economic situation is dire

[snowychap]

To answer this and Snowy, simply the over riding ethos of the city was less and less regulations, things were fine, things appeared under control so all governments did it, us and the US to greater extent

But my point wasn't about whether or not 'the city' wanted less regulation as that is pretty much a given - like asking Butch and Sundance if they would prefer fewer marshalls.

It was whether the government's acceptance of looser regulation was something which they actually wanted (i.e. the Tory position) or something which they thought they had to allow because they were powerless to do otherwise (which was, I think, the point that you had made).

[ianrobo1]

powerless defintely, if they had not done this the city would have reacted badly business would have gone to other stock markets and the Tories would have screamed about it

there was no real choice if you accept the free market

[snowychap]

powerless defintely, if they had not done this the city would have reacted badly business would have gone to other stock markets and the Tories would have screamed about it

there was no real choice if you accept the free market

How does your last sentence square up with your first one?

[ianrobo1]

simple in a free market trade will always go to the palce where there is the greatest freedom/profit

hence the leakage of cheap jobs to china for profit and free labour laws ...

[snowychap]

I meant how does the 'if you accept a free market' square up with 'powerless definitely' (which was not about actually being powerless but about wanting something different and feeling powerless).

[ianrobo1]

a true free market means no regulations doesn't it ?

all parties have signed up to it

[snowychap]

All parties have signed up to zero regulation? :shock:

I think they ought to have told the public.

[ianrobo1]

not zero but less and less certainly for the city remebering it accounts for some 10% of GDP

[leviramsey]

Playboy's Super Bowl party is the latest casualty

A case in point is Playboy, whose Bunny-filled blowout is usually the signature event of Super Bowl week. Last year in Arizona, Hugh Hefner hosted 2,500 people in a 52,000-sq.-ft. pavilion for his party, and tickets were going for $3,000 in the secondary market. This year, with Playboy's stock down more than 70%, Hef has canceled its Super Saturday Night party. Instead, the company is sponsoring a DirectTV event; four Playmates will be on hand, compared with the 22 who showed up at last year's Playboy bash.

[Gringo]

Short and shallow

we benefit from a position which is a better position than many of the other major economies. We've got lower national debt

Britain is best placed to weather the global crisis

Britain to suffer worst recession of any advanced nation, says IMF

The economy will shrink by 2.8 per cent this year, with Britain faring significantly worse than the United States, Western Europe or Japan due to its reliance on the financial sector, the International Monetary Fund said.

Its forecast was almost double its previous prediction for the severity of the UK recession and prompted leading experts to warn British families were facing an "extremely painful" period, with people getting poorer in the next 12 months.

....

The IMF's stark forecast came on another day of dire economic news:

:: The Institute of Fiscal Studies warned that British taxpayers were facing a "double whammy" of £20 billion tax rises and public spending cuts a year to get the country's finances back on track - equivalent to £800 per household per year, or a 4p rise in income tax;

:: Oxford Economics said that Gordon Brown's plan to fund short-term economic giveaways with long-term tax cuts would hold back growth and cost thousands of jobs.

....

Its forecasts for the UK were drawn up after Mr Brown launched his £20 billion "fiscal stimulus" package of tax cuts and increased public spending.

At the time, the Treasury claimed those measures would mean that the UK economy would start to grow again in the second half of 2009.

Mr Brown has since repeatedly refused to say if he stands by that forecast, which is widely expected to be abandoned in the Budget later this year.

...

"You replied: 'Yes.' Now we know the economy shrank by 1.5 per cent in the last quarter alone will you finally admit, even on your own definition, something that every economist, business, family in the country knows to be true - you didn't abolish boom and bust."

But Mr Brown said: "This is a recession facing every country and continent in the world. Everybody except the Conservative Party agrees it is not a unique UK phenomenon. This is something that has got to be dealt with internationally.

"You mentioned the IFS. They also said: 'In current circumstances the cost of doing nothing is larger than the cost of acting.' That is the rebuttal to the Conservative policy of doing nothing."

20 years to pay back debt

....

The burden of UK government debt will remain above pre-crisis levels for 20 years, says the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), a think tank.

....

Even if everything goes according to plan, the IFS points out that it will be "the early 2030s before debt returns below the ceiling of 40% of national income" that Gordon Brown set as one of his key fiscal rules in 1997.

[snowychap]

France out for the day

A one-day strike by public and private sector workers is under way in France, with disruption to transport, hospital and education services expected.

Hundreds of thousands of workers are demanding more government action to protect jobs and wages.

Three-quarters of people and all the main trade unions are backing what the press are calling "Black Thursday", correspondents say.

Air France flights will be cancelled and train services are being disrupted.

The protesters are demonstrating against the worsening economic climate in France and at what they believe to be the government's poor handling of the crisis.

Early reports said that regional trains and those in and out of Paris were being affected. Only 35% of trains were running in several regions, operator SNCF said.

Hit hard

Last summer, President Nicolas Sarkozy boasted that these days when there is a strike in France, nobody notices, says the BBC's Emma-Jane Kirby in Paris.

But this time, our correspondent adds, the strike will hit hard.

Schools and post offices will be shut and courts, hospitals and power companies will also be affected.

Many people are angry French banks were given a multi-billion euro bail out while floundering industries and businesses were offered far less help.

...more on link

Meanwhile, back at home, house prices 'continue to slide'.

The slump in house prices continued in January with prices falling by 1.3%, according to the Nationwide, the UK's largest building society.

The mortgage lender said the rate of price falls had eased slightly when compared with December's 2.5% slide.

But the fall took the annual rate of decline in house prices to 16.6%, from a 15.9% in December.

Amid rising unemployment, job security worries were likely to be putting people off buying a new home, it said.

The average house now costs £150,501, down from £153,048 a month ago and £35,543 below the peak of October 2007.

...more on link

[snowychap]

But hey, it's not all gloom for some:

Shell racks up record profit at £60m a day

Shell posted one of the biggest profits in history for a British company, revealing today that it made $31.4 billion (£22 billion) in 2008, up by 14 per cent on 2007.

The record profits — equivalent to £60 million a day — came as the oil giant admitted that it was being hit by the plunging crude oil price and weakening demand for oil and gas.

Profits in the fourth quarter of 2008 fell by 28 per cent to $4.8 billion, which was below City forecasts.

Although critics of oil companies, which have accused them of making windfall profits at the expense of motorists, are expected to seize on the record profit figure, City analysts are more concerned about the speed of deterioration in their finances since the oil price peaked last summer.

...more on link

[tonyh29]

Measures to restore bank lending during the recession have so far had little effect, a group of MPs have said.

The Commons Treasury Committee questioned whether the Government's £20bn stimulus package - including the VAT cut - would revive the economy.

The committee also warned there is a risk that Britain could fall into a "self-reinforcing deflationary cycle".

They described the measures from Chancellor Alistair Darling's November Pre-Budget Report (PBR) as "piecemeal".

And the MPs said the shortage of bank credit was "the single most critical problem" currently facing the economy.

The Treasury were called on to establish what it would do should printing more money become necessary to revive economic activity.

Overall, the committee warned that the economic outlook was "highly uncertain".

[VillaGoMarching]

Zavvi have just made another bunch of people redundent. I'm one of them.

Zavvi Merry Hill is gone.

[tonyh29]

A one-day strike by public and private sector workers is under way in France

The cheese eating surrender monkeys on Strike ... now there is something you don't usually see :shock:

[leviramsey]

What stimulus advocates learned from Iraq

When Washington makes a big decision—to pass the PATRIOT Act, to invade Iraq, to bail out Wall Street, to spend hundreds of billions "stimulating" the economy—the most important stage of the debate isn't the final agreement on what to do. That's just a bunch of details about portions and timing. The key stage comes in the initial rounds, when the acceptable radius of disagreement is established. Your sharpest critics are often your most radical critics, so it's important that their arguments be confined to the foreign press, the blogosphere, and other backwaters.

Once those boundaries are ratified, you must police them without pity. This is harder than it sounds. If you argue with those outsiders, you've made them a part of the debate. But you can't shut them up either. The goal then is to persuade everyone else that the dissidents simply don't deserve attention: that they're extremists, partisan flacks, or just not "serious." In 2003, "serious" people were willing to debate the evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but they considered it settled that such weapons were reason enough to invade his country. In 2009, "serious" people will debate the best ways to stimulate a slumping economy, but the arguments against a so-called stimulus itself are beyond the pale.

Not everyone will respect the borders you've established. As it became more and more obvious that the Iraq war was a bad idea, for example, critics outside the serious zone started mocking the insiders' pretentions; the term Very Serious Person became an in-joke on antiwar blogs. The left-wing pundit Matthew Yglesias was especially fond of the phrase, particularly when criticizing liberal hawks. But such mockery doesn't make the tactic any less attractive. When House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) opposed the use of stimulus money to keep state budgets in the black, it was Yglesias who declared that Boehner wasn't part of "the serious-people universe." I don't think he was being ironic.

In an even more telling moment this month, the prominent Berkeley economist Brad DeLong blogged a list of economists making, for the most part, normal free-market objections to stimulus spending: that "Congress typically spends according to its political priorities, not economic priorities," that the government "can only shift jobs from one part of the economy to the other," that "the stimulus plan will most probably turn quickly into pork spending," that Obama should "allow the marketplace to correct the errors made by the last 8 years of misguided intervention." Then DeLong informally anathematized everyone on his list, writing them off as "ethics-free Republican hacks." Setting aside questions of ethics and hackery, several of the economists he accused aren't even Republicans. But it's easier to dismiss someone when you've reduced his arguments to a matter of partisan loyalty. That's another trick you may remember from Iraq. "They're not anti-Keynesian—they're just on the other side."

On one level, the stimulus crowd hasn't been as successful as the GOP was during Bush's first term: The Democratic leadership cravenly fell in behind the PATRIOT Act and the Iraq war, but every Republican in the House voted against the Democrats' bill yesterday. On another level, the Democrats don't need to be as successful as the GOP. The bill passed the House without the Republicans' help, and it will probably pass the Senate. And in the meantime, the Dems defined the debate, excluding alternative perspectives almost as effectively as the Bushians did.

Do you doubt that? Consider the following argument:

The recession is a necessary correction. It is forcing ill-conceived and poorly run companies to collapse or restructure, and it is compelling consumers to save again. Protecting those overgrown institutions and encouraging more unsustainable consumption will only delay doomsday and make it worse. It's better to endure some pain now than to endure even more pain tomorrow.

There's two things you should notice about that counternarrative. The first is that it sounds pretty radical. The second is that it isn't as radical as it sounds. It doesn't require you be a thoroughgoing libertarian opposed to all intervention in the economy. An ordinary liberal Democrat could accept it, arguing for federal efforts to ease individual pain—unemployment insurance, retraining subsidies, even direct income grants—while refusing to shore up failing institutions. You might think that would be a common position on the left: help for the dispossessed, not one dime for corporations.

But as far as Washington is concerned, it's invisible. The only Democratic legislators who broke with the bill were conservatives. Meanwhile, many Republicans have accepted the premises behind a Keynesian stimulus effort; they're just debating scale, means, and methods. Alternative ideas are out there, but Washington doesn't take them seriously.

In other words, the Dems have learned a lot from the administration they deposed. As the St. Lawrence University economist Steve Horwitz wrote this week, "Accusing your opponents of being 'ethics-free Republican hacks'...means you don't have to argue for the merits of the individual pieces, just scare the public and demonize the opposition. Of course, that's exactly what these same folks complained about after 9/11. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss indeed."

[ianrobo1]

The recession is a necessary correction. It is forcing ill-conceived and poorly run companies to collapse or restructure, and it is compelling consumers to save again. Protecting those overgrown institutions and encouraging more unsustainable consumption will only delay doomsday and make it worse. It's better to endure some pain now than to endure even more pain tomorrow.

this guy would not be a right winger would he

typical right wing response in a recession

do **** all

never mind it is right wing free market deregulated markets that caused this

'price worth paying' © Norman Lamont

what they never say is the impact of BofA, Citibank, RBS, HBOS, and many others failing would have had, Lehman alone caused massive provblems, multiply that 10 fold and we are looking at omething that would destroy all soceities

this situation has never been seen before i all our lifetimes and times have changed since 1929, this is a new situation and laissez faire or intervention will have it's negatives and positives but to seriously suggest governements do either nothing or relatively little is madness

what we see now is small beer to the recessions in our lifetimes

[thetrees]

The recession is a necessary correction. It is forcing ill-conceived and poorly run companies to collapse or restructure, and it is compelling consumers to save again. Protecting those overgrown institutions and encouraging more unsustainable consumption will only delay doomsday and make it worse. It's better to endure some pain now than to endure even more pain tomorrow.

this guy would not be a right winger would he

typical right wing response in a recession

do **** all

never mind it is right wing free market deregulated markets that caused this

'price worth paying' © Norman Lamont

what they never say is the impact of BofA, Citibank, RBS, HBOS, and many others failing would have had, Lehman alone caused massive provblems, multiply that 10 fold and we are looking at omething that would destroy all soceities

this situation has never been seen before i all our lifetimes and times have changed since 1929, this is a new situation and laissez faire or intervention will have it's negatives and positives but to seriously suggest governements do either nothing or relatively little is madness

what we see now is small beer to the recessions in our lifetimes

I thought it was getting boring :?

[ianrobo1]

is this not an economic debate ?

if you don;t like it either reply and we debate or to put it simply get out of the thread

[thetrees]

is this not an economic debate ?

if you don;t like it either reply and we debate or to put it simply get out of the thread

But it's boring Ian.

I blame your socialist government of the last 11 years, and you just claim it as a global problem caused by right wing, free market thinking.

You don't seem to think that the socialist government are in any way to blame, although you no doubt thought they were wonderful during the 'no more boom and bust years'

Sure, my input to such debates and stance on this government can be seen as boring, just as your input and desire to blame anybody but the socialist government can be seen as just as boring.

I guess you just outbore me by about 20 to 1