Category: Blog

The Credit Crunch and banking crash began when the UK (and US) authorities decided to bring the credit party to an abrupt end in 2007. In the UK they slammed on the brakes with high interest rates, starved the money markets of funds, and finally told the banks to lend less and save more. The credit binge was one they had fuelled in earlier years with low rates and their own special enthusiaism for off balance sheet financing. Suddenly we were all told that borrowing too much was not good for us. It appeared they wanted a new era of austerity, based on repaying debt and living within our means. The private sector was put through the mangle to squeeze out excess. The Chancellor and the Governor told us about moral hazard and said it was up to the banks to sort out excessive debts and over the top lending.

Two years on, and we live in a different world. The private sector is doing exactly what they wanted. It has no choice. Banks are dutifully hoarding cash and lending it back to the government. Individuals are paying off credit card debts, and striving to get the mrotgage under control. Businesses are being forced to sell off stock and stop investing as they cannot borrow more, or only at high rates. That’s what was what they wanted to happen because they ahd allowed the country to borrow too much. The sooner the adjustment is made the better, painful though it is. It is the price of big policy errors made in the “good” years.

Now we learn that the authorites do not like the high unemployment figures, the poor output figures and the rest that flows naturally from the credit squeeze and from their past huge mistakes. Who does? Why didn’t they listen when some of us warned them in time to stop the worst of it?

So they have come up with a great way to overcome a crisis of borrowing too much in the private sector – they are borrowing too much in the public sector instead. They are fighting fire with fire. All that they said about the dangers of excessive credit in the private sector applies with a vengence in the public sector. In the private sector if a business borrows too much it goes bankrupt. Only those who have decided to deal with it lose out. If a state borrows too much all its citizens are forced to pay the bills and suffer the resulting pain of adjustment to reality. When will the Chancellor and the Governor make their speeches about moral hazard in the public sector? Or does the Governor now live in a world where none of this debt is real, because he thinks we can print limitless amounts of money to “settle” the bills with no adverse consequences?

Between 2003 and 2006 they got regulation of private sector banking and credit hopelessly wrong. Now they are gettign public sector credit hopelessly wrong. Why do they never learn? Haven’t they grasped yet that all borrowing does one day have to be repaid. If you refuse to live within your means now, you will be even poorer tomorrow.

Today we pray that there will no more murders in Afghanistan, as many try to go to the polls. Our soldiers have been courageous and hard working, in an effort to offer security ahead of the election. The coalition needs the election to be as free and as fair as possible. Above all we need a result which carries conviction that it is the will of the Afghan people, producing a government with some authority.

Yesterday Sky invited me in to interview me about the war. They had read a few things on this blog which interested them. I explained I was not a specialist in the way I am on economic and financial matters, but was happy to ask some of the necessary questions about what the UK is seeking to do and what we might do next. They conducted a probing and intelligent interview without any of the usual BBC tricks of putting words into my mouth, making up views I or the Conservatives do not hold or trying to get quotes they could use out of context to prove a Labour smear. It was refreshing and much more grown up.

I argued that the UK government’s mission was now concerned with state building. Our troops are trying to win and hold territory so that the civilian power of the Kabul based national government can extend to parts of the country where other forces have been powerful. The immediate task is to create sufficiently safe streets and polling stations so people feel they can go to vote without harm. I suggested that once a new government was established following the election the UK and its allies needed to talk urgently about the timetable for transfer of more and more of these security functions to the Afghan army and police, appreciating the need for training and reform.

The interviewer pointed out that the government said we were in Afghanistan to make the streets of London safe. He reminded me that a recent report by MPs who had studied this complained of mission creep, and thought there were dangers in pledging wide ranging state building. I think we are already well into the state building mission, as the desire to facilitate elections demonstrates. I find the government’s argument about the safety of the streets of London difficult to accept. If that is the sole aim, why aren’t our troops told just to concentrate on those people thought to be planning international travel, and those camps known to be training grounds for international terror? Doesn’t such an exercise require more intelligence work and less fighting? And why is such intervention limited to Afghanistan when we know there are other countries that are training grounds for international terrorists?

The latest problem the government is encountering from its critics is over the conduct of the present Afghan government. If the UK role is to buttress the power of the incumbent government, to help it to govern more widely and effectively, critics can point to any one of a number of policies the Afghan government follows which we do not like and ask why we are supporting this? It is one of the hazards of supporting the emergence of democracy in a foreign country, that they might elect a government you do not like which does things you find unacceptable. If your troops are risking their lives to allow that government to govern, do you then have a right to demand that they change policies and laws you do not like? How do you intervene to prevent illegitimate and violent challenges to the civil powers, without stifling opposition and dissent? It is difficult and sensitive work. In the end you only succeed in helping create a democracy on the day the civil power no longer needs foreign troops to keep the peace.

National Savings has announced increases in its savings rates on certain products. I do not tell you this to recommend them, nor am I on commission! The rates are still quite low.
I tell you because it shows that even the government now accepts that the bank rate of 0.5% is a nonsense when it comes to persuading people to save, just as the banks have long regarded it as a nonsense when they decide how much to charge you for most loans. More and more business simply ignores the MPC’s interest rate decision. Rates are going up, as they have to, whatever the MPC thinks.
These are strange times. In the same week the government allows a bank it owns to fail to pay interest on its bonds, and seeks to show how odd its own Central bank’s interest rates are. Meanwhile the long absence of Parliament means we get no statement on these matters from the Chancellor, and no opportunity to ask him why.

Yesterday’s figures for CPI price rises should have been no surprise to all those who have been following the fall and rise of the pound, quantitative easing, and UK tax policy. The distinctive policy being followed by the UK compared to most other advanced countries was always likely to produce higher inflation this summer, and has done so. Indeed, it may even be the government’s intention.

In most advanced countries including the USA prices are falling. Here they have been going up for three main reasons. The first is we are still experiencing the impact of last year’s large devaluation of the pound. We import a high proportion of our needs. It was always going to take time for the impact to come through, as suppliers ran out of more cheaply priced stocks, and as currency cover they had taken out expired.

The second is the cost of government. The UK government is on a run to get its own fees, charges and prices up. There has been no let up in the rise of Council Tax, parking charges and the like. The government is also hiking petrol and diesel tax, which will have a further effect on prices generally, as most goods in the UK are distributed by road transport.

The third is the rise of global commodity prices. This has been brought about by a combination of Chinese re stocking whilst prices are comparatively low, and speculative demand from the US and UK where quantitative easing has created more money amongst investors seeking some risky investments. Commodities have attracted some of this money.

The Bank of England thinks CPI inflation will now take a tumble. Their recent reports have not concentrated fully on price inflation in the way the rules suggest they should. The government seems to favour quantitative easing to try to increase output and speed recovery. It now needs to explain why output has increased in Japan, Germany and France in the last quarter but fell in the UK. Have they noticed that France and Germany had no quantitative easing?

It is quite possible that CI inflation will come down a bit sometime this year, but the Bank should be more worried about future inflation prospects than it is. If the government is trying to create a little bit of inflation for fear of deflation, it should recognise that it is all too easy for a little bit to become a big bit. They should be disturbed about the different path of both output and prices in the UK to other advanced economies. The one thing that is stopping fast inflation in the UK is the poor state of the banks. Sorting out the banks more quickly might be a better policy to get things working again.

A reader of this site contacted me yesterday to give an example of rip off local government. Venturing into deepest Camden, the people’s very own borough, our blogger parked on a single yellow line on a Sunday. There was no parking sign nearby to inform drivers of the hours of operation of the single and double yellows. Common practise elsewhere implied that evenings and Sundays would be free to park. The car was parked neatly, well out of the way of through traffic on a road which was wide enough to take the parked vehicles. There were several cars parked.

Forty five minutes later on return, the car had gone, towed away on Council orders. The cost was £260 to get the vehicle back, as well as the lost time and frustration at having to prove identity of ownership, show a driving licence and all the rest to comply with the fearsome regulations for return of your car. This would be a major financial blow to many caught out in this way, representing the best part of a week’s pay after tax for anyone on average earnings or below.

There are some common features here of jobsworth Councils behaving very badly towards visitors or to local voters trying to use their cars. First, why can’t the rules and conditions be more clearly displayed? So often I search for the rules, only to give up and drive on because they are not on display or if they are they are ambiguous or unclear. Second, why does a wide street have to be restricted on a Sunday where in most places there is a more tolerant attitude? Third, why does a Council have to waste so much time and effort taking a car away when it is not causing an obstruction to the highway? Fourth, why do the penalties for a minor infringement have to be so huge? Surely a fine five to ten times the cost of the parking in an equivalent area requiring payment would be more than enough?

I invite you all who have seen this type of motorist mugging in action to bombard the Chief Executives of the Councils concerned. They doubtless have their own carefully reserved free parking place right in the centre of their towns and boroughs, paid for by the very taxpayers they are busily setting up and milking in this way.

This site has slipped to second place from first last year in the annual Total Politics Blog Poll of MPs websites. This is not of course an MP’s website as narrowly defined – it is a running commentary and an invitation to my readers to a debate on the state of the nation and the world economy. However, there will be no excuses for this slip in the polls. I must do better.

Starting from today there will be more satire, more analysis of a kind you cannot read elsewhere, and more campaigns. Satire is difficult, when events are often beyond parody, so categories one and two will often merge! Happy blogging.

We learn today that the nationalised Northern Rock needs more capital from taxpayers. Pending its further financial reconstruction, it is deferring payments on interest on money it has borrowed by issuing bonds. I would be interested to hear Ministerial comments on how much they are going to put in, over what time scale, and what bondholders should expect in the future from this nationalised company.

We have been so busy at UK PLC that I have not written to you the shareholders for some time. Now there is a little August pause I am able to do so.

I am pleased to report that our recently acquired bank subsidiaries remain loss making. Some of you were concerned in case the large losses of 2008 were not sustainable, and even speculated that we might be forced into profits this year. Fortunately we should be able to continue with a satisfactory rate of loss, although it would be unrealistic to expect us to sustain the level of 2008 which was exceptional. We did write off quite a lot of the past losses then, but there should still be plenty to use this year to keep us in the red overall.

The main advance in 2009 is in the successful build up of new debt. Last year we set out to put your company onto a totally new footing. We decided on borrowing £417 billion in just two years, an audacious expansion. We have felt for some time that other sectors of the economy have geared more than we have, and it is high time we geared UK PLC to the maximum possible.

Some said we would not be able to raise this much debt, and wondered if at a time when others had come unstuck by borrowing too much it was a good idea. We are proving them wrong. One of the ways we have ensured that we can raise this much debt has been to authorise our subsidiary the Bank of England to buy up parts of our debt ourselves, thus stimulating demand for it. Our market power, combined with the opportunity to buy our own debt, has ensured that we have dominated the borrowing market, keeping most others out and allowing us to become the largest borrower the country has ever seen by miles.

We have not neglected our other main strategy, to make sure that everyone in the UK is affected by the actions of UK PLC. We leave no stone unturned to make sure people have heard of us and pay us money. Indeed, our revenue raising strategy requires us to find more ways of taxing and fining people, to offset the reductions in revenues we are experiencing as result of the economic downturn.

We have been especially successful at finding new and developing old ways of mugging motorists. We are bringing in extra taxes on fuel, and making as many complicated rules and speed limit changes as possible to raise the fine revenue. Our local subsidiaries are exploring new charges and rules on parking, and have developed an imposing array of levies and licence payments for people wishing to build, run events, operate pubs, clubs and gaming businesses and run taxi services.

We are always on the look out for new ways to let you pay for UK PLC. You must appreciate that whilst we have been able to put more of the spending than ever before onto the company’s mortgage, we have been so good at increasing spending we do need to keep the revenues up as well. We were too successful in encouraging and allowing some of our salesforce to claim expenses and have had to rein it in a bit. The temporary check to that budget will be entirely lost by the extra salaries, bonuses and expense claims elsewhere in the organisation so it will not prevent us recording record spending. Indeed, if you look at the pay and expense claims in our media and banking subsidiaries, they dwarf the salesforce claims.

We have employed good PR consultants recently to capture the essence of what we do -at your expense I am pleased to say. Our two new catch phrases are “Never knowingly underborrowed” and “Making sure you all pay for all that we enjoy”. I am sure you will agree this sums up so well our unique proposition.

The Directors and other senior executives are spending most of their time on attacking the claims of our rivals, Conco, who think they should have the management contract for our great company. We cannot see how they could conceivably spend, borrow and waste as much as us, and will hammer home this message as often as possible.

Mr Darling has now said in an interview that he will consider legislating to control excessive pay and bonuses for banks. He will find that is not easy when he turns to his advisers.

We first need to know what the problem is, then ask how do you fix it? There are three political problems that need examining to do with bankers pay:

1. Many of us find it unacceptable that senior executives working in loss making state controlled business are being paid mega bucks out of our money. Why is Stephen Hester being offered a £9 million package, when there would be someone good out there who would do it for one tenth of that sum and still be well paid?

2. I also agree with George Osborne that someone senior working for a bank not controlled by the government could be offered mega bucks for taking extreme risks, only for the bank to seek a government guarantee or other assistance if they get it wrong. That too must of us find unacceptable.

3. There is the fact that many people throughout the financial world do receive high basic pay and bonuses. If they get it right their firms earn mega bucks. If they get it wrong their shareholders, who have the power to hire and fire, have to pay up. I cannot see any problem with such generous remuneration if the shareholders think it makes sense for them and pay the bills if it goes wrong. Some in Labour love the politics of jealousy and want to stop all such high pay to the private sector, though they usually think footballers are an exception they do not wish to meddle with even where the footballers wages help drive the club into bankruptcy. They judge the public’s jealousy levels well, as the public is more jealous of bankers than of footballers who sometimes entertain and wow them. They probably think TV “stars” are also an exception, though it may have been taken too far in the case of Mr Ross.

The easiest way to tackle type One excessive pay is for the government as majority shareholder to refuse to sign contracts containing such payments. They should call in all the top executives of their heavy loss makers, and negotiate a new deal with them, deferring or cancelling bonuses until their banks are genuinely profit making and have provided for or sorted out all the loss making activities these executives have helped build up in recent years. These new contracts should be a condition of taxpayer support. They should be made to pay for what they have done wrong in the past by forgoing the bonuses they think they have earned. They should not be allowed to dump all the unprofitable business on the taxpayer and carry on as if nothing had happened.

Type two excessive bonuses are also best tackled in this way. There should be a general statement of government policy, that if any bank gets into trouble in future and needs taxpayer guarantees or cash, it will automatically trigger a retrospective revision of all senior executive contracts with a view to cost cutting as a contribution to sorting out the bank’s cash and profit problems. The Regulator can go further and say that in cases where they judge that large institutions that could cause damage to the system are offering excessive remuneration for excessive risk, they will require the institutions to carry more capital to undertake such business. Shareholders will then see that their generous remuneration policy imposes a further penalty on them in the form of lower returns on capital and the need to put up more money.

Those who think we need to tackle Type Three excessive remuneration by changing the law have to answer the following questions:

1. How do you define an excessive bonus?
2. How do you stop them simply increasing the basic pay so the total package remains the same, whilst the bonus element is reduced to the new legal ceiling?
3. How do you stop them employing their top people offshore, or switching the HQ to a jurisdiction where these new rules do not apply?
4. If your target is the guaranteed bonus ( a bizarre concept which has become necessary in some cases to hire good people who would otherwise lose out from moving), how again do you stop them calling it something else – like a “hiring premium” or “relocation package”
5. How can you judge in advance what is excessive risk? The law might prevent hiring deal makers , salesmen or dealers on low or no basic pay who make all their money out of activity. Yet this is a lower risk way of paying them, as it depends on them generating revenue to earn well.
6. How do you avoid other financial centres using this proposed new law as a good argument to financial institutions to leave London and go somewhere else altogether?
7. How can you exclude the footballers and media stars you like from the prohibition on high pay? If you don’t bankers could sign up to a well paid contract to appear occasionally on business TV, with a less well paid contract to do some banking as part of the mix!

Yes, it’s true. David Cameron has used private planes to fly around, so he can fit more engagements in and get back to Parliament or his family in good time. The good news is, taxpayers are not paying for this.

Busy people doing important jobs do need to use the best means available for carrying out all their commitments. Before Labour rush to condemn, can we please publish the air miles of all Ministers, run up at the public expense. Were all their journeys strictly necessary?

I use my car a lot. It is often greener, cheaper, and takes less time than going by train. Where the train is quicker and easier I will use it, accepting that it may be dearer.