Gordon McRuin's tripartite regulation of the banks, loose money policy with too low interest rate to keep the economy growing on the back of a housing bubble, massive expansion and overspending of borrowed and taxpayers money on public services so they were running a large deficit at the top of the economic cycle and his Canute like efforts to justify it by extending the economic cycle and abolishing boom and bust not only exposed that he and his arrogant team were totally and utterly incompetent, but total and utter fools as well. Like the Conservatives with their ERM fiasco they deserve to be out of office for a generation (or more) as the electorate quite rightly punish unnecessary financial hardship through Government stupidity and incompetence.
And when disaster struck they were true to form, total incompetents, when it came to the Northern Rock situation, followed by Natwest and then organising a shotgun marriage to save Edinburgh based HBOS which dragged down Lloyds-TSB as well.
The banks obviously played their part as well, especially Fred the Shed and is an abject lesson on just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should do something.
McRuin's working tax credits have also been a disaster which have held back wage rises and the Conservatives are correct to reform this and to push up the minimum wage and promote the working wage, which more organisations are adopting. Working tax credits subsidize low wage paying companies, which distorts the labour market and is wrong.
I agree that the reform of sickness benefit has been unnecessarily callus, which is why I backed the campaign to get deaths released for those stopped their sickness benefits. Bad political policies and systems need to be exposed, regardless who is in power.
Interesting paper recently by the well respected Brookings Institute in the US which shows that US Corporations now target quarterly share prices, earnings and dividends at the expense of wages and long term investment and long term earnings. It is basically a combination of three things; changes to corporate and investment laws, management targets and bonuses and aggressive very active investors who all too readily reach for their lawyers if targets aren't met. This has resulted in the biggest growth industry in the US is public company share buy-backs! 50% of sorting problems is identifying them, so hopefully changes will be made or companies outside of the US will benefit long term with greater R&D spending, better products and earnings.
Although I'm a free market capitalist, I'm more of the Joseph Cadbury mold than Tiny Rolands, where there has to be a social dimension to businesses and markets, they can't operate in isolation from the effects they have on people, the environment and the world. Having had experience of dealing with companies in most parts of the world I prefer the UK's and Japanese 'gentlemanly' capitalism to the dog-eat-dog US style. IME generally in Europe the further south the company is you are dealing with the more you have to watch them and the tighter have to be any credit terms.
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Topic: Labour leadership battle. (Read 4152 times)