The Treaury put out this announcement at about 6.30 this morning:
My immediate reaction was:
On reflection I added:
Nothing has changed my opinion that Truss has only days, at most, left in office. Hunt is, therefore, never going to enact anything he talks about today. Trying to salvage anything from Kwarteng's statement but the energy plan makes no sense. And, of course, that might be all he says, except to forewarn of austerity to come. But I really suspect Hunt knows he is not in this role for long, at least under Truss. In that case to place too much emphasis on anything said would be inappropriate.
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An attempt to stop the markets crashing when they come online this morning ?
Have you figured out what the average mortgage debt currently is yet?
And also worked out who gains and loses from the real value of that debt reducing faster than the rise in interest payments?
Don’t you think it odd that everyone now seems to agree with my calculations?
Isn’t this all about MP’s getting Rishi Sunak in power?
Liz is out of her depth, floundering with little strategic thinking and a complete lack of statesmanship.
The Bank of England scheming and using press-releases to unnerve the markets. Unless of course Andrew Bailey is completely clueless (which I suppose is possible).
Along comes Sunak and all will be calm.
Whether it is Hunt or another Chancellor, in four weeks time I suspect the Tories will be trying to achieve the same con trick that worked so well with the Poll tax.
Replacing it with the Council Tax, that is only slightly less medieval, regressive and advantageous to rich Tories, but that by comparison seemed almost fair and rational.
You would almost think they planned it.
Having just subscribed to Byline Times, it seems to me that too many of the Tories are close to the sort of Americans Think Tanks who were advising Yeltsin in the 1990s. It has all the hall marks of ‘shock therapy’.
This is a very dangerous situation in my view – as close to a national emergency as there ever has been.
If we tolerate this, then our kids will definitely be next – as the song goes. I wonder if the statement from Hunt is going to be the nuclear option?
The Tories are close to getting what they wanted – a country ran along American capitalist lines – a rentier friendly zone. for which they will all be paid handsomely. Some in the Labour party too.
I feel very forlorn at the moment.
Including g all the Tories seems to be a bit of a reach, but certainly Truss and Kamikwase looked like they were thus influenced. And I am no Tory.
In spite of Truss-Kwarteng, astonishingly this is not the bonfire of excessive liberatarian market ideas in Britain. Rather, from nowhere, The Magical Market Tree is delivering its opinion, and the public is bowing low. The airwaves are full of worried electors reverting to the reassuring household/business budget idea in Government. You can take Britain out of the EU, but you can’t take the houshold budget away from people’s faith in government. Let the international markets decide our politics by all means; and nobody asks how we have ended in this predicament. I can even see the ‘balance of payments’ making a comeback as a new area of stress. The one thing we can be sure of is that Britain will not ever face considering whether its whole economic model, based on the primacy of the City in international markets, to which the whole economy is wholly and religiously subservient, actually serves the interests of the British people, or works in the 21st century that currently unfolds before us.
The one thing that might happen is that Britain faces the elephant in the room for the last six years: Brexit; but I wouldn’t bank on it making any difference. The capacity for British humbug is substantial; immigration is only acceptable in Britain when it is done by Government stealth (the public might even guess, but invariably prefer not to know); administered with a thick syrup of tough anti-immigrations regulations that are neither implemented nor resourced, and leak like a sieve. Government stealth policy has worked for centuries, on just about everything.
‘.. the primacy of the City … to which the whole economy is wholly and religiously subservient’
Absolutely – way back in the 70s there was at least some sense that the City had role in providing financial services to the rest of the economy. With the industry broken down into specialist areas. Building societies, merchant banks, clearing banks focused on retail and commercial customers, brokers and jobbers.
The rot started with Big Bang. Since then the rest of the economy has become just a carcass for the City to feed on. Pure wealth extraction. I watched it happen as I had many of them as customers over my working life. Starting with building societies and ending up with the BofE. The banks and City of today are unrecognisable from what they were and how they behaved. They need root and branch reform. Breaking them up into their component parts as they were pre Big Bang. Refocusing them on supporting the rest of the economy instead of feeding off it to reward themselves. The damage they do to the rest of the economy, their failure to provide investment, their role in tax evasion and avoidance far outweighs whatever tax they pay into the economy.
Singapore on Thames exploded after the mini budget, so the Tories now know that their dream economic model will not work for them. Brexit was a wase of time, energy, billions of pounds, economic collapse and no more influence on the world stage. Unforgivable!
As we now know it is pensioners who are going to robbed by this chancellor. The contract was and is that we paid for the pension through NI and it has to be upgraded with CPI .Otherwise they commit legal theft as bad as purse snatching. The pension itself is almost the lowest pension in Europe and god help those who do not have a second pension. Who can live on £190 a week if renting, eating , heating.