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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart
36804 Posts
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 Posted -
28/04/2011
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07:37
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Political comment is a high risk activity on the site these days so I thought I'd try again to give those who are interested in politics a safe haven!
Stanley Challenger Graham
Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk
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Bailey
New Member
14 Posts
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Posted - 25/07/2011 : 11:32
i dont know what to think anymore! didnt the IMF say that the condem cuts will be good/ok in the longrun? but then there was all this stuff here that I believe Cable said what you are saying Stanley about growth being impeded by cuts...
i am tempted to go more with the growth= not gonna happen w these cuts.
Edited by - Bailey on 26/07/2011 14:09:58
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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart
36804 Posts
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Posted - 26/07/2011 : 05:35
Tiz, there is little doubt that the cleanest way out of the mess is for Greece to withdraw from the Euro, default on all debts and take the consequences. They would have to start from year zero but would own their own country and any cuts they make would eventually benefit them and not the bankers sucking enormous interest payments out of them. The IMF is no help in this respect, they are essentially monetarist and a product of the banking system. Read Naomi Klein for examples of 'bail-outs' which benefited the banks and international vultures swooping to buy up assets cheaply. If you reckoned up the interest already payed I suspect that it would exceed the debt already.
Ossie must be doing some hard thinking looking for a way out. The prediction is that the last month's growth figures might even show a down turn. I'll bet someone in the Treasury is burning the midnight oil to try to find a way of massaging the stats!
Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, the NATO coalition desperately seeks an exit strategy from Libya. I D Smith our Foreign minister makes a speechin which he suggests that Gadafi could be allowed to stay under 'certain conditions'. That will be a hard one to fly past the rebels! Gung Ho hasn't worked, they need Plan 'B'.
Cameron will not be pleased by the C4 Dispatches programme last night on the NewsCorp affair. Well researched and convincing. What a mess!
US struggles to find a political formula to solve the enigma of the budget. A noted American economist was on World Service this morning and he said that regardless of the political shenanigans behind the 'crisis', the bald fact is that the US is 'fiscally reckless' and doesn't deserve their AAA credit rating. Looking at the basic figures he's right. If they were a commercial organisation they would be a junk investment. Think of the money China has invested in the US to prop them up. What happens if they withdraw?
Stanley Challenger Graham
Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk |
Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart
36804 Posts
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Posted - 26/07/2011 : 06:03
Funny how the question of whistleblowers in the NHS came up in Parliament yesterday ten days after Dr Phil Hammond did a major piece on the subject in Private Eye. Essential reading!
Stanley Challenger Graham
Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk |
Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart
36804 Posts
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Posted - 27/07/2011 : 06:43
So, the second quarter of 2011 is estimated at .2% growth. These figures are so inaccurate that the only safe course for Ossie is to think worst case and regard it as static or perhaps even falling slightly. So what does he do? He goes public saying this is good news as it is stable! Interesting suggestion that cutting the top rate of income tax could stimulate the economy.
The big problem is that when he says the strategy will work in the long run he is right but this takes no account of the damage done to the economy and society.Note that all the pundits agree on one thing, domestic spending is at the root of the problem. I know I keep banging on but this is over 80% of the economy and the cuts are having most effect on domestic disposable incomes, the driver of the economy. This is why the strategy is, and always has been, wrong and economically illiterate.
The big problem in political terms that the ConDem coalition has is that they are not going to get any good news before the next General Election campaign starts. This leaves aside the possibility that they may have got their savings figures wrong and any external shocks. There is no sign of any good news from the Global Economy. US is a basket case no matter what they do about extending the borrowing limit. The Euro is on a knife-edge, the problem of the Mediterranean economies hasn't gone away. Reforming the domestic planning laws, cutting red tape and pushing savings won't cut it. An economic U-Turn is at the moment unthinkable but pressure builds inside the Tories to be seen to be doing something. At the moment the perception is that Ossie is sitting on his hands waiting for something to happen. This may be the Real New Economy!
Stanley Challenger Graham
Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk |
Tardis
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Posted - 27/07/2011 : 14:39
All economists are "used to measuring the 'standard of living' by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is 'better off' than a man who consumes less".
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Bradders
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Posted - 27/07/2011 : 23:12
Watch out for Piers Morgan's past catching up with him.....re McCartney/Mills brake-up. Hacked tapes played out loud to a news-room , for fun....ALLEGEDLY.
BRADDERS BLUESINGER |
Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart
36804 Posts
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Posted - 28/07/2011 : 05:23
That wouldn't surprise me Brad, never did like the bloke.
Michael, economists can only measure on parameters that can be quantified like consumption and output. Standard of living and quality of life are too amorphous. Bit like trying to measure how 'happy' we are, whatever that means.
Stock markets are getting twitchy about the continuing stalemate in Washington over the raising of the debt limit. It's a game of chicken and all about politics not economics. The economic reality is that extending the limit on the credit card (Which is what it is all about) does nothing about either the debt or the structural flaws. They have to spend less and save more, simple as that and the longer this is not addressed, the bigger the crash will be when it inevitably comes. The US is an economic basket case in hock mainly to the Chinese. Meanwhile, millions of old and poor people worry about what happens to their world on August 2. A disgrace.
Notice how quiet the LibDems are. I get the feeling they are keeping at arm's length while they wait for the present problems to pan out. Cameron still under pressure about NewsCorp and economic strategy faltering while cuts start to come in. I predict they will become an internal opposition party inside the coalition as they try to distance themselves from the gathering storm.
Stanley Challenger Graham
Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk |
Tardis
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Posted - 28/07/2011 : 15:40
Maybe, Stanley, the economists are measuring the wrong items.
even this from Douglas Adams way back at the start of HHGTTG
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this, at a distance of roughly ninety million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet, whose ape descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has, or had, a problem, which was this. Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small, green pieces of paper, which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn't the small, green pieces of paper which were unhappy. And so the problem remained, and lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.
So maybe the things we measure and consume aren't unhappy either
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Tardis
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Posted - 28/07/2011 : 15:43
One benefit of the chaos in America over financing/or George Osbourne even is that currently 10 year government gilts are at their lowest interest rate for some time (pre 2007), which obviously means that the debt is growing at a little slower rate.
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Tizer
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Posted - 28/07/2011 : 17:02
quote:
Stanley wrote:
Stock markets are getting twitchy about the continuing stalemate in Washington over the raising of the debt limit. It's a game of chicken and all about politics not economics. The economic reality is that extending the limit on the credit card (Which is what it is all about) does nothing about either the debt or the structural flaws. They have to spend less and save more, simple as that and the longer this is not addressed, the bigger the crash will be when it inevitably comes.For a minute there Stanley I thought you'd joined what Vince Cable calls the Right Wing nutters in the Tea Party!
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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart
36804 Posts
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Posted - 29/07/2011 : 04:58
No way Tiz. Same probem here and in Europe but we have the added problem in UK that the ConDem government have moved too fast and we have stagflation. You'll hear more of that word in the next six months. The worst of all economic worlds and the poorest pay the piper..
Michael, Douglas was usually pretty near the trurh but not the solution. See his example of the telephone sanitizers and advertising people using leaves for currency and finding in autumn that they had too much, direct comparison with 'quantitive easing' or more correctly covert devaluation.
So NoW gave Sarah Payne a phone and then hacked it. Rebekah's 'best friend' . With friends like that who needs enemies?
Stanley Challenger Graham
Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk |
Tardis
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Posted - 29/07/2011 : 10:37
Stanley, you ignore the factor of money:
Why you need it. Even in the telephone example above you approach the problem from the wrong end. The example set is that you only need money if you don't actually produce anything and the telephone sanitisers and the rest of the "fleet" population are examples of non-producers. Adams does add the caveat of the planet dying from a disease contrcated from a dirty telephone. Your choice of Quantitive Easing as an equal is very wide of the mark, because currencies have to based on an ability to repay (money is only a cipher)
So in Economic Geography terms you have; primary producers, secondary producers and the tertiary sector. These can be obviously endlessly subdivided
But I will take your work as an example. If you produce a piece of kit, you could barter it for food, based upon the time and knowledge that it took you to produce at what you thought was a reasonable rate. Where is the need for money in the transaction? Plus if you do this type of transaction where is the benefit in tax to the rest of the economy for the public sector?
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Invernahaille
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Posted - 29/07/2011 : 13:30
Service Industry. The death knoll for Britains once proud Industrial Output.
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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart
36804 Posts
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Posted - 30/07/2011 : 06:59
Michael, too many leaves is exactl;y the same as too many banknotes no matter where they come from. Don't tell me I am ignoring money.
The new economy Robert, Thatcher and the Mad Monk thought industry was superfluous and dirty, leave it to the Cinese while we kept our hands clean in the City!.
Stanley Challenger Graham
Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk |
Tardis
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Posted - 30/07/2011 : 10:44
Stanley: I have no reason to pick an argument but in the example quoted it wouldn't matter how many "leaves" were in circulation, the population of the ark fleet did not actually make anything, so therefore no one was actually adding any value, and it is very difficult to "generate" revenue when you do not actually have any primary or secondary goods to actually market. Remember that the ark fleet hadn't even got as far as growing their own food...as a small deciduous forest was the going rate for a ship's biscuit.
Quantitative easing is about monetary liquidity, and it would take up much more than a little posting to go into all the relevant details.
One of the consequences of QE is a fall in the value of a countries currency with regard to others, but it does not impact on the price of products actually produced in the country where QE occured. It will make imported goods more expensive and therefore should re-balance demand for more goods made in the country. It will make exported goods look cheaper to other countries (although they will still be the same price as before because no one has cut wages, taxes, etc). Of course if a company produces goods from imported items then prices will be affected (energy, steel, coal, etc)
Money is a cipher, not an actual item. It is a promisary note and nothing more. It is gathered from one project and used to buy goods from another. You can not consume if nothing is being made.
The issue about Economic competitiveness is alive and well, but I think that you would agree that some compromises have been made because otherwise people would be flocking to India and China to have their children educated because it is "cheaper" there. Taking the QE example above, maybe if the country had accepted a lower proportion of imported goods by currency devaluation, our own industries would have been much better, but I remember the quality of British Leyland that rotted on the drive and a ship building industry that refused to embrace welding rather than rivetting because of the "jobs" implications rather than the speed of the job.
The question of banking, and internationality is far more diverse than a simple statement and fails to comprehend exactly what they accomplish. We might all say that they are expensive, but in an economic environment competition should win out. This country has the least competition, and it was Blair/Brown and Balls that let the banks "go" and failed to regulate them with a triumvirate that was intended to be divisive rather than complimentary.
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POLITICS CORNER
