The Labour Government

The Future’s Blue! said:
Interesting. Many economic experts said that Brown was the shining light in dealing with the banking issue, and I tend to agree.

What he wasn’t, was the leader the country needed following the huge issues it created.

Trying to blame Brown for the banking crash is simplistic, especially trying to use the sale of gold as another stick to hit him with.
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He wasn't to blame for the crisis but was caught with his trousers down.
What followed next was all things Gordon, a well intentioned idea that ultimately has disastrous unintended consequences, in this case QE .
Bemoaning the growth of wealth inequality in the UK in the last 25 years ? - Gordon is your man, nobody has done more to exacerbate it.
 
Hertzblue said:
He wasn't to blame for the crisis but was caught with his trousers down.
What followed next was all things Gordon, a well intentioned idea that ultimately has disastrous unintended consequences, in this case QE .
Bemoaning the growth of wealth inequality in the UK in the last 25 years ? - Gordon is your man, nobody has done more to exacerbate it.
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I’d say Mark Zuckerberg has done far more than Gordon Brown to exacerbate wealth inequality in the UK. Not saying what his platforms produce is all bad btw. Far from it. It’s far more nuanced than that.
 
Churchlawtonblue said:
They may have done, but it was Brown as Chancellor that deregulated them. He also sold off our gold reserves at the bottom of the market costing us tens of billions. The guy was a complete disaster.
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The gold story is an old favourite of the Tories. In retrospect it wasn’t a great idea but for many years gold underperformed many other investments so it wasn’t a totally stupid thing to do at the time, and the amount lost to the country ended up being equivalent to less than 1% of GDP for one year.

As for being a disaster, most economic experts agree that his response to the GFC actually prevented much bigger problems. The real fuck ups started when Cameron and Osborne and their successors kept austerity going for far too long.
 
Churchlawtonblue said:
They may have done, but it was Brown as Chancellor that deregulated them. He also sold off our gold reserves at the bottom of the market costing us tens of billions. The guy was a complete disaster.
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Little known fact ... Between 1970-71 the Bank of England sold nearly half of our gold reserves. Just like the Brown sell-off, it was sold at a historic low of about $42.5/oz in October 1971. Only a year later it was worth $65/oz. This was done under the Tories and Edward Heath and had to be a much larger sale and loss as by the time Brown got to it half had already been sold so in effect Brown only sold a quarter of what was originally held in reserve with the Conservative Heath government selling off half.
 
Vic said:
Is that a fact?
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Yes it is.

He was a very frequent visitor. You should note that the official record of guests at Chequers only states who visited during a period, and not whether a person visited multiple times and how frequently. Which is just as well for Mr Broon.
 
west didsblue said:
The gold story is an old favourite of the Tories. In retrospect it wasn’t a great idea but for many years gold underperformed many other investments so it wasn’t a totally stupid thing to do at the time, and the amount lost to the country ended up being equivalent to less than 1% of GDP for one year.

As for being a disaster, most economic experts agree that his response to the GFC actually prevented much bigger problems. The real fuck ups started when Cameron and Osborne and their successors kept austerity going for far too long.
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Why we hold any appreciable gold reserves at all just sounds stupid to me.

It's the equivalent of shoving money under your bed for a rainy day whilst borrowing money on your credit card so that you can afford to eat. The rain has been pouring in through the roof for 20 years.
 
inbetween said:
Why we hold any appreciable gold reserves at all just sounds stupid to me.

It's the equivalent of shoving money under your bed for a rainy day whilst borrowing money on your credit card so that you can afford to eat. The rain has been pouring in through the roof for 20 years.
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Sounds a bit like the Rags.
 
west didsblue said:
The gold story is an old favourite of the Tories. In retrospect it wasn’t a great idea but for many years gold underperformed many other investments so it wasn’t a totally stupid thing to do at the time, and the amount lost to the country ended up being equivalent to less than 1% of GDP for one year.

As for being a disaster, most economic experts agree that his response to the GFC actually prevented much bigger problems. The real fuck ups started when Cameron and Osborne and their successors kept austerity going for far too long.
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I disagree, 100% it was Brown that deregulated the banking sector in the UK before the collapse. He was a major factor in their collapse, he has admitted such in several interviews since.

You cant praise an arsonist for putting out the fire he started.
 
Vic said:
Good grief, not again.

It would only have cost us billions if Brown hadn't sold it then and a future government decided to sell when the price of gold rose. What chancellor is ever likely to sell gold now - for fear that it would rise higher?

Can you tell me all the economists who knew the price of gold would rise as it did?

Instead we've had years of interest on the bonds Brown bought with the gold.

And Tory privatisations at less than market value cost far more.
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Two wrongs don't make a right Vic. Just because the Torries messed up doesn't mean Labour didn't aswell.

Why is it so hard for you Labour fan boys to admit that Labour has made mistakes. That's a pretty naive attitude to have especially with politics.
 
Churchlawtonblue said:
I disagree, 100% it was Brown that deregulated the banking sector in the UK before the collapse. He was a major factor in their collapse, he has admitted such in several interviews since.

You cant praise an arsonist for putting out the fire he started.
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www.bbc.co.uk

Gordon Brown admits 'big mistake' over banking crisis

Gordon Brown admits he made a "big mistake" over the handling of financial regulation in the run-up to the UK's banking crisis of 2008.
www.bbc.co.uk www.bbc.co.uk

The Tories were a tad cheeky mind it would certainly have hapoened under them, reminds me of the Iraq war, the Tories would have been up the yanks arses on that but they still used it for point scoring.
Like Labour playing the blame game now, which has some merit, we know it will continue long
beyond the point of it becoming desperate.
 
Churchlawtonblue said:
I disagree, 100% it was Brown that deregulated the banking sector in the UK before the collapse. He was a major factor in their collapse, he has admitted such in several interviews since.

You cant praise an arsonist for putting out the fire he started.
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Did he live in the USA?
I seem to remember the GFC started there with subprime mortgages and a property crash and went worldwide. Whilst financial deregulation was a significant factor, it was what all our competitors were doing as well.

What collapse are you talking about? Most sectors of the economy took a huge hit including the banks but they didn’t collapse (with one or two exceptions) because the government bailed them out which prevented a financial disaster becoming a catastrophe. Although the bailout initially cost hundreds of billions, the vast majority of the costs have been recovered over time, albeit more slowly than they could have been due to protracted austerity.
 
west didsblue said:
Did he live in the USA?
I seem to remember the GFC started there with subprime mortgages and a property crash and went worldwide. Whilst financial deregulation was a significant factor, it was what all our competitors were doing as well.

What collapse are you talking about? Most sectors of the economy took a huge hit including the banks but they didn’t collapse (with one or two exceptions) because the government bailed them out which prevented a financial disaster becoming a catastrophe. Although the bailout initially cost hundreds of billions, the vast majority of the costs have been recovered over time, albeit more slowly than they could have been due to protracted austerity.
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He deregulated the uk financial sector in the years leading up to the collapse. Anyway I can see where this is going, so I'm going to bow out now rather than waste anymore of my time or yours. Have a good day.
 
Churchlawtonblue said:
I disagree, 100% it was Brown that deregulated the banking sector in the UK before the collapse. He was a major factor in their collapse, he has admitted such in several interviews since.

You cant praise an arsonist for putting out the fire he started.
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Brown wasn’t a major factor. Labour went with a light touch on the City because it was booming and why meddle with something that was working. What they, and pretty much everyone else, didn’t realise was the degree of entanglement between institutions and across borders and no amount of regulation was going to firewall against that, unless it was a joint US/UK initiative and that was never going to happen.

The gold sale is tedious. It was a call based on data at the time and it was nigh on 25 years ago. It was a blip that barely registers. The fact that have had six PM’s in the last decade and the erosion of political stability, not to mention junking our foreign and industrial strategy has been far more damaging and we are still struggling with the consequences.
 
west didsblue said:
Did he live in the USA?
I seem to remember the GFC started there with subprime mortgages and a property crash and went worldwide. Whilst financial deregulation was a significant factor, it was what all our competitors were doing as well.

What collapse are you talking about? Most sectors of the economy took a huge hit including the banks but they didn’t collapse (with one or two exceptions) because the government bailed them out which prevented a financial disaster becoming a catastrophe. Although the bailout initially cost hundreds of billions, the vast majority of the costs have been recovered over time, albeit more slowly than they could have been due to protracted austerity.
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I completely agree.

No one could have predicted that anything bad would happen to UK banks - other than a £700bn funding gap and RBS funding itself on overnight money by 2005 - and it was only a few of them that actually went bust.

The government only had to guarantee 90% of losses on UK bank debt and although they had to underwrite the entirety of the interbank market to stop it from melting down, that was only for a year or so. And the cost of this was pretty insignificant as well. The government only had to increase the amount of gilts in issue by 25% - hundreds of billions- in a single year to avoid a collapse of the financial system, so I don’t know what people are complaining about. I think they’ve just got an agenda against Gordon Brown.

Frankly, people have the same sort of shitty attitude when they talk about the Titanic. Everyone goes on about it sinking and the catastrophic loss of life, but it only hit the one iceberg and a few people did survive. Plus people generally had a good time on the first few nights of the voyage.
 
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