{"id":22904,"date":"2013-10-30T06:42:08","date_gmt":"2013-10-30T06:42:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=22904"},"modified":"2013-10-30T06:42:20","modified_gmt":"2013-10-30T06:42:20","slug":"does-the-uk-want-to-become-a-greater-hong-kong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2013\/10\/30\/does-the-uk-want-to-become-a-greater-hong-kong\/","title":{"rendered":"Does the UK want to become a greater Hong Kong?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I <a title=\"Isn\u2019t it time we said that the world\u2019s major banks were systemically corrupt?\" href=\"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2013\/10\/30\/isnt-it-time-we-said-that-the-worlds-major-banks-were-systemically-corrupt\/\" target=\"_blank\">have just noted <\/a>what appears to be the systemic capacity of the banking system to be corrupt. Despite this Mark Carney, the new governor of the Bank of England last week predicted a bright future for UK banking - suggesting it would grow quickly so that its assets - now four times the size of UK GDP might be nine times the size of UK GDP by 2050.<\/p>\n<p>My immediate reaction to this suggestion was that he was naive: this appears to embrace the normal fallacy of growth prediction by extrapolating what has happened without thinking about the constraints on it continuing. I dismissed the thinking as absurd as a result: I did not even blog on it.<\/p>\n<p>Martin Wolf has not reacted in the way I did. He questions, quite rightly, the thinking at the core of this vision. As <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ft.com\/cms\/s\/0\/08dea9d4-4002-11e3-8882-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz2jBVPXbH1\" target=\"_blank\">he has said in the FT this morning<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Is the future Mr Carney outlines good for the UK? Here, Mr Carney is right: the financial sector has become a crucial source of incomes and jobs. But this industry also generates instability and rising income inequality. At least, the UK needs to understand the implications of becoming a greater Hong Kong.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>His answer is, of course, \u00a0a very clear 'no'. It's worth reading his article in full.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have just noted what appears to be the systemic capacity of the banking system to be corrupt. Despite this Mark Carney, the new governor<br \/><a class=\"moretag\" href=\"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2013\/10\/30\/does-the-uk-want-to-become-a-greater-hong-kong\/\"><em> Read the full article&#8230;<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[70,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-banking","category-economics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22904\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}