Sunday 19 October 2008

V SIGN FOR THE POOR

yo!..pension politix issue...innit!

PALOOKAVILLE FINANCIAL stardate capitulation day+32

...Admiral Brown is onna bridge o a dorkship TURNERPRIZE...struttin arahn pretendin ta be a great dictator...practicin salutes an stuff...

...all around him the economy lies in ruins...frozen by the withdrawal o the great credit binge of the labour years...

...he hopes to put the leverage handle back onna broken money machine an restart a BOOM wotz BUST...

...he wants first time buyers ta bailout a property market by buyin houses before they become fair value again...

THE GRAPES OF WRATH

liam : "I'm staggered – there is no other word for it – at the way Gordon Brown is strutting around the world like a pumped-up super-hero.

Does he have no shame? I know he's the Prime Minister; I'm meant to show due respect. But I'm still forced to ask myself – what planet is this man on?

I don't deny there is merit in the UK bail-out scheme. Some of us have argued for months that only "direct capitalisation" of the banks would even begin to break this crisis. Brown's plan is certainly better that the "made in America" version involving the state buying-up Wall Street's bad assets, without insisting on equity ownership. US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson dubbed his rescue package a "bazooka". A smaller armament would have been more apt – a peashooter, perhaps?

None of this remotely justifies Brown's triumphant tone. For one thing, the global financial system remains in very deep waters. The British economy is also a mess – with the blundering errors Brown made as Chancellor coming back to haunt us all." Sunday Telegraph


irwin : ..."Politics may make strange bedfellows, but economic crises make even stranger ones. Gordon Brown, a free trader, now finds that Nicolas Sarkozy, an arch-protectionist, has virtues he had not previously noticed. It seems that they are united by three things. First, they believe, or at least are pretending that they believe, that the current ills originated in the United States. You might remember: these are the same United States whose entrepreneurship Chancellor Brown lauded to all who would listen, before becoming prime minister and slipping easily into the anti-American mode that now dominates his public and private discourse.

Second, Brown and Sarkozy, along with their EU partners, believe that now is the time to put the former hegemon in its place. America, they believe, is paralysed by the lame-duck status of its president. It will, they reason, be forced to go along with any European proposals for what is variously called a “new financial architecture” and a “new world order”. The joy on the faces of EU leaders as they gather for their conferences can be seen in news photos. Never mind that the banking systems of their countries are on the verge of collapse, or that they are headed for a recession deeper and longer than the one the United States will suffer. Now is their chance to do things that the Americans might not like, but can’t stop.

Third, Brown, Sarkozy & Co have always done what President Ronald Reagan accused his own bureaucracy of doing: “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidise it.” Brown, long famous for profligate spending and mindless regulations, now proposes to subsidise homebuying by first-time buyers so that they can catch the falling knife that is the house-price market. And his new-found friends in the EU have never hesitated to increase their tax-funded budgets, and draft regulations at such a rate that even the lobbying firms in Brussels cannot follow all the action....

........For Brown, such a Bretton Woods II would put him in the role played by John Maynard Keynes in 1944, when his biographer Robert Skidelsky reports Keynes “was the Churchill of this [financial] world, and no one could have taken his place”.

That wouldn’t be the first time, and won’t be the last time, the prime minister has likened his role in coping with the financial crisis to Churchill’s role in coping with Hitler." Sunday Times

WEATHER FORECAST

john waples : "Anyone still holding on to hopes that the financial problems have been solved and that we will not have problems in the wider economy is living in cloud cuckoo land. Over the past year we have seen an excess of debt being blown out of the banking system and the same will now happen in the real economy.

Every day I am hearing first hand from small and medium-sized businesses that are getting bullied by banks. As a result, the corporate casualty list, which so far has been contained, is going to grow rapidly. All companies that I speak to have put capital-spending programmes on hold for the next 12 months, staff numbers are being cut and profit forecasts that looked attainable only six months ago are being trimmed back.

From the collapse of Northern Rock to the part nationalisation of HBOS and Royal Bank of Scotland, it took more than a year to recognise the depth of the problems in the financial system. It may take the same length of time for the British economy to sort itself out. The stock market has already priced in a lot of this pain and has singled out those highly indebted companies that are going to struggle to survive. But so far there has been a lag between the rapid fall in UK equities and the corporate news that will inevitably follow.

It is going to be a very demanding time for company bosses, who will have to make tough decisions. Britain will pull through and the government appears keen to prime the system, but anyone who is delaying taking action should think again. This is the time that British business has to show its mettle and, if it does, it will come out the other side in much better shape.

As a newspaper we will endeavour to identify success stories. But I have had too many conversations with too many senior industrialists and other businessmen to ignore the shake-out that is coming." Sunday Times


THE PENSIONS OF THE PUBLIC SECTOR PAID FOR BY THE POOR

petey : jobs is bein lost wot will never be got back by those who will pay the real, lasting, price of browns hubris...while he an his govt. pals bask in the warmth o their Guaranteed, cast iron, index linked and unbelievably generous PUBLIC PAID PENSIONS...

...brown has robbed private pension funds of £5 billion+ per year since deciding that the poor should be hoodwinked into financing the state...while MP's voted themselves better pensions and higher pay!

1998 buget : "However, the most controversial shock and the biggest regular revenue raiser concerned abolition of the tax clawbacks available to pension funds - known as gross funds which receive dividends tax free. When companies pay out dividends they deduct what is called advance corporation tax. The amount is credited to them when they pay ordinary tax and at the same time the gross fund investors claim the ACT levy from Inland Revenue. The loss of this will amount to �4-billion in a full year rising to an estimated �5.4-billion. Brown claimed this loss would be bearable without cutting pension benefits because - thanks to rising markets - most funds had a substantial surplus over their liabilities.

However, the pension industry calls the abolition (which will pare about 0.75% a year off pensions) robbery and short term expediency for raiding people's long term savings. Companies reckon the "top up" required for in-house pension schemes will largely wipe out the cut in corporation tax while the local authorities claim that it will force them to put up property rates sharply." Business Times

peteypension : nah jus compound it up every year since 2008...money taken from our savings to pay for their pensions!




No comments:

Post a Comment