Guest 716- Registered: 9 Jun 2011
- Posts: 4,010
#1
Mini Chronology..................
2000.....AOC take over Time Warner.
2007....2009..RBS take over ABN Ambo.
Alan Greenspan cut interest rates and left them rock bottom.
Sir Melvyn King leaving interest rates to low and waited too long when economy nose dived
Gordon Brown praised Bankers for their remarkable achievements and cosying up to the City.Presided over an ever widening deficit.
Bill Clinton allowed investment banks to take highly leveraged to markets and forced lenders to take a relaxed approach to disadvantaged borrowers.
Eugene Fama financial institutions loading themselves up with toxic sub-prime debt ...bubble thinking.
Reagan & Thatcher deregulation market forces...trickledown economies.removed constraints on banks.made
finance more important than manufacturing!!!!! reduced trade unions powers making it harder for employees
to secure a bigger share of national economy as in the past raising corporate profits and rewards for the top
1 % of earners stagnating wages for ordinary folk and a higher propensity to get in debt.
Hank Paulson Freddie Mac and Fannie Mac...Leyman Bros..Paulson triggered the biggest economic downturn since the depression.
Kathleen Corbet as CEO of Standards & Poors presided over the poor quality loans period.
Bankers............Fred Goodwin RBS..Adam Applegarth Northern Rock..Dick Field Leyman Bros.Jimmy Cayne Bear Steam..Stan O`Neal Merril Lynch $ 8 billion debt..Andy Hornby...Sir Victor Black Lloyds.
Guest 715- Registered: 9 Jun 2011
- Posts: 2,438
#2
I am sure one name on there will spark the usual response on here
Audere est facere.
howard mcsweeney1- Location: Dover
- Registered: 12 Mar 2008
- Posts: 62,352
#3
a scottish name i presume.
Guest 715- Registered: 9 Jun 2011
- Posts: 2,438
#4
That will be the one Howard
Audere est facere.
Guest 725- Registered: 7 Oct 2011
- Posts: 1,418
#5
Nobody caused the financial crisis. Like night and day, summer and winter, Manchester united at the top of the premiership then Liverpool boom and bust happens. Nothing unusual about all this just the natural life cycle of the economy. Although it has to be said that what is particularly dangerous about this current slump is that our government is doing it's level best to deliberately make things worse in order that it might be elected next time.
Guest 655- Registered: 13 Mar 2008
- Posts: 10,247
#6
That is quite right Philip, spot on.
We can only look at the position the UK was in at the start of the turn-down, which was quite appalling and we were is a very weak position. We already had a structural deficit due to the government's failure to obey Keynes golden rule about reducing the deficit in a growth cycle and repaying debt. The simple fact is that the UK economy and that of much of Europe was run as if the good days would roll on forever.... madness.
The downturn started in 2007 and it was that which sparked the banking crisis that came to a head a year later. The banks were in such a poor position due in part to the removal of the Bank of England's regulatory role in 1997 and the encouragement by a certain Scot to them to go and take risks. Yes the bankers made some daft mistakes they never should have made and have a responsibility for that, but they would never have been allowed to take the risks they did and expose us to US toxic debt to the extent they did if the BoE were still in their pre-1997 role.
We can add to the list of factors that made the UK so weak at the start of the turn-down to inflation brief given to the BoE which excluded levels of debt from their role in setting interest rates. As a result rates were kept too low too long and that led to a housing and private debt bubble.
So - while he was not guilty for turning the cyclical downturn into a full blown crisis, Gordon Brown was most certainly guilty of the appalling condition of the UK economy and the British banks making the depth and length of the UK recession so much worse than it would otherwise be.
Brown though is the only person who can take responsibility for the massive government spending boom that created the structural deficit and is resulting in the need for spending cuts. This is in fact separate to the overall financial crisis and would need to be corrected whatever.
I would, incidentally, like to point out that the 'global crisis' was/is not truly global in the sense of effecting every country. Many countries did run their economies responsibly and have not been so seriously affected as we were, some have not even experienced a recession.
Guest 698- Registered: 28 May 2010
- Posts: 8,664
#7
What doesn't help is that every time we start to head for a slump, there aren't enough people at the top who remember the last one.
I'm an optimist. But I'm an optimist who takes my raincoat - Harold Wilson