December saw the final stage in the passage of the Financial Services Bill through the HOL. The behaviour of certain people in the City of London has clearly been unacceptable but there is no doubt that a buoyant financial services sector contributes greatly to the country’s general prosperity. There is a real danger that the new regulatory bodies will want to “have a go” at firms to show that they are acting tough – one regulator has said publicly that he intends to shoot first and ask questions afterwards.
Proper regulation of financial services is essential but we need an environment that encourages innovation, does not discriminate against smaller firms and avoids a “one size fits all” approach.
I have been trying to persuade the Government that the principles that a regulator should follow (as defined in the Bill) should not just be “proportionate” but also should be “fair and reasonable”. Despite two or three attempts my words have fallen on deaf ears at the Treasury and the Bill remains unamended. I remain nervous about the long term effect for the UK in general and financial services in particular.
The idea that the recession would be over in a couple of years, after the longest period of expansion in living memory, 13 years up to 2009, has been footling. To most people it only observable in the price of houses and what they have to repay in mortage interest and capital.
The likelihood of a very long recession indeed is high, possibly not quite as long as the 13 years of expansion, but 2019-2020 are certainly years to aim for.
Meanwhile the pace of food retail price inflation, and other consumer products, does not cease to amaze me.
The 1% cap on benefits seems therefore to be rather mean, reducing the benefit of the poor
to pay the interest of those who invested in bricks and mortar at a bad time, but who after 2020 will begin to roll in it. Taxing the poor now to pay for middle class riches later.
[Not forgetting that a certain number of the mortgagees themselves claim benefits; they at least are paying now for their own wealth later if they are wise enough to hang on to their assets when a recovery does eventually occur.]
Capitalism, finance and inflation presents all of us with three or four “gambling” opportunities during our lives, and if we opt for capitalism, the big gamble, at the right time, we can make ourselves rich; if not, we become tied to a treadmill of misfortune.
Previous gamble opportunities in my life time have been roughly 7 years duration 7up/7down. This one 13up/ and so far 2-3 down.
Banking crisis take 8 years on average to get back to where you started. That’s for single country banking crisis
This one is going to take longer.
The real problem remains.
5,010 bn plus hidden off the books. They’ve spent people’s pensions contribtuions, and now like any Ponzi fraud, the money is due, and they can’t pay.
Hence all the stuff at the moment.
No winter fuel for prudent savers, lets just give it to the spenders.
No state pension for the prudent, because we’ve labelled it welfare.
Lets rip off the poor by raising the retirement age. They die young, so if we raise it just the rich will benefit.
Lets change the law, because if we don’t it will be fraud.
Ever notice how Peers can’t/won’t discuss the debts?
Your claim that
“there is no doubt that a buoyant financial services sector contributes greatly to the country’s general prosperity”
is to be very seriously challenged, Lord Hodgson.
I will try to be brief:
1. A “country’s” prosperity depends primarily upon its own (indigenous)
Lifesupports, self-sufficiencies, sustainworthinesses, and protections thereof.
2. That this Earth can only support at the most 3 billion human-beings
but is already being disrupted and destroyed by a human-civilisational economics and financial-system totalling already 7 (seven) billion people ‘needing’ two(2) Earthsworth of renewable and non-renewable resources,
and has been planned to increase that destructivity to three(3) Earthsworth by 2050, when the world population will have further blown-out to 11 billion;
in which “this country” (Britain) is a fully complicit “stakeholder”;
and our descendants in the USA find it so financially-easy to “price” their housing and homes as if they were many times their “real and real-life” value;
these two evidently de-facto-iatrogenia-&-malfeasance factors
coupled with the literally insane “need”
of the “best bankers” to be paid as if they were each hundreds of human-beings,
not just one-wholesome-human-being, equal in food, clothing and shelter need with each of the 7 billion other individual-&-“private” human-beings,
this not only sounds warning-bells & sirens, and flashes near-blinding red “stop” lights
to the struggling minds of “this country’s” strugglingly sane and sustainworthy “lower” classes,
it “Stinks”; and stinks most evil;
not sweet like a farmyard
nor ‘strong’ like a cess-pool,
but worse
worse than “Great” Britain’s ‘glorious’ battlefields
days and weeks after our very best fathers, brothers and sons
had been mowed down by delib erately “financed” mass-murder machinery,
mangled worse than weeds down into poisonous and evil mud
to agonise, pray, drown, and putrify , feeding foreign disease-carrying fly-pests and parasites;
(noble lord, that the Royal Bank rewards its chief financial-expert with 400 human-livings, per year, for causing and backing such Evil, is surely to God a matter far more serious than to be called “possibly questionable and unacceptable behaviour of ‘certain people in the City-of-London’”).