Category: austerity measures

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Osborne Bails Out Osborne

Chancellor George Osborne (who will eventually become an Irish Baronet, we should remember) today announced a bailout loan for the (basically insolvent) Irish banking system of around £7bn, this to come from the British taxpayer. He defends this as in our national interest because we export more to them than we do to several of the emerging economies combined. True enough no doubt, however, it’s difficult not to think his real concern is to preserve the British banks that are owed billions by the Irish banking system. They made loans presumably agreeing with the then Shadow Chancellor, one George Osborne, who in 2006 was so impressed by the Irish economy that he asked “What has caused this Irish miracle, and how can we in Britain emulate it?” http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article733821.ece
The fact the British banks made loans to the Irish says little for their grasp of sound banking principles. If they made bad loans, they deserve to go out of business, not be preserved at the expense of the taxpayer. Preserving them only allows them to repeat their mistakes again and be bailed out again in a vicious circle that can only end with the destruction of the entire economy.
The Chancellor appears to have no more idea than do the banks he wants to preserve. We need to get shot of the lot of them.

Incidentally, today comes news that the Chancellor’s promised White Paper, due soon, in which he promised to detail his plans for growth will not now appear till sometime next year. It appears for all his bluster he hasn’t even got a plan A, let alone a plan B.

BB

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The Black Heart Of Banking

Banks don’t actually need any capital base at all, they can make money up from the thin air at will (setting aside the dictates of the BIS which is biased on the side of the banks) and gift it or loan it at .01% interest to deserving business and so promote the creation of wealth. It’s the natural way of doing things. We’ve been bought up with a set of beliefs themselves entirely artificial and wholly against our interests so that an artificial economic elite may be created and sustained. This is what’s causing the the current poverty and this is what’s going to have to end. We are witnessing a global banking dynasty, its very existence unsuspected by the majority, in its death throes. I don’t know what the immediate future might hold but I’m sure of one thing; it ain’t gonna be pretty 🙁

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Greece Circles The Drain

Bad times behind and ahead for Greece and the rest of Europe too, us in the UK particularly. Predictably enough to everyone except politicians, apparently, the austerity neasures adopted first in Greece and then here in the UK have resulted not in Greece leaping like Prometheus unbound from the depths of the recession but finding themselves in even worse straits instead.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,712511,00.html

We’re next!
All this is inevitable as austerity measures are a two-edged sword; not only do they reduce public spending on the one hand but they also reduce private spending as its implementation means people simply haven’t got the money to spend. The one thing it does do is make the rich richer by comparison by making the poor even worse off than they were previously. It’s difficult not to think that the motley crew of public schoolboys and old Etonians in government aren’t fully aware of this even if the broader public aren’t.

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Missiles To Go!

Cruise missiles now come in handy boxes. They’re big boxes, mind, shipping-container-sized in fact (probably because they actually are shipping containers), but anyone with the wonga can now get a takeaway cruise missile and cart it around on your ship or your train or your lorry – and no-one will know. Scary, huh? Here’s the skinny…

http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63P2XB20100426

Point that leaps to mind is given a cruise missile can take out an aircraft carrier without breaking a sweat and that parties on both sides of the Atlantic are pushing for new carriers to be built and pressed into service, it’s now economic nonsense, in military terms at least, to spend billions creating a lumbering behemoth that can be knocked permanently out of commission by a missile costing a teeny fraction of its cost. So there’s a budget cut both countries could make, there’s an austerity measure right there!

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