Have government rules which discourage saving caused the banking crash?

I believe that several of the limits have been raised significantly, especially for the elderly.

Gaz

Part of the problem though, is that the poor often have no money to enable them to save.

You can offer them anything you want, but unless they can spare money from a minimum wage job after feeding their family and paying housing costs, they'll never be able to take "advantage" of the offer (and I suspect the government play on this for all it's worth !)

Raised from a ludicrously low level of 3,000 to a lucricriously low level of 6,000. And this limit like the last one has been left to wither on the vine of inflation.

When the 3,000 limit was set you could probably buy a house for it, albeit not a very good one. 6,000 would barely make a 5% deposit on a similiar house these days. Having a higher limit for the elderly is pretty stupid as any one approaching retirement is most at risk of losing their job and not being able to another so if they save they will have the glorious pleasure of handing back their lifes savings back to the government.

So far better to not save, at least not in a bank anyway, or better still get in debt up to your eyeballs. Infact you would have to be pretty insane to save.

It's no wonder the banks have no liquidity. It's an insane system. But take comfort in the fact that the government has not saved for a rainy day either.

To bad it's pissing it down and will be for a long long time.

"Colin Wilson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@news.individual.net...

Many of the 'poor' could save, but there is no point, what would take them years to save would have to be handed back to the government in a very short period of time if they lost their job. Hence the rule is don't save and live on credit. Futher more it is not just the 'poor', it is a very large section of society, indeed the majority who are discouraged from saving, even if you are fairly well off and can afford to save a considerable sum, to do so would be lunacy, you won't get any help if you lose your job so you will effectively be flushing all your savings down the sh*tter if you had saved.

Anyway the sh*t has certaintly hit the fan now, and that fan is looking more like a muck spreader.

Everyone has been jumping on the jolly old housing 'ladder' and riding the ladder of lunacy to a life of wealth as the bubble grows.

However the bubble has burst and it looks like it will be a long slide into the mire.

When a US bank can lose over $230 billion in value in a few days things don't look too rosey.

And the rich know about supplementing their children's trusts by moving property about so that not only can the tax payer pay for it to start with and keep it well furnished but also supply an income from it.

I hadn't seen any figures on this, but my first instinctive response is "wow" followed by "hehehehehe"

The Australians have done some good work on this, with their superannuations pensions system. The state pension is handled like a private pension, ie you have an individual pot that you get to manage, and add to. Their research showed, that once the pot reached a certain amount, people took a real active interest in it, topping up payments etc.

When you are right at the bottom of the mountain, it seems a long long way to the top.... If you are half way up there though, it becomes much more likely people will climb to the top.

For a voluntary contribution based pension system to work properly for the low paid, it needs to be isolated from the low level benefits.

It needs to be simple, it needs to be secure (but risk options available), it needs to have both employer, employee and state contributions, and it has to be significant.

Gaz