2030 GMT
London
Sunday
29 November 2009
KHOODEELAAR! TOLD UK G BROWN SO! That imprudence was callous, irresponsible, and reckless and could only cause crisis: Dubai proves it, worse to follow
[To be continued]
AADHIKARonline is republishing [Sunday 29 November 2009] the following article from the Daily Mail, London, UK website: just for reference:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/columnists/article-1231682/WILLIAM-REES-MOGG-Just-like-Dubai-recovery-built-sand.html
WILLIAM REES-MOGG: Just like Dubai, our recovery is built on sand
Last updated at 1:50 PM on 29th November 2009
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Institutions see a nation through the hard times. The Government, Parliament, the Press, the legal system, the defence services, the police, the health service and the Monarchy provide a national focus that helps individuals to survive national crises.
That is true of financial affairs as well as the crises of politics or defence. It is true now of the banking panic.
The first question everyone would like answered is whether the banking crisis is over. Technically, it probably is; in reality it is not.
In technical terms, most countries other than Britain have resumed some economic growth, though at a much lower rate than they enjoyed in 2007 or earlier. Britain will probably have resumed a slow rate of growth in the last quarter of this year and will continue limping towards growth in 2010.
More from William Rees-Mogg...
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WILLIAM REES-MOGG: The decline and fall of the EU empire07/11/09
WILLIAM REES-MOGG: Barack Obama leaves C-list Britain in his tracks31/10/09
WILLIAM REES-MOGG: Why do they think we want President Blair?24/10/09
WILLIAM REES-MOGG: Gordon Brown doesn't get it. Nor did Harold Macmillan17/10/09
WILLIAM REES-MOGG: Some people are sceptical about David Cameron. I'm not...10/10/09
WILLIAM REES-MOGG: The three big tests David Cameron has to tackle03/10/09
VIEW FULL ARCHIVE
But the real question is: has the world economy genuinely recovered? And also: has confidence been restored? Last week's crisis in Dubai suggests it has not. Dubai looks unpleasantly like a Middle Eastern Iceland in which, unfortunately, British banks have invested some £30billion.
This is indeed a deferred cost of the great financial and property bubble that preceded the crash of 2008. Then too much money was pumped into speculative ventures, whose values have collapsed. It could be many years, if ever, before the real-estate values of Dubai recover their pre-2008 levels.
Much of the debt, including the debt owed to the British banks, may never be repaid. The concept of development for Dubai, which is not a major oil producer, was to create a property boom on borrowed money.
This was only a bankable idea because there existed a global excess of funds. Dubai was the victim of a flood of money, just as much as Ireland or Iceland, or the sub-prime housing market in America. Unfortunately, Britain's close relations with Dubai meant that it was British banks who carried a large part of this shaky business.
This will prove to be only one of the aftershocks of the banking crisis. The 2008 crash, which brought down Lehman Brothers, was not Britain's fault, though Lehman Brothers did a great deal of business through London.
One can regard the failure of Lehman Brothers as very similar to the failure of the Knickerbocker Trust in 1907. Banking panics destroy the creditworthiness of banks, which has to be restored one way or the other.
In the development of a bubble, standards of creditworthiness are bound to be relaxed. Banks make their money by borrowing and lending, in good and bad times. In bubbles there is little difficulty either in borrowing money when asset values are rising or in lending money to willing borrowers.
When panic strikes asset prices fall, no one is keen to lend and only the desperate want to expand their borrowing. As the old saying goes: cash is king.
More...
ALEX BRUMMER: Dismiss this new Dubai crisis at your peril
A week ago the world believed, or hoped, that the recession had ended, and that normal banking business could resume. In fact, that has not yet occurred. Bankers have remained keen to strengthen their own balance sheets by borrowing from public funds but have been reluctant to lend - even to good clients.
If the situation had indeed returned to normal, it should be easy for a small businessman to walk into the local branch of his High Street bank and arrange a loan facility as a routine matter of business. The panic has somewhat abated, but complaints are still heard that sound, small businesses find it hard to borrow.
Banking is one of Britain's essential economic institutions. Our economy depends on bankers for our finance just as we depend on soldiers for defence. Yet soldiers do not expect to be paid in millions of pounds, regardless of the results they produce. There is something wrong with a banking system that pays bankers in millions when they have lost money in billions.
In February 1989, I was writing a weekly column for The Independent. A speech was made in the City that included what I thought were exceptionally sound observations on the ethical basis of finance.
'The 30,000 who come to work in the City are reaping the benefits of the reputation for honesty, integrity and fair dealing which has been created by generations of their predecessors. That sort of reputation is beyond price... Free and open markets may be the key to financial success, but if they are to operate fairly and honestly someone has to write the rules and see that they are rigidly enforced... Rules and structures may be important, but much more important are the unwritten rules and the will to abide by them. In the end it is the loyalty and good sense of the citizens themselves which make the whole system work.'
In my column I wrote: 'What worries people about the City is the suspicion that it will only obey written rules, that it has lost its sense of unwritten rules and the will to abide by them.'
If that was the case in 1989, it is certainly the case in 2009. The City used to operate on a much less legalistic basis than Wall Street; the City's code was based on one's word being one's bond.
One concept, which the bankers of my youth accepted, was the overriding duty owed to their clients. A banker used to be a professional adviser with all the commitment that implies. That old relationship needs to be restored.
The 1989 speech was made by the Queen. She was applying to the City the standards she has applied to her own role as Monarch. That is a compliment, but it is also excellent advice.
Perhaps she could be persuaded to become a special adviser to the Bank of England; after all, her head is on all the coins.
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Sunday, November 29, 2009
KHOODEELAAR! evidentially putting in context UK Con Party's 'transport' affairs MP Theresa Villiers: she is up against a Party of Big Biz touts
1720 Hrs GMT
London
Sunday
29 November 2009
Editor © Muhammad Haque
This link has been taken from a UK Con party blog and is being carried here only as a reference item.
http://playpolitical.typepad.com/uk_conservative/2009/11/theresa-villiers-promise-fewer-traffic-lights-and-better-roads-management-in-pledge-to-motorists.html
This item is part of the evidence that we shall be referring to and citing to illustrate the point that Dave Cameron’s UK Con Party is no different now than when Theresa May had suffered its nasty state.
This weekend, we notice the UK Con Party having a go at their current frontbencher on transport in the House of Commons. They are having a go at Theresa Villiers because she is refusing to utter like a moron the zombie lines that the touts of Big Business in the Palace of Ghostsminster are expected to utter and express their allegiance to the authoritarian cult controlling the Executive and the shallow Parliament in Britain propelling the agenda behind the CRASSRail scam.
Villiers may yet be overwhelmed by career considerations before any scheduled general elections in the UK and she too may come unplugged just like the Lib Dems’ Vince Cable did [at Bethnal Green on 15 October 2009, as we have been exclusively reporting and dissecting] on where she and ‘her Party’ stood on the crass Crossrail.
As we have been showing since 2004, the peddlers of Crossrail are irrational and dishonest. And they are at it again inside the Dave Cameron Con Party as they have been inside the Vince Cable Unplugged Party. Just as they have been inside the Blaired Party!
Do the over-the-top-macho-byting UK Con Party ‘bloggers’ realise that it is still early days to utter as if they have ‘got back’ ‘in power’?
If there is any UK Con Party blogger who still has some semblance of familiarity with reality then they are not showing. Most of the UK Con Party bloggers are die-hard reactionaries and intolerants who will not make society better at all of they are the ones that grab the pillars and hold the posts come an actual election letting them in.
And notwithstanding the latest display of idiocy in asking the Rees-Mogg family to tone down their own brand of brazenness, David ‘Dave’ Cameron is not showing real signs that he will mend ‘the broken society’.
The lunacy that the UK CON party is showing is not going to bring an end to aggressive postures internationally nor is it going to make things rational domestically.
Not if the idiotic frenetic zealous fanatic subservience to the Military Industrial Complex and the dictates of BECHTEL disguised as ‘electorally trendy’ [now that one we shall examine in some detail soon] ploys is anything to go by.
And the pathetic shamelessness in the UK Con Party – which is still gloating of Thatcher and her jingoistic records at home and abroad – posing as the Party of ‘mending society’ via the ‘offices of IDS’ cannot be got across without actually remembering how that Party broke society in the past and how it will smash what remains of society in the future.
How is that going to be proven?
Take a look at ‘Dave’ ‘Eton-Bullingdon Club’ Cameron’s treatment of David Davis in June 2008. Davis was the Party’s Home Affairs front man in the UK House of Commons when he made the startling announcement that he was quitting as an MP and seeking re-election as a tangible protest against the erosion of civil liberties and other attacks on society. What did ‘Dave’ do and say? He DISTANCED himself from Davis and said as much as he could to confirm his distance. His main sentence uttered within minutes of being told that Davis had actually held an impromptu ‘News Conference’ at an entrance to the ‘Palace of Westminster’ outlining his reasons for resigning, was about his [Eaton-Bullingdon Club ‘Dave’] priority of ‘leading the Party’!
NOT one word about the core cause that Davis had cited.
And in the weeks that followed that and throughout the period of the by-election chatter, neither “Bullingdon Club’ Dave nor any of his cohorts found the time or the reason to elaborate on the Davis 'manifesto'.
The UK Con Party ‘led’ by Dave [!!!!] Cameron said as little as they could manage without coming across to the lowest common denominator of the brainwashed members of the electorate that they were in fact condemning Davis for daring to question the authoritarian trend in UK society which G Brown was aggravating and backing.
It is not a surprise then that the same Cameron gang BACKED the CRASSrail scam in BOTH Houses as it was passaged and massaged against the evidence. That the CRASSrail scam is exposed even by the OTHER ‘rational’ utterances on ‘economics’, and ‘finance’ by Cameron’s gangsters is not an irony that either Cameron or any of his gangsters is capable of noticing.
IF the Cameron gang do get in after any scheduled elections, one thing will definitely get worse: any so-called ‘parliamentary scrutiny of the executive’
[To be continued]
London
Sunday
29 November 2009
Editor © Muhammad Haque
This link has been taken from a UK Con party blog and is being carried here only as a reference item.
http://playpolitical.typepad.com/uk_conservative/2009/11/theresa-villiers-promise-fewer-traffic-lights-and-better-roads-management-in-pledge-to-motorists.html
This item is part of the evidence that we shall be referring to and citing to illustrate the point that Dave Cameron’s UK Con Party is no different now than when Theresa May had suffered its nasty state.
This weekend, we notice the UK Con Party having a go at their current frontbencher on transport in the House of Commons. They are having a go at Theresa Villiers because she is refusing to utter like a moron the zombie lines that the touts of Big Business in the Palace of Ghostsminster are expected to utter and express their allegiance to the authoritarian cult controlling the Executive and the shallow Parliament in Britain propelling the agenda behind the CRASSRail scam.
Villiers may yet be overwhelmed by career considerations before any scheduled general elections in the UK and she too may come unplugged just like the Lib Dems’ Vince Cable did [at Bethnal Green on 15 October 2009, as we have been exclusively reporting and dissecting] on where she and ‘her Party’ stood on the crass Crossrail.
As we have been showing since 2004, the peddlers of Crossrail are irrational and dishonest. And they are at it again inside the Dave Cameron Con Party as they have been inside the Vince Cable Unplugged Party. Just as they have been inside the Blaired Party!
Do the over-the-top-macho-byting UK Con Party ‘bloggers’ realise that it is still early days to utter as if they have ‘got back’ ‘in power’?
If there is any UK Con Party blogger who still has some semblance of familiarity with reality then they are not showing. Most of the UK Con Party bloggers are die-hard reactionaries and intolerants who will not make society better at all of they are the ones that grab the pillars and hold the posts come an actual election letting them in.
And notwithstanding the latest display of idiocy in asking the Rees-Mogg family to tone down their own brand of brazenness, David ‘Dave’ Cameron is not showing real signs that he will mend ‘the broken society’.
The lunacy that the UK CON party is showing is not going to bring an end to aggressive postures internationally nor is it going to make things rational domestically.
Not if the idiotic frenetic zealous fanatic subservience to the Military Industrial Complex and the dictates of BECHTEL disguised as ‘electorally trendy’ [now that one we shall examine in some detail soon] ploys is anything to go by.
And the pathetic shamelessness in the UK Con Party – which is still gloating of Thatcher and her jingoistic records at home and abroad – posing as the Party of ‘mending society’ via the ‘offices of IDS’ cannot be got across without actually remembering how that Party broke society in the past and how it will smash what remains of society in the future.
How is that going to be proven?
Take a look at ‘Dave’ ‘Eton-Bullingdon Club’ Cameron’s treatment of David Davis in June 2008. Davis was the Party’s Home Affairs front man in the UK House of Commons when he made the startling announcement that he was quitting as an MP and seeking re-election as a tangible protest against the erosion of civil liberties and other attacks on society. What did ‘Dave’ do and say? He DISTANCED himself from Davis and said as much as he could to confirm his distance. His main sentence uttered within minutes of being told that Davis had actually held an impromptu ‘News Conference’ at an entrance to the ‘Palace of Westminster’ outlining his reasons for resigning, was about his [Eaton-Bullingdon Club ‘Dave’] priority of ‘leading the Party’!
NOT one word about the core cause that Davis had cited.
And in the weeks that followed that and throughout the period of the by-election chatter, neither “Bullingdon Club’ Dave nor any of his cohorts found the time or the reason to elaborate on the Davis 'manifesto'.
The UK Con Party ‘led’ by Dave [!!!!] Cameron said as little as they could manage without coming across to the lowest common denominator of the brainwashed members of the electorate that they were in fact condemning Davis for daring to question the authoritarian trend in UK society which G Brown was aggravating and backing.
It is not a surprise then that the same Cameron gang BACKED the CRASSrail scam in BOTH Houses as it was passaged and massaged against the evidence. That the CRASSrail scam is exposed even by the OTHER ‘rational’ utterances on ‘economics’, and ‘finance’ by Cameron’s gangsters is not an irony that either Cameron or any of his gangsters is capable of noticing.
IF the Cameron gang do get in after any scheduled elections, one thing will definitely get worse: any so-called ‘parliamentary scrutiny of the executive’
[To be continued]