Saturday, September 27, 2008
You can't buck the market, oh no. You've got to let the market decide. For the last 30 years, this has been the mantra, first of Thatcher and her cronies and then of the bleeding Labour party. The City boys knew best - intervention would be foolish. And now all of these supposedly-unbuckable financial institutions are needing to be baled out by government money, both here and in the US. This whole situation is coming as cold comfort to those of us who maintained all along that the market couldn't be trusted to run a whelk stall, and that a balanced economy requires intervention and heavy regulation, but, hey, it's something to cling to. With any luck, it'll be the start of a new age of scepticism and questioning in politics, but chances are the big public will remain just as bovine as it ever has. I despair.
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3 comments:
I'm with you, Mr B. The company that owns me - a High Street institution no less - is about to perish as it changed its funding model to something called Asset Based Lending about 9 months ago, thus fucking itself more perfectly than John Holmes might have done were his cock constructed of 75 foot-long pipe cleaners.
I'm all for a dose of realism in the money markets and a timely readjustment of expectations - but there will be millions shot down by this malarkey. I'm going to refrain from laying the blame at the foot of any one administration as that would be a huge simplification of a complicated issue. But tell Sid.
Spot on ! Actually it's less about politics and more about financial types trying to make a quick buck. Any layman looking into the original cause of this credit crunch would never have invested in a scheme which sold mortgages to people who could really not afford them and secured the loan on the value of the house. It was doomed to failure. So why did they take the risk if not to get rich quick ?
What grates with me more is how the Government needs to bail out all these financial institutions because of their lack of foresight. One investor on TV the other night was quaking at the thought of all these mergers resulting in less banks to deal with meaning less competition in the market. Again from a laymans perspective, less banks = less competition = less risks = more stable market.
You never had the Government bailing out the miners/steelworkers did you ?
Don't get me started about competition. If unfettered competition is so good, why has multi-channel TV resulted in masses of drivel rather than excellence? A little competition is good for eradicating complacency, but it needs to be kept in check.
And the governments baling the banks out sets a dangerous precedent. It tells them that they can try anything they bloody well like, without any risk whatsoever. When we're out the other side of this, the same numpties who got us into this shit will be in charge of the financial institutions, claiming that they still know best without a trace of irony.
The world would be a better, happier, kinder place if everybody was happy with just enough. Instead, we're told to want more and more, without it being fully explained how we can afford it.
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