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LordGreenShoots

Listed below are comments made by LordGreenShoots between Friday, 7th August 2009 and Wednesday, 21st October 2009.

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A sombre warning 2:23pm on 21 Oct 2009 Well, lets hope in the near future we all at least have the undoubted pleasure of seeing that po-faced puppet who spouts all the PR rubbish from the bankers assosciation put up against a wall and shot.
Lloyds: Mind the GAPS 1:48pm on 18 Sep 2009 # 5 - "What absolutely cannot be allowed is for the FSA to drop the ball and allow any financial institution to opt out of GAPS and avoid paying the premium, only to then have to ask for a bailout (in whatever form) in the years to come." This is almost certainly what WILL happen.

Not only is this likely, but financial institutions will feel hard-done-by if they arn't bailed-out again. A dangerous precendent has been set by Bernanke and Brown that future encumbents will regret.

The only way to stop this happening is for provision to be made for the salvaging of retail and deposit banking, whilst allowing the investment and casino operations to go bust and be wound-up in ANY institution of WHATEVER size and complexity. Only then can true risk management be restored in the financial sector.
Banks can learn from retailers 11:56am on 18 Sep 2009 # 120 - Agreed, the retail model is not an apposite one. Retailers cannot sequester the taxes of their host state in order to stay in business. The banks long-ago exhausted ordinary customers for loans, then they went for sub-primers, now even that is gone. They have depositors cash, but they are in the process of running that down by making saving meaningless with low rates. All thats left is trickery, accounting changes and to BLACKMAIL the state into keeing them alive.
The what and when of spending cuts 12:56pm on 16 Sep 2009 # 52 - "... it looks to me to be an odds-on bet that we will delay too long to cut/raise interest rates and then have to do it too much." Correct: Delays are already building on this one; the next rate rises (probably spring 2010) will have to be sharp and rapid to compensate for the current over-extended easing period.

"Gordon Brown says he will cut when Germany and France cut and in a way, rather perversely, this may be our only hope of a strategy as the prevailing Anglo-Saxon economics has failed utterly."
Well said: Brown (thankfully) is not world chancellor and the French and Germans have already indicated that they will pursue their own timetable on a withdrawal strategy from bail-outs, QE and the rest.

The fall-out from the collapse of the Anglo-American model of hyper-debt capitalism has yet to be fully manifest, but the Chinese and others are now fully aware (don't think they were before the 'crunch') of their nascent power over the Anglo-Americans. They have a true picture of the extent to which it is their purchasing of western debt that has allowed the Anglo-Americans to pursue a policy of world-wide interference.

The lecturing of 'second & third world' nations, from Brazil to India and Eastern Europe, by the Anglo-American banking establishment has now been shown to be a con-trick of epic proportions. The wars currently being pursued by 'the west' will become increasingly unaffordable, their domestic welfare systems will buckle under the strain of insupportable spending as 'the east' flexes its financial strength and develops its own markets to spend its savings on.
What RBS's results say about QE 2:11pm on 26 Aug 2009 Sub-Prime = Sub-Human. Who are the financial anarchists going to have to target next? Ordinary borrowers - exhausted long ago; Subprimers - gone the same way; SMEs - bankrupted. Taxpayers seem the obvious new mark, as their governments have shown themselves very weak in any sort of civil protection role. Western states in particular have long abandoned any pretence at governing themselves and have surrendered all power to the international banking 'elite'. The direct draining of tax receipts into investment banks seems the next clear step, perhaps presented as being in the 'public' interest by their political front-men?
QE: More to do? 1:48pm on 26 Aug 2009 How are 'they' going to stop the QE programme? The markets, especially the banks, now rely on the US and UK governments instead of the largely closed wholesale money markets. Its quite scary that the international banks now have a direct channel for sequestering taxes raised in the US and UK for their own profits and bonuses! Like an addict, they will do anything to maintain this flow to ensure their own survival. Unless this can be reversed soon a vicious circle of ever-increasing government debt has been created that cannot be stopped.
The recovery's coming - but the UK's taken a permanent hit 1:43pm on 19 Aug 2009 Confidence in the 'system' has been shaken to its very core by the events of the last two years. Any return to the levels of lending and consumption that charaterized the mid-90s to 2007 will take a decade or more. People no longer trust banks and other finacial institutions to the extent they once did. This has still to play-out fully in the years ahead. With the government effectively taking onto its own balance sheet the debts of the private banking sector and insuring future lending,this can only mean cuts in public sector spending and employment, high taxes, lower expectations, high youth unemployment, urban decay and a general austerity not seen in the Uk since the post-war years.
What was HBOS doing? 1:33pm on 19 Aug 2009 HBOS were simply following the market in a very unintelligent way; sub-prime = sub-human? They were an extreme example of what most financial institutions were doing in the securitized bubble market, 1999-2007.

Suckered into beliving that their exposure to risk was insured by the likes of AIG, they just let their sales-oriented business model run amok on a sea of boundless false optimism and bonuses.

Financial crisis phase-one is over, but phase-two has only just begun. Essentially, we now have governments, especially the US & UK, in the role of the pre-crunch wholesale money markets. How can they withdraw from this situation without a return to crisis? The strategy seems to be the return of securitization through a reflation of asset prices. But the models of 'off balance sheet' shadow banking that underpinned the bubble were, and are, fundamentally unsound and unrecreatable.

The real crisis has only been postponed and no amount of wishfull thinking is going to prevent the collapse of unsustainable levels of western consumption in relation to global inequality, and the coming shifts in economic power eastwards.
What RBS's results say about QE 12:59pm on 12 Aug 2009 I suspect whats going-on is that people from their mid-50s being made redundant have realised there are no jobs available and, having checked that they have the new 30 years required for a state pension with SERPS (or new equivalent), have decided to wait-out the last few years before retirement on the their savings and investments. By the time these run-out they will have reached retirement age and be entitled to full state support.
What RBS's results say about QE 1:59pm on 07 Aug 2009 The real aim of QE is to rescue the debt securities held in off-balance-sheet structured vehicles. By doing this the banks can save these 'Enron-type' entities, whilst reflating the asset bubble that gave them their value in the first place. The stuff about helping the real economy is all just guff. Reflating asset prices and the return of securitization is the true aim of all this, AND IT WONT WORK.

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