Lets hope 2010 will see a cleaner regime.
Posted on April 27th 2009
I feel sorry for Darling, his boss has made a right cock up of the economy and he is taking most of the stick. Gordon Brown had us all fooled, according to him he had banished Boom and Bust and he was the architect of the most prosperous years we have ever seen. Gordon convinced us and the banks that interest rates would be low and employment levels high which encouraged the banks to take ever increasing risks for lower margins and encouraged Jo Public to borrow more, safe in the knowledge that the debt was affordable. Of course we all know now that we were suckered and that the architect was in fact just riding a global bubble like the rest of us.
A phrase coined by Alan Greenspan pretty much sums up why we have got in this mess; ‘irrational exuberance’ the tendency of financial market operators to downplay risk, to ignore warnings of the impending implosion of asset price bubbles and to leverage available capital to the highest permitted limits to maximise profits. What now? Most likely we have mortgaged our future and anyone over the minimum earnings level will be paying for it for a generation. Higher rate taxpayers who will soon be paying 45% Income Tax already can see a glimpse of the future under Labour. Let’s hope that May 2010 brings a new broom to sweep away the wrong doings of the current regime.
