Non- Rugby Related Chat. Please note that this forum is moderated. If you wish to make comments for the club's attention please do so in Fans Forum and not this one.
Things are evolving rapidly and now it seems that the Greeks won't have teir referendum. Too bad. It is always sound and sane to ask people for their advice. The people I mean. But what really matters is the question you ask...
My question would be :
- your government cooked the books to get in the Euro zone with the help of Goldman Sachs, vast spending plans were subsequantly allowed with money you didn't have: are you prepared to pay this money back or do you want to leave the euro zone and see your economy possibly shrink by 30% or more?
It's a little long for a question, I know but it is better than a mere ukaze saying: give the censored money back you lazy thieves!
Well us Brits are also used to not getting a referendum. In 2006 only 34% of us liked it, given us the lowest approval rating of anywhere.
But just as when we expresss a desire to bring back corporal punishment, or capital punishment, or visible policing, or smaller hospitals, or more Post Offices nd not fewer, then our intellectual MPs regard us as a thick misguided electorate that should only be listened when they need us to vote them in.
Kicks and scrums and ruck and roll.....Is all my brain and body need!
I have never understood how one can have monetary union without political union. The USA is a federal organisation of,effectively, 50 individual small countries. The federal government has over-arching taxation and budgetary powers which is why it works.
I think the Greek referendum is clever. If he wins, then he has a mandate for cuts etc. If he loses, then he walks away "trusting the people" and does not preside over bad stuff and can be re-elected later when it's over.
IMHO is all just smoke and mirrors by politicions. There is no way out for Greece or the Eurozone in general. The banking system is insolvent and will eventually be nationailised. At some point the ECB will resort to printing money (QE) and debase the euro.
The thing is, this is not an economic recession. Its a historic deleveraging of excess debt that has ballooned over the last decade. The world is basically fighting a deflationary depression, and eventually the markets will win. My bet is that everything goes a lot, lot lower.
The elected politicians of the 20 richest nations cannot make policy for fear of what the markets may do. Ergo, close the markets at a stroke, using each countries' forces at a given signal. Then open them under government control to lend to businesses.
The governments ARE the problem, not the markets. What the govenrments have been trying to do for the last 3 years in prop up a failed ponzi scheme.
If they had let the markets run their course in 2008, then all those who had made bad decisons would have been cleaned out and the world could rebuild again. All they have done is add oodles more debt, but a sovereign level..ans as we are seeing its all going to get defaulted on.
This is probably not the place but:
1. If you believe in democracy it should not be possible to have governments dictated to by corporations and anonymous market traders.
2. What the bankers and their cronies in hedge funds, pension funds and other financial institutions have proved is that they have no discernible morality.
Ben Elton's 1989 novel Stark depicted the idea that the World was realistically being run by a handful of organisations controlled by handful of men who knew full well what was happening to the World and had no time at all for poiticians.
Oddly enough, 6 years earleir I was overseas working for a massive commercial organisation and by a series of happenings ended up standing at a drinks party, way out of my league, surrounded by powerful men.
We were later joined by a tall dignitary who turned out to be the CEO of this huge enterprise I was working for. He looked a bit tired, so I offered to get him a G&T or something and it looked like the best offer he'd had all day.
When I returned to the group they were eagerly quizzing the CEO on what had been his afternoon meeting with the President of a nation of 120,000,000 people.
He was utterly disinterested, just shrugging off the questions, yet when I handed him his drink he beamed at me, said "thank you" very graciously and then started asking me about where I sat in his organisation.
Kicks and scrums and ruck and roll.....Is all my brain and body need!
Old Hob wrote:This is probably not the place but:
1. If you believe in democracy it should not be possible to have governments dictated to by corporations and anonymous market traders.
2. What the bankers and their cronies in hedge funds, pension funds and other financial institutions have proved is that they have no discernible morality.
I have no problem with the issue that bankers have behave immorally or recklessly. But the point is that they did exactly what the government regulators allowed to them do. Without that compliance from the regulator then none of the banking crisis in the UK could have happened.
Its a bit like the overwhelming immigration into the UK of the last decade. Nobody blames the immigrants. They quite rightly blame the government who failed to prvoide the correct controls and regulation.
The financial regulators job is to look at the bank balance sheets and say are these instituations managing the correct risk in the event of a financial crisis. Obviously they were 30, 40 or 50 ..1 leveraged on their capital base and were completely out of the control.
A governments job is to prevent these crisis happening in the first place, not to cry over spilt milk after the fact.
I see. On the one hand "The government is the problem" but on the other it has to solve all the problems caused by others. In the past we have been hard on immigrants, benefit fraudsters and other groups. Now is the time to be hard on bankers and others. Their immorality is killing people and
When I returned to the group they were eagerly quizzing the CEO on what had been his afternoon meeting with the President of a nation of 120,000,000 people.
He was utterly disinterested, just shrugging off the questions, yet when I handed him his drink he beamed at me, said "thank you" very graciously and then started asking me about where I sat in his organisation.
If you'd spent the day talking with a politician would you want to spend your evening going over the discussions with the slime ball or would prefer to have a coversation with the nice employee who is providing you with booze (surely that's a promotable action)?
I have no problem with the issue that bankers have behave immorally or recklessly. But the point is that they did exactly what the government regulators allowed to them do. Without that compliance from the regulator then none of the banking crisis in the UK could have happened.
The problem is that a good deal of bankers, hedge fund managers etc etc, are just trying to do their job which is normally make money for the organisation they work for. Their bonuses are not based on how well the economy is going it is based on targets to them. They might all be doing stand out jobs as far as their small scale targets are concerned and if this is turning out to be a bad thing for the nation then surely you should punish the organisations that manage them and the bodies that regulate these corporate organisations. Not the person who is just trying to fulfill the criteria of his contract so he can afford a holiday.
The "I was just doing my job" argument has been a non-starter since Nuremburg. The bankers concerned chose that lifestyle/ career. They must know that what they do is wholly repugnant.
The bankers werent repugnant in the eyes of the public until it all blew up in 2008. `Between 2000 and 2008 millions of people in our country were happy to discuss how much their house had gone up, or how many holidays they had been on, or the new car they had just bought. They were all doing the same thing as bankers...that is running on unsustainable debt and credit, and thinking the bubble was sustainable.
Old Hob..just to claify my point. I dont want to see governments trying to mop up the mess they have made..not least because they are incompetent indoing so. What i ask of the government is that they prevent it happening in the first place.
This issue with bankers is not global. Its not every country. There are many, many great countries that have little or no banking crisis. Why ? because they regulated them properly in the first place. The same reason that they dont have the immigration problems, or the crime problems or the education problems. Because the put the right controls and systems in place at the beginning.
