Hearthly wrote:
Cavey wrote:
I disagree; the market is normally sufficiently clued up to know what's good for business and profits (if nothing else), especially in such broad, global terms as this.
This is the same blind faith in the market that caused a little 'upset' in the world of banking a few years ago, as I recall....
And the Dotcom boom (and bust), it did well on that one, too.
I hesitate to respond substantively, chap, since we've been here so many times before and it never seems to sink in.
Briefly, though, "the market", of course, had nothing whatsoever to do with the so-called 'Banking Crisis' - this was mass, coordinated fraud, itself borne of inept, useless regulation from a Labour government (that people like you cheered to the rafters) that utterly failed to understand the arcane workings of the "industry" whose clear responsibility it was to regulate. They were too busy bigging them up during Mansion House gatherings and collecting the ill-gotten tax receipts for their ruinous public sector expansion projects (at the expense of "real" jobs doing nasty, oily stuff that could be left to the "poor, old fashioned" German economy). I mean seriously, you might as well blame the markets for the existence of organised crime; the markets can only work on whatever information is disclosed to them, and funnily enough the banks kept schtum about their LIBOR cartel, passed on "repackaged" junk debt bonds (with AAA ratings), money laundering on a vast scale and all the rest.
It is ironic that those same uber-Left types who blame everything on the free market totally fail to acknowledge these real causes of the situation - a combination of human greed and crucially, this lack of regulation. If I leave a case stuffed with £5 and £10 notes in the middle of the street, for every one person who'd hand it into the nearest Police station, there will be 10 or 100 who'd pocket the lot. I loathe banks - and bankers - more than most, but can I really fully blame them for capitalising on the vast, illicit money they were able to freely take, like candy from an unmanned sweet shop? No-one in government asked the right (or pretty much any) questions, just as long as the whole ponzi scheme kept paying those dividends. But crime and fraud <> business, capitalism or the 'free market', and most certainly, the so-called 'bailout' involving printing hundreds of billions of pounds thereby diluting the entire UK economy and investing untold billions in 'real money' before, during and after through de facto nationalisation of said banks was anything but as well. In the real economy, such companies (banks) would all - quite rightly - have gone to the wall. THAT is free market economics, I think you'll find.
People like you love to demonise Thatcher for selling council houses!!1!! but then, Labour, Blair and Brown... a near ruined economy, Middle East in flames (and quite possibly seeds of the next World War sown)... think I know who I prefer somehow. But of course, I forget myself. There's always this (entirely retrospective) claim that that Labour wasn't "real" Labour, huh. Well, whatever, one thing's for sure - it's the Tories' job to clear up the mess, just as we always have done and are doing. Those horrible old Tories with their 3-4% year on year growth and record falls in unemployment within less than a single Parliamentary term, eh. Time to move out of the UK and become a 'political refugee'...
In terms of the Scottish debate, the tragically amusing thing is that Salmond is an ex-banker, and was a big proponent of the Euro, RBS, Iceland and Fred "The Shred" until pretty recently. Yeah, think I'd be staying in the UK if it were me.
