Browned off. Very.
Did my ears deceive me, or did Gordon Brown have the extraordinary front just now to lecture us all about the need for "transparency not opacity" and the "end of irresponsibility"? This from the man who made double and treble accounting, smoke & mirrors, and PFI-off-balance sheet finance the hallmarks of our national accounts.
It's time to go in and go in hard. Enough of this gland-aching nonsense that you need an experienced hand at the tiller in rocky waters. We have had Brown at the helm for the last 11 years and his legacy is an economy built on debt. SS Great Britain has its own cargo of Brown toxic waste. In political terms, nothing matters more than ensuring that the only responses voters have to "trust him, he has the experience" are either raucous laughter or, better, cold fury.
PS. Does anyone have a clip of Brown saying "no more boom and bust"? It's not on YouTube, yet, so far as I can tell. Please, someone, put that right. Click here for some statistics on how often Mr. Experience claimed to have invented the internet abolished the business cycle.
Yes a list of Browns stupid quotes would be a good idea ranging from "end of Boom and Bust" through to "light touch on the city". They need to be nailed on their lies and hard.
Posted by: Matt Wright | September 27, 2008 at 00:29
When Brown did the pensions, I was sitting 11 stories up in London City and was lectured by a very aggressive gent on what it meant. At the time, Prudential and others said, "you have target x on input y, if you wish to maintain target x, you need y+ 20%".
And fuss for a year and then vanished, never surfaces in 2001 or 2005 elections.
However I am sure also at the time, I remember Gordon (or sidekick) saying something along the lines "Pensions are only for the rich". I have not been able to find it since, I saw it I knew it was said but ......
Go get . The man is a menace, and I realise on another post I let him off, but now:
If you and Eddie George had not held the interest rates down to fuel artificially high house prices, they buggers in the IB would not have have exercised themselves so vigorously in creating toxic derivatives.
Where is the half-brick when you need it?
Posted by: snegchui | September 27, 2008 at 00:51
When Brown launched his (on-going) raid on pension funds tens of thousands of private investor's faith in pension funds and the stock market began to fall. As a result people with money to invest with retirement in mind sought alternatives for their pension pot money. Houses and buy-to-let seemed like sure-fire winners and money poured into bricks and mortar. The cost of a house was determined by the amount a bank or building society would lend you. As part of a vicious loop some/most mortgage lenders believed that house prices would never fall again and would catch up in value with whatever debt they advanced. The roundabout has now slowed down and the pass-the-debt-parcel is stopping. The results are as we see it in the financial and the more mundane hight street markets. There is more debt than cash and cash is needed.
I firmly believe that Gordon Brown's decision to weaken the attraction of pension funds and to balloon off balance sheet borrowing played a major role in the crisis we now have.
When Gordon implies that experience is needed I have to ask whether we would trust the captain of the Titanic if he had, after the sinking, carried on blaming the iceberg. Experience is only useful if you learn from it.
Posted by: Eveleigh Moore-Dutton | September 27, 2008 at 10:44
Eveleigh Moore-Dutton makes a very good point. Government here and elsewhere is principally to blame for the current debacle.
Cheap money was key to over fuelling the housing market and buy to let became important for many pensions after Brown changed the rules. Many children have also been kept in fee paying schools from buy to let - that has yet to unwind.
Posted by: Lindsay Jenkins | September 27, 2008 at 10:59
Thank you Lindsay. I wonder how much the government's prescriptive attitude to planning matters has also played a part. The requirement that newly built dwellings have to be high-density has resulted in a huge over-supply of flats in town and city centres. Only days ago I heard of such a development in Manchester where not one single apartment had been sold. Too many of those that have been sold were sold, often unseen, to buy-to-let landlords who now find them unsaleable. Another case of a government trying to dictate to the marketplace with disastrous results?
Posted by: Eveleigh Moore-Dutton | September 27, 2008 at 11:07
The definition of madness is to repeat the same action and expect a diffrent result. Having borrowed excessively and raided pensions to boost public spending for a decade pawning the countries future, Brown now intends to borrow even more despite the crippling results for the economy.
Posted by: MikeB | September 28, 2008 at 03:02