| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Who will win the leaders debate tonight (based on the economy) | |
| Posted by: | William Beausire | |
| Date/Time: | 29/04/10 20:58:00 |
| Hi Mike. Why on earth do you think I'll be voting for George Osborne as Chancellor? Had you read the thread on which you are commenting you would have seen that my opening comment is "George Osborne is so useless that Brown thinks he is on firm ground on the economy." That does not, to me, imply an intention to vote for George Osborne as Chancellor. Not that one has the chance to vote for anyone as Chancellor, of course. You may of course be unable to grasp that. As to the question of the world recession...the UK situation is not helped by the fact that the recession was widespread in the West. However, the fact that other countries made the same mistakes as us does not mean that we didn't make mistakes - we just made the same mistakes as many other countries, only more so. That is why we were disproportionately badly affected. Some countries, such as Canada, ensured that their banks had adequate capital to support their lending. We could have done that, if we had had a competent Chanceller in the preceding years. Other countries were not as a)stupid and b)arrogant as Brown in thinking that they had abolished boom 'n' bust, and put aside some money in the good years to help them through the bad years. We could have done that too. But we didn't. The impact on the UK from recession overseas is pretty moderate anyway. Because we can let the GBP sink we can boost exports. Our main problem is domestic - people and businesses borrowed a load of money they couldn't afford to pay back, encouraged by inappropriately low rates for an inappropriatley long time. When lots of people can't pay the banks back, and the banks are inadequately capitalised, they go boobies up. Northern Rock went bust because they lent too much money to people who couldn't pay it back, not because of any global recession. Likewise HBOS. RBS is a bit different. But the main reason for the depth and length of the UK's recession is banks stopoong lending as they try to rebuild balance sheets. This puts the torch 'n' pitchfork tendency in the dumb position of blaming the banks for the recession because they lent too much, and then blaming them for the slow recovery for not lending enough. The basic point, however, is that for the main UK casualties the problems were entirely domestic and entirely of their own making and could have been prevented by competent regulation, as they were elsewhere. Because you seem to be trying to blame the UK recession on the world recession, I am guessing that you favour a vote for the man who presided over the UK recession. I respectfully suggest that that would be a mistake of cosmic proportions. |