Becomes pointless when no side will budge nor can be convinced, and there is nothing to gain or lose by holding a position. Then it is pointless. And agree, much rather be riding my bike
This is precisely what was voted on by the people in Switzerland yesterday. Not just bankers' pay. Everyone's. So now it will become law. And goodbye golden hellos and golden parachutes. They will both be illegal. The vote was a popular initiative, carried at about 70%. People have had enough of being ripped off by an oligarchy.
Hey Pete, what happened - did someone richer than you run off with your girlfriend or something? The main reason we are finished as a business/financial power is because too many people sponge, and too many people see success as a dirty word. Hope you aren't one of the latter.
No, the main reason for our economic troubles is because too many people are obscenely greedy, selfish, dishonest fraudsters, who have no conception of ethics and who use their positions at the top of financial institutions to sponge. Hope you aren't one of them.
Whoah! That's a good one. I'd be really interested to hear your evidence for that. So let me get this right: Britain's falling economic power = a sponging populace + anti-success sentiment. What we need now is a little evidence, or something that sounds a little like evidence (or is at least plausible). That means you aren't allowed to quote from The Daily Mail.
Everyone slags off the bankers, but what about the previous administration that maxed out the credit card and everyone now, and for future generations will have to pay off the balance. If the markets hadn't collapsed then would the financial state of the country been exposed or would we still be living in ignorant bliss? Bankers/ government they're both complicit in this mess.
Yes it's not fair to say it's the MAIN reason, you are both right. I take that back. But the hostility financial firms, and wealthy people experience in the UK from our 'plebiscite' (as Pete said), leads to populist legislation, political volatility and does do some damage. We should be worried about Europe - we are still the 7th largest country in the world by GDP (I think), and our fading role as a financial centre is a large contributor to that GDP; European legislation reducing the continents' competitiveness globally in markets will hit our country much worse than other EU members. Internationally our reputation HAS taken a serious blow, firstly because we thought we were smart enough to have all this gearing when we weren't (that's citizens, corporates, everyone), secondly because the effects of a global financial crisis, with us as a developed economy and a global financial centre, are amplified (not so many self-cert 110% mortgages in the developing world). Lastly and crucially for one of the points you didn't like, international investment in the UK will decline if we are seen to be volatile and populist in our legislation - business likes predictability and stability. If we start penalising high earners and corporates, as we are now doing (rightly or wrongly), then high earners and corporates globally will see us as a less attractive option than before. Does that make sense? New york might not have our time zone, but they do have a much better environment to work and to run your own business (European entrepreneurs: Les misérables | The Economist this is a good article on why Europe fails all day long at producing exciting new businesses/scaling them). Our welfare/social spend is 21% of GDP, proportionately very high even for the developed world. I am glad the incumbents are trying to slash this, as people who aren't on benefits are already struggling enough and as i'm sure you both understand, every person receiving welfare is an additional cost to the taxpayer. If you can't see why cutting welfare and returning people to work, whether they want to or not, is a good thing.. then we shouldn't continue any conversation until you've read a bit more -> (Basic Maths For Dummies Cheat Sheet (UK Edition) - For Dummies). By the way Pete, I used to run a small investment firm. But you will be pleased to hear i've repented by since setting up a 'real' company that employs quite a few people, creating jobs and helping the local economy here. So in a few years I will probably have atoned for the fact that I used to buy shares in large public companies to make (shocking, here it comes), a profit. And 'gliddofgood', no i'm sorry I don't read the mail, I read the telegraph, guardian, times, and NY times every morning. My mum does read the mail, and so yes she is terrified of Romanians and house prices all the time.
@Tedward Well, that is an interesting post, and I read the article and the Dummies page. I admit to not knowing what tessellation was. But you make two references to populist legislation and political volatility in the UK, and I can't really see what you mean. Political volatility? Since the Thatcher era, politics has pretty much been the same. New Labour was just Conservatism with a different label and a couple of different seasonings. LibDemism has been shown to be just more of the same. There is no political volatility in the UK. On the contrary, there is complete political stasis and it doesn't look like going away anytime soon. In fact the electorate is getting so fed up the same old dish that they are voting in smaller and smaller numbers. And what of populist legislation? The only thing I can see that falls into that category is the ban on fox-hunting (when if they'd wanted to do something useful for animal welfare, they could have done something about importing European pork). Are you referring to the cap on bankers' bonuses - opposed by the UK, or the calls for multinationals to pay their fair share of corporation tax? What laws recently introduced, as a result of populist sentiment don't you like and doesn't business like? More to the point is to address the antipathy banks have to risk any money on start-ups and, it is true, the non-fertile ground for start-ups in Europe. One thing the Economist doesn't mention though: in the US, because of the size of its market and the homogeneity of its language, you can have an idea, see that it works and quickly scale it up. That is far harder in Europe and you'd quickly run into language difficulties and different ways of doing things in different countries. But I do think it is undeniable that Britain especially, is failing its entrepreneurs. I say this because the best university education in Britain is so good that you've got a lot of very well-educated and talented people who somehow fail to get new businesses moving. It's hard to think that it's all their fault. I also don't buy the idea that unemployed people don't want to work. They might not be queuing up to pick winter cabbages in Leicestershire for peanuts, but when you've been studying for the last few years, that isn't so surprising. I think that people really want to work, but they do want to earn enough to have some little fun in their lives, or at least live in a place of their own. But the working class is stigmatised in the UK in the way that it isn't here in Switzerland. This is one of the biggest differences in this country. People who make things, or do things are highly respected. Most will have served apprenticeships, so really do know what they are doing, and by and large the Swiss work ethic for a job well-done means that people want to provide a top quality product or service and are respected for doing so. "Can't be arsed" doesn't wash very well here. And I don't think there is an anti-success sentiment in Britain either. But people are getting annoyed with society looking much like the expanding universe: people are moving away from each other in wealth at an increasing velocity. The poor are getting poorer, the rich richer, and that can't be right. Or it can only be right if the poor increasingly deserve to be poor, and the rich increasingly deserve to be richer. How does that work?
Wow - that's pretty wide of the mark Pete. If we add a few racial stereotypes to that sentence we would be in 1930's Germany! There have always been a small number of greedy people, and there always will be. It's a bell-curve distribution in every respect. There are a small number of pyschopaths too, and a small number of honest politicians. You can't extrapolate that to apply to the whole of any given society! The main reason we are in these "economic troubles" is since the second world war, the debt levels which were borrowed have never been paid down, but rather, have expanded beyond all peacetime precedents - to expand the living standards of the baby boomer generation - well beyond their economic output. They have been borrowing from their children as social cohesion was given a new lease of life in a post WWII environment, where people had witnessed and endured such human atrocity and lack of solidarity. Whilst admirable, the long term effects have been significant beyond what was ever imagined. The micro-economic market movements on top of this macro trend have been just blips. The larger issue is that the overborrowing has reached a structural and unprecedented peacetime level - and this has finally tipped. The catalyst was always going to come - that it was sub-prime mortgages is irrelevant. Today's borrowers (sorry - voters!) have pledged an unprecedented level of taxation rises and spending cuts on their children to fund the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed. This generation have seen a wealth effect increase far beyond the GDP growth through the same period, funded by monetary expansion. The role of the state has steadily increased in every walk of life since WWII. And they have bequeathed this upon their children, who did not get to vote for this. We are in a "stationary state" with a Keynesian liquidity trap. Markets in these circumstances do not respond to interest rates, and we are wasting our time having a facile debate about austerity versus spending. Neither are right. We are experiencing structural economic decline in Western Europe and the US, and a huge debt overhang without an inflation to deflate the real value of the debt. We have lame politicians who are only interested in media-ready one liners without substance - and they have no interest or intention of educating the public about the issues, or how we might address them. And people should wake up and acknowledge that the European debate is exclusively about political union to stabilise a continent post WWI and WWII, which is admirable - but which is not routed in economic macro-management. And it has no political mandate so it lacks popular legitimacy. Which is why it is run by autocrats......but the idea that Europe is homogeneous is a joke...... What we actually need is some strong government. We won't get it any time soon. We probably need to be in this mess long enough that a demand for new politics will emerge, due to the abject failure of the existing political lightweights. At which time, following all other lame attempts, hopefully some genuine leadership will emerge. Historically though, imbalances of this magnitude were settled through political instability and war....... worth remembering.
I'm going to do lots of research on the internetwebthingy, and come back with a post that will change the world. On the other hand, I can't be arsed, so I am going for a dump, then retiring to slumberland. Nighty, night! PS There is sensible fiscal governance out there if folks look beyond their own selfish motives.
3 points, ChamMTB (is that Motor Torpedo Boat © Dover Patrol?) 1. People have voted for the economics of the country. They get a chance to vote every 5 years. If since WWII they didn't like the way things were going, they could have voted otherwise. New parties could have emerged in 65 years. 2. Europe may be run by autocrats, but behind the scenes, the lobbying by corporate interests is massive, as a programme I saw on Arte recently demonstrated. 3. Didn't the table posted earlier (was probably the Fuel Tax thread) point out that levels of taxation as a % of GDP has in fact been remarkably stable for decades? Finally, John Ronson's The Psychopath Test tended to point out that psychopaths are a lot more prevalent than you'd think, and that plenty of them are in the upper-echelons of management. It's just that they wield metaphorical axes.
sorry ET, even though the post was minutes ago, I have no idea wtf I was on about! Off to bed now ....
Agreed, but I don't see the current lot making any significant dent in the deficit and the debt continues to rise much as before.
