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LadyEllen -> RE: Benefit scroungers ? (7/1/2010 9:08:01 AM)
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Its a global economy Kevin. The job of the investment banker is to produce the best returns for his clients. If its apparent that he can get the best returns from gambling on currency, commodities or investing in the Far East, he will do it and if he doesnt he will be fired. He is paid a fortune because he makes fortunes for his clients. If he fails to produce he will be fired, if he fails to keep up with his colleagues he will be fired.
The problem we had, and the problem we now all find ourselves in, (and that includes me too), is that Mr Investment Banker lost his bet. He didnt actually do anything wrong except to fail to understand his product and his market, and this because no one wanted to understand and no one wanted to hear that the Emperor had no clothes. We can be rightfully angry at this failure - it is incompetence of the worst kind, made all the more unforgivable because of the supposed professional status Mr Banker professes.
But our anger is also rightfully directed at those whose failed economic policies, reliance on Mr Banker, enabled the situation to come about as an inevitability through deregulation and failure to enforce what little regulation remained - but then no one wanted the party to end in this demonic pact; banks got huge profits, the tax on them funded government expansion, Joe Public got cheap credit and the notion that things were going well and the investors got good returns. Ultimately we voted for this and continued to vote for it.
The real issue you are pissed off at is the failure, accompanying all this, to promote, through relevant regulatory and incentivising frameworks, private domestic business and provide it with the investment it needed to grow and provide employment at home, in favour of quick, easy and higher yields through gambling on the global markets. And yet in a global marketplace the reality is that this is how things will turn out - our domestic businesses cannot compete with cheap foreign competition so they make poor investments, whilst those low cost foreign markets provide the high returns needed to fund our western lifestyle and aspirations, particularly as these relate to the growing burden of an aging population.
In short the most we can do is reintroduce banking reforms that seek to limit the general damage to our domestic economies of gambling failures and adjust to the situation as best we can. The bottom line is that much of the money used to support our governmental spending on healthcare and welfare benefits comes from the international markets in one way or another, either as returns, taxation on returns or simple borrowing - and that if we took action to remove ourselves from that game then we shouldnt have enough to go round and that pot would be shrinking year by year as our sources of revenue dried up and the burden on them grew.
Its a shitty situation. It pisses me off. But I recognise that there is little I can do about it so its about adjusting to it. Kicking and screaming dont help.
E
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