It looks as if Barclays wants to head back to the days of the wild west in the City of London when the economy was explicitly run for its benefit. The FT has reported that:
George Osborne and Mark Carney should team up with senior figures in finance to promote the City of London and avert the damage done by tax and regulatory reforms, the chairman of Barclays Bank has urged.
The City is at a “tipping point”, with the current burden of tax and regulation at risk of deterring inward investment and damaging London's role as the world's leading financial centre, John McFarlane will warn in his inaugural speech as chairman of the CityUK lobby group on Wednesday.
To avert irreparable damage, it was time for policymakers to stop undermining the financial services industry and start promoting it, the veteran banker told the Financial Times.
The NHS is collapsing, as are the police and other vital public services.
Three million households are to lose 10 per cent of their income.
Housing is unaffordable for the vast majority of Barclays' employees.
The trade deficit is at extraordinary levels.
And Barclays wants the main issue to be the City's plight since it has been asked to play a role in society.
You really could not make the crassness of that up.
And nor could you have better indication that it thinks itself in a world apart.
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I doubt many city financiers need or use the kind of public services they are happy to ignore. Private medicine, private helicopters, private education. They are also happy to ignore the benefits they enjoy from the publicly funded infrastructure that makes the City of London such an attractive home for its many clients of dubious origin. Our legal system, our educated workforce, our cultural heritage, our very democracy. All are threatened by distorted priorities that see government investment skewed towards the City and away from social requirements.
It’s crass, it’s obscene, and it is stupidly self defeating. It is a reasonable and moderate position to oppose this self -serving special pleading, and the political kowtowing.
Just to highlight further the absolute Pythonesque absurdity identified here I spotted what appeared to be a Government inspired advert on TV the other night trying to extol the virtue of exporting as a country.
The trade deficit is off the scale because we don’t bleedin’ make anything anymore. Our shipbuilding, manufacturing, engineering, energy, and steel industries have not so much been decimated as annihilated on the alter of free market neo liberal globalism, along with the communities and SME’S dependent upon the money generated by those now murdered industries (no wonder some SME’S and communities are wanting to highlight the absurdity of the poor subsidising the tax avoiding wealthy by cutting off their tax contributions in the hope of forcing the Chancellor to do his job properly).
What is left of our steel industry is shutting up shop due to our new bestest friends the Chinese dumping steel at low prices onto the world market whilst at the same time we are shovelling shed loads of money, we apparrantly don’t have, towards them for several decades at inflated prices to build bits of our energy infrastructure. The seed corn money for the replacement solar and wind technologies our fledgling indigenous industries depend on for sustainable development have been cut.
And the Government is spending public money on TV ads. encouraging the country to export! Export what exactly? The only thing the country seems to be producing in any quantity (but not quality) these days is bullshit.
If you have to advertise it then by and large it is bullshit
That’s the golden rule of the only industry solely dedicated to not telling the truth
So true
Another advert! That’ll be on top of the recent, sickening DWP one that cost 8 million with a ‘cuddly’ character called ‘Workie.’
We don’t make fax machines, video recorders etc any longer, but we do make,in Sunderland, more cars than the Italian car industry as a whole. In Solihull, JLR have expanded their business dramatically, as have Mini in Oxford.
Industry and the world change around us – making tractors when no one wants them was a major success for the USSR, wasn’t it.
Wind power, for all the billions poured into it, produced zero when the grid was under pressure – money well spent?
Very well spent
Carbon saved is critical
As far as I’m aware, in MMT theory, as long as other countries are prepared to accept and hold Sterling, then a trade deficit is a benefit to the UK. No?
In the sense that it lets us run a government deficit, yes
As far as my extremely limited economic knowledge goes I understand such a state of affairs is only of “positive” benefit if the currency in question happens to be operating as the world’s reserve currency, where those other countries holding that currency need it because certain vital resources are only available to them via payment in that reserve currency.
This allows the country/State whose currency enjoys that status to run up astronomical levels of debt with no serious worries as the debt will be recycled by the rest of the world who need to buy and hold that currency to obtain resources without which their societies could not function.
I further understand this may also have something to do with the fact that anyone attempting to build a system in which such resources are obtained using another currency or group of currencies gets the shit bombed out of them and ends up as a failed state with its leadership butchered, infrastructure destroyed, and competing groups of militias tearing the place apart and lopping people’s heads off.