to understand what caused our financial crisis. John [...]

By: Bazman

Bazman — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 07:30:18 +0000

This is not a repeat of the 1970′s It’s not the unions or the workforce that have caused this mess. It is the elite people like bankers and their apologists. They do not have a divine right to rule. Many people who read this site no doubt supported everything these banks and investment companies did and defended even the most ludicrous excesses. Getting people, especially the middle classes into massive amount of debt, then pulling the rug out from under them and credit card crunch is yet to come. Any policy by any government to make the rich pay more is not by definition bad for the middle classes and in many ways can benefit them. How’s your discount shopping going? Lidl Aldi. I’ve seen you walking around like you have discovered something. Fluorescent light bulbs bright enough now? Shameless.
Just because someone works in an office does not make them middle class. Just la de da, and if you are middle class then that does not make you rich. Blind support of an elite has got us into this mess and now these rich bankers are tapping their pencils in the drawing rooms of their mansions pondering what went wrong. For everyone else of course. I would like to read just one person defend these peoples bonuses on this site.
Go on, we could all do with a laugh! I suspect keeping the cash and not saying anything, or some nonsense about starving children in Africa is the name of the game. We all got turned over and few people saw it coming.

By: adam

adam — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 04:30:36 +0000

Communist Britain?

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article5581225.ece

By: Tim Skinner

Tim Skinner — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 22:44:22 +0000

Yes, I like it!

Almost fungible, London cabs could play their part, and give a new meaning to black gold.

By: Magelec

Magelec — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 18:27:56 +0000

I understand from a friend of mine who worked for some time in Figi that he had a lot of dealings with the Australian tax authorities. He told me that Australia doesn’t have the problems with dodgy bank liabilities that the UK etc have because their equivilant to our FSA actually did their job properly. We seem to have a lot of box ticking bureaucrats with no spine. The latest proposal by Lord Turner (Chairman FSA) that the banks should be required to build up their cash deposits seems to allow for the time when the banks take on more dodgy loans instead of stopping them from taking on the liabilities in the first place!

I hope the above makes sense.

By: TomTom

TomTom — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 17:39:38 +0000

Why Britain never used Monetary Base Control is clear – it is a society prone to inflation and could not permit effective credit control for fear of the weak economic base constraining consumption.

By default we now have an extreme MBC whichis market-driven rather than central bank supervised. The B of E is powerless to unlock blocked credit lines and the whole system of monetary policy is off the rails with presumably Velocity dropping sharply leaving the bank to increase Quantity in the hope of shifting the price level.

If only the British economy were not prone to boom and bust because of the Credit Cycle – all that has changed since the 1960s is the amplitude – and the country looks more and more like a banana republic

By: Alan Wheatley

Alan Wheatley — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 11:44:59 +0000

A phrase appearing regularly is “too big to fail”; or in another form, “too important to fail”.

In a properly regulated free market, is not “too big to fail” a definition that the institution is too big and should be broken up?

Alternatively, such big institutions could be subject to regulation that requires that size/importance be inversely proportional to risk.

By: Alan Wheatley

Alan Wheatley — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 11:24:12 +0000

Thanks for the tip – a good read.

It led me to the Adair Turner speech. In it he identified one of the failures of regulation to be “…central banks too focused on monetary policy tightly defined, meeting inflation targets”. But in the case of the Bank of England, it was doing what it was told to do by the government, which is, surely, where he real failure lies.