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fragmeister

Listed below are comments made by fragmeister between Monday, 23rd February 2009 and Friday, 24th April 2009.

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Why tax the rich? 12:21pm on 24 Apr 2009 Surely the only fair system of taxation is that everyone is taxed equally - say 25%. Rich or poor, you pay the same proportion of your income. Progressive taxation is not about fairness but about assuming people with more money should pay more than people with less. In other words, envy.
Stealth taxes out, hikes for the rich in 9:09pm on 22 Apr 2009 "Their message, in summary, is that these tax changes are not merely symbolic or political - they will raise real money - eventually."

Now that all numbers seem to have 11 zeroes after them, those with eight zeroes (like 1.5 billion) just seem like toy money. Doesn't really seem to add up, unless eventually is in geological terms.
Optimistic about the future 1:13pm on 22 Apr 2009 Well, no excrement Sherlock. He isn't Private Fraser is he, going around shouting "We're doomed". Nice journalism. Gisajob!
Awkward questions ahead 7:55pm on 26 Mar 2009 Will there be an inquiry into the recently reported case of the defenceless economic zealot Gordon Brown being mercilessly tortured in Strasbourg by the evil C&A henchman Daniel Hannan. I have seen the disgusting sight on the video posted on that propaganda website Al-YouTube
Knife "fact sheet": The e-mail trail 3:08pm on 06 Mar 2009 Chances are that this is not the only example, just the first one we have heard of. Any more abuses of statistics rumoured?
Sorry for what? 1:51pm on 06 Mar 2009 Want of foresight, unwillingness to at when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until emergency comes, until self-preservation strkes its jarring gong.

I think those are all things for which Mr Brown could consider apology. And he might just recognise them, since they come from a speech of his much more esteemed antecedent, Winston Churchill, to the House Of Commons in 1935.
Brown's message to the United States 7:16pm on 04 Mar 2009 I must have heard the wrong speech. It sounded to me like a quarter had got stuck in the speak your weight machine - monotone and boringly repetitive.
The Prime Ministers 09:23am on 24 Feb 2009 163 - My comment is at the end of my previous post. The rest is laughable propaganda lifted almost straight from Flash's new website telling us it will be all right.

Personally, I don't believe a word.
The Prime Ministers 9:51pm on 23 Feb 2009 There are lots of complicated terms flying about - quantitative easing and fiscal stimulus and deleveraging - there are plenty of words people are getting used to hearing on the TV, but which don't actually illuminate what's happened at all.

Perhaps the simplest way to explain it is by talking about electricity. Just like everything gets difficult for you in your house when the electricity stops flowing, everything gets difficult in the economy when the banking system stops working.

So it was really important to save banks, because that underpins everything, just like electricity does in your house. But once the credit crunch and the banking collapse had done such damage to the system, it wasn't enough for us to flip the trip switch and hope the electricity would start flowing again.

That's why we've brought forward our plans to inject more money into the economy through cutting taxes and increasing public expenditure - we're sending more voltage around the electricity supply to keep the house in good order.
How did we get here?

The spread of sub-prime: despite record house-building, more people wanted homes than were for sale and they were prepared to borrow more to get their homes. In America people were encouraged to buy homes with cheap credit and low starter interest rates, but salespeople made no proper assessment of what level of lending they could afford to repay.

As US house prices fell and the US economy slowed the number of people defaulting on their mortgage started to rise, and once other lenders realised that was happening, the system started to panic, as everyone was trying to work out how many other risky assets the other banks held. That's what first started to spread fear through the system early last year.

Banks became global borrowers: many banks started packaging lots of mortgages up into bundles and selling them mainly to other banks - what the experts call securitised credit. That can work as long as there is money available to borrow, but when that dries up they've got nothing to pass on to people.
People had no idea how many mortgages would default, and a very active market for these assets dried up, leaving banks like Northern Rock in real trouble.

Because of a lack of due diligence at the start and because mortgages had been packaged up and sold right across the world there was real confusion about what these bundles were worth. People had no idea how many mortgages would default, and a very active market for these assets dried up, leaving banks like Northern Rock in real trouble.

That's what led to the liquidity crisis - the drying up of ready cash for the families and businesses who needed it.

It was made all the more difficult to fix because sometimes these investments had been made and bought by individual bankers without them telling their boards, their auditors or the FSA - so nobody who should have had a clear picture of what was going on really did.

The system seized up: the money in your bank isn't just the money which people like you have put into it. Behind the scenes is a series of relationships between banks who all lend to one another, and the whole system works on trust - the confidence that if one bank lends money to another one week, they will be able to borrow in turn if they have particular drains on their reserves the next.

When a big name like Lehmans failed everyone was sort of frozen by fear. For most banks the safest option was to hoard their cash and not lend it to other banks or even their customers, and that has a knock-on effect on the relationship between your bank and you. If your bank isn't sure it can borrow to and lend from other banks, it's not going to be sure it can lend to you.

The failure of regulation: Our financial services sector has brought a lot of wealth to the country and it's been good for businesses more generally, but it's also a sector that moves really fast and whose companies and firms have a global reach, so there's always a time-lag between an innovation in financial services and the ability of a national regulator to make and impose rules that cover it.

Regulation to date has focused at the bank level and at the country level, but what we saw was not the failure of banks in isolation but the failure of global markets themselves. This has led to many lessons on regulation and on how to coordinate regulatory efforts across countries to supervise the global financial system itself.
I've been saying for the last ten years that we need global coordination ... it's only really when things reach a crisis point that people are ready to take bold action together.

I've been saying for the last ten years that we need better regulation and global coordination - after forming the unified regulator for Britain, the FSA, we arranged the Financial Stability Forum for the world - but we all know that processes which involve lots of countries and organisations signing up take a lot of time, and it's only really when things reach a crisis point that people are ready to take bold action together.

Britain's ideas for how we rebuild the financial system so it works in the interests of ordinary people and not financiers are getting a global hearing and other countries are following our lead.

The last ten years: we are so much more interdependent and connected than ever before. It's not just something that's happened in banking - it's everything from the amount of its income Tesco now gets from its stores in other countries to the kids here who play Xbox with strangers in Korea to the fact people are texting photos from family weddings from their phones to relatives on the other side of the world.

The above is technically known as b******s
The Prime Ministers 9:45pm on 23 Feb 2009 I believe the first person to take the title of Prime Minister was Campbell Bannerman. The title was first legally recognised in 1917. Walpole was dead before both of those.

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