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tonyparksrun

Listed below are comments made by tonyparksrun between Wednesday, 4th November 2009 and Friday, 11th December 2009.

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Why £73bn is the new £90bn 2:07pm on 11 Dec 2009 mrsbloggs13c2 #61 Turn off the street lights in the middle of the night, it's green and mean. I have long advocated this, but I guess the Health & Safety Nazis would moan about that.
Turn off everything in office blocks at night. I have a clever plug costing less than 15 quid that turns off all the peripherals when I turn off my PC. There are some real quick wins out there!
Still think VAT will go up further in the emergency Tory budget post election.
And don't get caught holding equities at election time, they'll rise on the result but as QE is turned off and the cuts are announced, expect Armageddon.
I hear Bognor is nice for a summer holiday.
Efficiency trap 10:19am on 08 Dec 2009 One thing we need to radically alter is Civil Servants working conditions. They have endless leave, sabbaticals, flexitime. Civil Servants have to be considered seriously for jobs advertised at their grade even if they have no relevant experience - So you get useless civil servants circulating, trying out jobs they have no experience to carry out. Any wonder why the government wastes money. This isn't a matter of billions saved here or there - a cultural paradigm shift is needed. As alluded to above, civil servants have no capacity to run eficiently as they know we will always pick up the bill - up until now that is.
Flattening, not falling? 11:48am on 07 Dec 2009 On the VAT debate, the main reason the government did this was that they were desperate to get liquidity into the system - they were prevented from reducing VAT below 15% by EU rules. There was no pint in changing corporate tax or personal tax as these changes would have taken months to feed through. When I heard the VAT cut announced I knew then for certain how deep in the mire we are - it was an act of desperation for a government with few options at the time - however small the impact they felt they had to get that liquidity in somehow.
Anyone know what sort of steel is used in bridge building or flood defence/river management works? The key here is that once the skills of the 1700 are lost to the UK they are lost forever. It's not the scale of the lost jobs it's the skills we lose. It will also be almost impossible to re-build the steelmaking capacity should we ever need it again. Media studies graduates need not apply.
Flattening, not falling? 12:20pm on 04 Dec 2009 Well the bankers have achieved what the Luftwaffe failed to achieve. My grandfather worked at Redcar works during the war and helped keep the furnaces going in spite of nuisance raiders. They had to dampen down the furnaces to keep the glow from being visible as a target far out to sea.

This really is a tragedy for Teesside which has been producing Iron & Steel for this country for 150 years - never forget that the Sydney Harbour bridge was manufactured on Teesside (shipped like Meccano to Australia) and it stands as a monument to the great age of British engineering and the toil of the many who hewed ironstone from the Cleveland hills.
A hung parliament and the City 1:14pm on 03 Dec 2009 Turkeys do not vote for Christmas (or Thanksgiving for that matter) shock horror. Actually they would if Rupert Murdoch told them to. The markets may balk at the prospect of a hung parliament - would they balk at a Government of National Reconstruction? There really is so little policy room to manoeuvre for an incoming government that Conservative, Labour or Liberal would not be radically different. You would see the roll out as much as possible of easy wins in tax raising and deficit reduction and when this proved to be insufficient we would see some painful choices finally made further out. Where does this leave democracy? Elected representatives unable to "be adventurous" in spelling out what needs to be done - we face the prospect of an election campaign of half truths, rumour and obfuscation. We will be expected to vote on what we guess maybe on the agenda - based on the 'brand' not the substance - as voting Turkeys that will most likely lead to a hung parliament.
Bad in Japan 5:10pm on 02 Dec 2009 I have started to form the view that the UK actually has experienced a step change in capacity. I am convinced the economy adjusted to the freewheeling credit boom and established a structure that was dependent on easy credit heavily dependent on retail/financial services. As SF points out Japan at least has the export industry to pay off any external creditors by running a current account surplus. We in the UK have consistently run external deficits, and so doing the economy has become dependent on paying off external debt with financial services income and selling off ownership of businesses. We should expect financial services as a sector to shrink. The above interpretation is arguably an over simplification. However, nobody is spelling out the shape of the economy in the long term - have we got the businesses, capital and skillset that external customers want to pay for? - If not we have a massive overcapacity in working age population geared to skills which will not contribute to paying off the debts incurred in the last year. Potentially a wrongly skilled economy may prove to be a further debt drag by adding to safety net spending. In short, what are our working age population going to be productively doing 5 and 10 years hence, that will pay off the debts of the bank rescue?
Winners and losers 1:02pm on 26 Nov 2009 No one has yet pointed out the massive liquidity and interest benefit the banks get from taking 1-3 days for clearing cheques or other transactions. Notwithstanding the profit from charges, this income accruing to banks on the float is the reason I expect free (in the black) banking. I understand the technology exists to have instant clearing, but then Turkeys neither vote for Thanksgiving nor for Christmas.

#80@Maimonides your plea for cash and a bygone era ignores the fact that electronic transactions and the advances in technology make life so much simpler for the majority, rather than carrying around wads of paper. Perhaps you would prefer we reverted to seashells. Money...it's a gas!It's not the poor who are necessarily penalised (many have to manage a tight weekly budget which causes problems against the monthly cycle favoured by banks) Why should those who can organise their affairs to remain in the black subsidise those too idle or stupid (rich and poor)to take that care?
GDP estimates becoming more accurate? 12:27pm on 26 Nov 2009 And let us not forget, dear G-S were one of the main beneficiaries of the US government bail out of AIG. They didn't see that one coming did they? stats or no stats. Is this not all rather missing the point - if we are going to get all anal about tenths of percent GDP statistics corrections when we know we will be bumping along the bottom (excuse the pun) for the next 5-10 years, we will all I expect lose the will to live very, very quickly. SF where's the leadership that describes where we (in the UK) need to go (economically) and how we're going to get there? Can you provide any insight? And I don't mean just cut government spending. Or is the future too bleak to contemplate/report?
Cautious good cheer 11:32pm on 11 Nov 2009 Some good posts tonight... I'm hearing commercial property and CC debt are the next black holes. And a word to the wise...don't get caught holding equities when the election takes place/QE runs out.

The obscured unemployment comments tie in with my personal experience in an SME.
The economist's new clothes 10:58am on 04 Nov 2009 #78 Gilbert
some good points...however
"how about loaning directly to small business and people who actually need it?"

Lord Sugar has something to say on this - credit has been too easy and many are hooked on it so they expect that the banks (i.e. our deposits)are used to fund their flights of ego - small businesses manfacturing cushions or nuclear free vegetarian peace windmills. The thought of government rationing finance to the needy is only one step worse than the banks doing so.

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