Short selling ban lifted on Financials.

In message , mick writes

It looks like a good idea. :-( The bloody City parasites are betting on failures again. I remember a co-worker saying to me 20+ years ago that all banks should be nationalised. I thought he was left wing nutter at the time...

After that has happened what industry do you think the UK should rely on for tax income and exports?

It seems to me that the additional problems that the UK is having over other countries is that it doesn't have a big enough non finance sector.

A double failure of Mr Brown, firstly he didn't insure regulation of banks was tight enough to prevent systemic failure and secondly he allowed the UK economy to become a one trick pony.

Thatcher did that!

No she didn't. She successfully moved the economy towards more reliance on services and less on manufacturing. She spotted an opportunity and took it. The economy has done pretty well after her leadership. It seems strange to blame her for a problem 18 years after she left power.

Gordon Brown was chancellor for 10 years, he had every opportunity to steer the economy towards more balance, towards new opportunities. Instead he just sat on his arse and let the success of Thatcher's financial deregulation policies pay all the bills. It is very hard to think of anything really constructive he did as opposed to the destructive things he did to business: obvious inaction, introduction of ridiculous bureaucratic complexity and additional taxation.

Because Nulabour are just carrying on with Thaterite policies.

It's funny how you describe thatcher's deregularization as a "success". It's policies like those that helped cause the current crisis.

She left power 19 years ago. NuLab have been in power for 10 years, they have been following NuLab policies. If they copied some of Thatcher's policies it is because they were successful.

The UK has been relatively successful compared to other similar economies. It is true that deregulation is responsible for both the banking problems and the particularly painful effect they have on the UK however do you blame the pioneers of the Industrial Revolution for the pain caused by the collapse of UK mining & industry in the 1980s?

You can't expect Thatcher to have seen the credit crunch or the way banks have used financial derivatives to increase risk and undermine capital adequacy rules.

In 1990 it was a very different world. Serious concerns about how banks were handling derivatives didn't really materialise until 92 or 93. By the time LTCM happened in 1998 the potential for systemic banking failure was obvious to anyone but a retard, yet for the last 10 years NuLab have sat on their arses and done very little.

And if they had clamped down on the City and restricted credit? There would have been an outcry and they would have been accused of strangling enterprise, etc.

Better to be accused of it than to wait ten years and actually accomplish it.

FoFP

Give them a chance, they may achieve it before then.

If they had done so, they would not have been re-elected for ten years. Nobody votes for restricted credit, slow growth. Except me. :-)

Gordon H Remove "invalid" to reply

Therein lies the political problem of bubbles. Once the punters have Dollars in their eyes, if a politician tries to stop them buying their golden tickets, they'll just replace them with a more amenable politician.

FoFP

It wasn't a question of restricting credit it was a case of making sure that the banks were acting prudently. Making sure that the banks were not taking excessive risks. Making sure that the banks could look after themselves. The restriction on credit would have just been a consequence. The outcry would have been minimal. How many people even know what Basel2 is? People would have been moaning about the various wars Blair took us into not the indirect effect of banking regulation nipping a credit explosion in the bud.

True stricter regulation might have slowed the economy slightly but surely this is the type of trade off we would have expected from a Chancellor who kept telling us that he was acting prudently, telling us no more boom and bust.

The thing that is crippling the UK more than other countries is not so much consumer debt as the fact that our principal industry, banking, has been the hardest hit. As for the future, the UK has also had its banking reputation devastated, so now UK plc needs to find a new earner.

Yes things look bleak and I'm pissed off.

Did anyone watch the BBC2 docu last night about the failure of the "risk managers", and the way their hedging compounded the risk instead of smoothing out the markets?

In message , Nick writes

As a tax-paying pensioner with no debt, and three offspring in their

Yes. However there was something that really did not make sense to me. Someone specifically mentioned that they pick two companies in the same marketplace (example given was Tescos and Morrisons IIRC) and bet on one going up and one going down. Therefore if the whole market segment drops they don't lose.

This obviously didn't work!!!

In message , Mark writes

Was that not used as the example of what happened in the banking sector? In which case no, - it didn't work!