Liberal Democrats Almost Wiped Out In Scotland!

Ahhh, benevolent dictatorship a la Mitch.

You will be benevolent right?


Right?

 

this is a good point, to be clear I would love nothing more than the liberal democrat party to be wiped from the face of the earth, I hope every member who solid there politics to create this coalition never has a decent nights sleep until the day they die, but it would be concerning for liberalism not to have a representative in mainstream politics, Socialists like myself are well used to such a situation but its not a good thing for it to happen to others With just labour and tory we will be very close to the situation they have in america.

 

When we talk about banks we are talking about investment banking and shadow banking, not your average current account but financial betting using credit default swaps , rehypothecation and the like.
In China a banker was prosecuted for doing this and having been found guilty was summarily executed..but look at the West as I have already pointed out Blair is linked to one of the biggest world banks as are so many politicians.and especially in America...people are still stuck thinking about a two party system, you can't still think like that , it's like thinking that we serve the Queen, we don't. Look at Clegg people seem surprised that he has renaiged on all his promises.but he is a politician and that is what they do ,he wants power, and he doesn't give a stuff about anything or anybody else.
Look at the situation the UK is in now, We the people aparantly owe trillions.Yet the people who brought this about what happened to them?
Tony Bliar is a multi millionare with an extensive property portfolio, earns £2 million a year from J.P Morgan stanley and is a middle east peace ambassador .........poor old Gordon Brown is also a millionaire and I bet the rest of that ship of rats did mightily well out of it to.
That shouldn't be allowed to happen..and the way that we can start is let the banks fail. If I open a business and it doesn't do well then I can go bankrupt.but what happens to the bankers when they make wild bets , they just get bailed out again by their politician buddies, and we the taxpayer have to pay for it.
Jon Corzine , a banker and close buddy to Obama lost billions on a bet about the value of the Euro, now that is gambling not investment, and it was taken out of segregated accounts, it could only occur with the conivance of the city of London because we in the UK are the only ones who allow rehypothaction to such a large extent, i.e leverage to up to 40 times your investment i.e put £10 and it's worth £400...that is not what most people think banking is about. We have to accept that the system is rotten to the core and go about building a new one.

 

Investment banking and high street current accounts are currently linked. If the investment arm of Lloyds TSB goes under, so do the high street branches. Which is why the government had to step in and save HBOS and Northern Rock.

Operating a shadow banking system so far as I know is illegal anyway. So the government wouldn't be protecting that. It'd be going after shadow bankers.

Letting the banks fail sounds good in theory. But as I said before there is currently nothing separating high street banking from investment banking. If one goes under so does the other.

The banking system is rotten to the core. It always has been. You only have to look at the interest rates on personal loans compared to the interest accrued against savings to figure that out. Replacing the old with the new won't be easy. Most of the wealth that exists in the world is just debt by another name. Changing the system could cause even more hardship than we're experiencing now.

So what sort of change would you recommend?

 

In Alberta, a conservative + province in Canada, there were banking problems: the banks in central Canada would not lend to Westerners :' P.

Solution? The provincial government created a bank, the Treasury Branch , and all of a sudden businesses and persons could borrow money. You also saw the rise of Caisse Populaires and Credit Unions which are generally owned by the people who deposit money (and have benefits of lower rates because of this).

Since we have already have paid out most of the costs of the banks why don't we employ someone , for a reasonable fee, to set up an arms length government sponsored bank and let all the people living off the corpse of RBS and other banks go down the tube. I still can't believe that they pay out such big bonuses to people who produce such poor results. I tend to agree with the chinese.. if someone is told that if they make judgements that are not in the interest of the shareholders (in the case of a government bank - the tax payers) then perhaps corporal punishment and the seizure of their assets will make them think twice before pilfering or just making silly deals.

Sounds a bit OTT I know but I for one am sick of people who risk nothing (I am a small business owner and know about risk) getting huge payouts because executives are happy to back each others calls for greater rewards. The risk of losing something (or being paddled on national TV;' ) might make them think a bit better.

Just random thoughts...

LFD

 

Complex subject and too busy to spell out right now, but I do have some raw ideas which I will put up later: However, basic solution involves removal of the elitist Tolley party and the dogma of the Laborious Auld Toadz - both are pretty much useless - but this does not mean the Lib-Dems - I have no idea about what they want.

Tolleys want a completely privatised system with zero/very-low cost Government - hence they cannot carry the mass of the populace with them - ever - they only represent the landed gentry and business interests.

The Laborious Auld Toadz want a committee and consultation for everything i.e. big Government and to spend their way further into the mess, hoping there is a way out.

Neither of these will work.

 

We already have credit unions and the UK government owns substantial shares in the Bank of England as well as the banks it bailed out. Those banks were ordered to lend to businesses. But still not enough money is getting through. I doubt the UK government are in a position to create yet another publicly owned bank.

What it does have at it's disposal are several financial institutions that routinely collect and hand out money all the time. The two that spring to mind to me are the Inland Revenue and The Student Loans Company.

The government could inject money back into the economy by giving tax rebates to small and medium sized companies that take on staff or otherwise make a move to expand their operations in a way that helps bolster the economy. The reason I say "tax rebate" rather than a tax break is because a rebate keeps the money flowing through the governments books while allowing it to be redistributed where it's beneficial. And it's the flow of money that the banks are stopping by not lending.

The Student Loans Company, in spite of what many students will undoubtedly think, very successfully loans out and collects millions of pounds every year. At a pinch it's remit could be extended to lending to small and medium sized businesses. Much of the infrastructure it would need is already in place and as a further bonus, SLC already reports to BIS. So there is clear direct accountability to government. Clearly some additional staff would be needed. However setting up a whole new bank takes more than hiring a few bodies to man the phones and assess application forms.

Part of the problem with the bonus culture at the banks is there is this false perception that many of these supposedly very talented people would move abroad if we killed off the bonus culture independently of the rest of the world. Personally I doubt that would happen. And indeed the banks are slowly beginning to get the message the bonus culture is not acceptable.

The other part of the problem is investment bankers consider their bonuses as part of their salaries they are entitled to. The bank offered them a contract which promised x,y and z. So naturally they expect those contracts to be honoured. Just as public sector workers expect the government to honour the pension agreements that were put in place by Labour. There are a lot of people fighting for their slice of pie with a lot of conflicting interests. Which is never going to be easy to untangle.

Sadly it's all but inevitable that the losers will be those people who are least represented. The corporate banks have lobbyists and lawyers fighting their corner. Public sector workers have the unions fighting their corner. The government has MPs fighting their corner. And then there's everybody else who don't really have anybody fighting their corner because the person you sent to parliament to represent you is part of the government machine. And in the British system MPs can be whipped into line or face sanctions from their respective parties.

So no. You don't employ anybody to do anything with respect to this problem. You pay the tax the government demands because that is the law. You pay the bank charges the bank demands for it's services because banks exist purely for profit. And without banking services it will become very difficult to exist in our society. Many employers will for example only pay wages into a bank account via the BACS system. They will not pay by cheque or cash in hand.

They have you over a barrel. Invest in some lubricant.