howard mcsweeney1- Location: Dover
- Registered: 12 Mar 2008
- Posts: 62,352
Guest 649- Registered: 12 Mar 2008
- Posts: 14,118
Guest 696- Registered: 31 Mar 2010
- Posts: 8,115
Just hyperbole, Howard, when they say the bankers will uproot and change shores. They won't!
In the last 15 years, the City's bankers have decreased in number from 250,000 to 100,000, trend continuing.
And not because they're making off to work for banks in tax-havens or anywhere else, for that matter. But rather because the ponzi scheme reached its climax, and banks are employing less City executives.
Guest 716- Registered: 9 Jun 2011
- Posts: 4,010
The world is getting smaller for Bankers.............there will be no where to run soon..........
Guest 696- Registered: 31 Mar 2010
- Posts: 8,115
In fact, not long ago I pointed out on the Forum that there are very many bankers quitting the sector for lack of available employment. Even top bankers by no means would simply "get a job" in another country as banker, because all over Europe the same is happening: bankers are being laid off en masse.
It was all just some make-believe propaganda that bankers could just up and go elsewhere and find the same job at a higher wage. The truth is, they're not going anywhere, and adding to that, they are being gradually subdued to strict State regulation.
The Silly Seasons will come to an end, when bankers could help themselves to bonuses.
Guest 693- Registered: 12 Nov 2009
- Posts: 1,266
My heart bleeds. The banks have systematically shafted the country, bled us dry and led the country to the precipice - and we're supposed to go easy on them to save their jobs?
It's never the fault of the perpetrators, is it? David Cameron, and Gordon Brown before him, would have been perfectly entitled to force legislation on the banks that would render their activities illegal, but both decided to let the banks try to put their own house in order. I have to say that I'm of the Miliband frame of mind in making the banks knuckle under the rule of law; there is a culture of greed within the City of London that needs removing and if the price of that removal is that the thieves responsible take their crimes overseas, so be it.
True friends stab you in the front.
Guest 696- Registered: 31 Mar 2010
- Posts: 8,115
No-one overseas wants them, Andy. Other countries have had the same problem with banks going bust, and have an exuberance of bankers, as the City does. Until recently, it was still claimed that, if their bonuses were touched, a top banker could stroll abroad and would get a higher paid job than in the City, choosing his own wage. Reality is different.
State regulation of banks is becoming stricter, and my guess is that international tax-havens will soon be dealt with, once law-enforcement is imposed on tax avoidance. Tax-havens literally destroy the world economy.
One example being, Spain has lost two thirds of corporate tax income since 2007 due to corporate tax avoidance, with the exception of the 5 biggest companies there. That equates to 32 billion euro a year less income for the Spanish treasury.
Sure, that money is going elsewhere, but the result is, Spain might get a bailout, at the huge expense of other economies. Adding to all the austerity measures in Spain anyway.
So there is no gain for the Public at large, neither in Spain nor in those countries who might have to bail out the Spanish economy.
Consequently, international tax-avoidance is an international Plague, it needs combating through severe legislation, where authorities in different countries agree to clamp down hard.
And the safest way for this is for strict scrutiny on bankers, so that whatever they do with other people's money, it is being tracked and noted: no matter where that money comes from.
Guest 698- Registered: 28 May 2010
- Posts: 8,664
Most of what banks do is necessary to the economy, the banking industry is the biggest contributor to our balance of payments and we are therefore in danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water for the sake of political dogma.
I'm an optimist. But I'm an optimist who takes my raincoat - Harold Wilson
Keith Sansum1
- Location: london
- Registered: 25 Aug 2010
- Posts: 23,942
Peter;
If the banks behaved then maybe none of this uproar would have happened
ALL POSTS ARE MY OWN PERSONAL VIEWS
Guest 655- Registered: 13 Mar 2008
- Posts: 10,247
Well said Peter.
I am no fan of the banks and deal daily with their shortcomings in the retail space but let us keep critisism of them to where it is deserved.
Keith - perhaps if the government had behaved then the economy would not be in the mess it is in now. (And, remember - in 1997 the Labour government changed the regulation and actively encouraged them to take risks).
Guest 714- Registered: 14 Apr 2011
- Posts: 2,594
Its like talking to the wall Barry, I admire your perseverance but the ability some people have to rewrite history is amazing.
The fact Brown ran up massive debts without the bank bailouts is either forgotten or ignored.
Guest 710- Registered: 28 Feb 2011
- Posts: 6,950
The off-balance-sheet and PFI shenanigans of old and that were so jealously regarded by the then opposition are still going strong.
Even with the low cost of Government borrowing it is still thought best to increase costs through PFI in the building of schools. The 'assumed' and much heralded savings of standardisation - one size and shape fits all - and the shunning of our abundant National Talent in Architecture are unlikely to match these extra costs.
P.S.
The rebuilt school that Ed once attended is one such PFI debacle, 50% owned by an off-shore branch of HSBC.
Funny how some who pay some tax and are then paid from the public purse are doing AOK, not doctors, teachers or binmen though.
Ignorance is bliss, bliss is happiness, I am happy...to draw your attention to the possible connectivity in the foregoing.
Keith Sansum1- Location: london
- Registered: 25 Aug 2010
- Posts: 23,942
Barryw
Unlike david l. i have said there have been a number of people at fault in this issue, but that doesn't make the present cobbled together govt right either
ALL POSTS ARE MY OWN PERSONAL VIEWS
Guest 655- Registered: 13 Mar 2008
- Posts: 10,247
Even I have not said they are right in every respect but the big problems are those created by Brown's tomfoolery on a number of fronts that I have detailed before.
Guest 696- Registered: 31 Mar 2010
- Posts: 8,115
In other words, Gordon Brown said: "right lads, you're sage enough to run banks without Government regulation, to manage the saved money that individuals and businesses have worked for, we trust you to do a good job without State regulation, so get on with it".,
The bankers got on with it, and within a short time drove the banks into massive bankruptcy.
Then the bankers cried to the State: "we're bankrupt, come and bail us out, we HAVE NO MONEY LEFT,,,"
Had the banks been left to run the course of self-regulating free economy, they'd have gone into bankruptcy, and millions of individuals and businesses would have gone bankrupt with them.
But the State HAD to intervene with bailouts, to prevent almost everyone loosing their savings and the economy collapsing overnight.
So quite clearly, the banks are NOT - and CAN NOT be - self-regulating, else they'd have already closed the economy down, in Britain, and in many another country.
So Gordon Brown's mistake lies in having trusted these bankers to be wise people capable of doing a good and honest job with the economy's money. However, the political spin will put the blame on Brown, not the reckless and greedy bankers.
Guest 655- Registered: 13 Mar 2008
- Posts: 10,247
Alexander. No - the situation was far more complex than that.
In 1997 Brown removed the oversight of the Bank of England, something Mrs T refused to do. He introduced a tri-partied regulatory system that was ill-conceived in the first place so that the levels of necessary supervision was reduced.
He also spoke at the annual Mansion House dinner, praised the banks and urged them to go out and win business for the UK and to take advantage of his changes.
Some, repeat some, of the banks did what he suggested. Many did not, HSBC and Lloyds among the 'good guys' in this respect (Lloyds only got into trouble because they agreed to Brown's request to rescue the HBOS Group who were among the 'bad boys'.)
Sadly the banks also suffered from other mistakes of Brown, such as the failed inflation brief to the BoE that ignored debt and also Clinton's equally foolish reforms that created the toxic debt problem the UK inherited because some UK banks (RBS largely) bought up American banks.
It was a 'perfect storm' of events that led to the 2008 crash almost entirely caused by ill-judged government action, ours and Americas. The banks are far from innocent in this but the government carries most of the responsibility for creating the conditions that exposed UK banks to the American toxic debt which itself was down to Clinton's reforms.
I have always said that governments are THE problem we have.
I have very much simplified this but I suspect from past experience you still will not grasp it.
Guest 655- Registered: 13 Mar 2008
- Posts: 10,247
The above banking problems are of course separate from the mad spending spree Brown embarked on building up a defici in the part of the economic cycle in which he should have reduced it. It is also separate to the cyclical economic slowdown and correction (started in 2007) that was turned into an economic disaster by a combination of the massive state deficit, the banking problems and the Eurozone. Other Brown errors that made the current problem worse of course, as a result of that inflation brief and low interest rates is the housing bubble, massive private debt and a lack of household savings.
Guest 696- Registered: 31 Mar 2010
- Posts: 8,115
This is impossible to grasp, Barry. Not least because the huge national debt left by Labour has been added to by the Coalition Government. And the deficit is possibly even larger now than it was pre-Coalition.
Furthermore, the banks UK have been told to gradually separate their investment sector from the saving sector, so as not to gamble away again the savings of individuals and businesses on speculation-style investments all over the world.
Ed Miliband has promised he won't give the banks to 2019 to separate the two sectors if he got elected, but would enforce it through Law by breaking up the banks.
The root cause of bank crashes lies with banking-speculation, not with Gordon Brown.
Guest 1694- Registered: 24 Feb 2016
- Posts: 1,087
There is already a Government Bill before Parliament right now which will, when it has finished its Parliamentary progress, do by law just what Ed Milliband is telling the banks he will do if Labour is elected. It'll already be law before the next election.
Guest 655- Registered: 13 Mar 2008
- Posts: 10,247
Alexander. Again you demonstrate that you cannot grasp the issues. Brown created and encouraged the environment in which the banking crash happened though a series of errors alongside Clinton's reforms. It was a government created crisis in which the Euro problems are now playing a part alongside Eurozone deficits. A perfect storm of adverse conditions - thanks to Brown/Clinton and the Euro.
Of course the debt was added to by the coalition - it was impossible to instantly close the deficit because it was so massive. I have said many times that the cuts are too little too slow and only very slightly faster than the snail paced cuts proposed by Darling. I have previously explained the way the deficit has been reduced, the Eurozone backlash has wiped out the last years worth of deficit reduction through suppressing growth, it remains lower in actual and real terms than in May 2010.
Do stop ignoring what is explained to you that is fact rather than opinion simply because it does not fit with your own ideas.
