History and the lessons no one learns

This is getting boring, the commentators keep going on about the deficit. It isn't surprising the public thinks it is important BUT it isn't.

Keynes realised that there were many lessons to learn from the twenties and thirties of the last century and the lessons still hold true. The first and perhaps, the most important, is that an economy can run in a stable manner with high levels of unemployment. The market does not mean efficiency. The difficulty is that once it has reached such a level it needs something to get it onto a different level. In the past it has often been war but not a solution to be recommended.

The other lesson is that cut public expenditure merely reinforces the situation and the economy can be stuck at an even lower level of efficiency with even higher levels of unemployment. This will depress wages and many people think that this will lead to greater employment. It seems obvious but like many such obvious comments it isn't true, wages might get lowered but so does the economy and so there are no more jobs. It is the same argument with the claim that public expenditure absorbs resources that the private sector can use. This again might make some sense in a booming economy but when the economy is depressed there is little need form the private sector for investment.

In time it would probably be good to bring the levels down but not in the short term. There are much more pressing problems, inequality being the major one. There could be two ways to tackle this, bring down the rich or promote the poor! The difficulty is the rich don't want either and will fight to stop anything happening. Adding to this is the observation that it is the rich who seem to represent us in the media. Listening to Andrew Marr worrying about the deficit is quite funny in an odd way. How much is he going to suffer, perhaps the privately owned media will get the BBC to cut wages. Of course the more you can suppress public sector wages the better. Mr Marr is supposed to be educated, independent school and Cambridge but it was only a degree in English. You would think he would be aware of the myths about the deficit, or at least his researchers would.

No, he just trots out the Tory line as if it were true, it would be interesting to know as he says he was a raving leftie at university. Perhaps at Cambridge it means he was opposed to hunting! His not exactly known for accuracy, how much did he have to pay Erin Pizzey

I am sure that Rupert Murdoch would like to see wages at the BBC cut because then he can pick up staff on the cheap. Perhaps that is what Andrew Marr is hoping for, a nice little contract with Rupert Murdoch

Private Fraud?

I get more & more incensed by the lies and petty deciets of those in the private sector & their political supporters. Note the recent support for Bob Diamond and a man who has managed to make a fortune by gambling with other peoples money. Then somehow claiming that he is clever & able, rather than just lucky. Then there is the neat claim that he helped Barclays avoid the government bail out but people seem to forget that they were bailed out by a middle eastern government.

I quote from The Independent of the 1st November 2008
"Barclays faces the possibility of an investor revolt after announcing it is taking cash from Middle-Eastern investors, at a hefty cost, as an alternative to accepting the UK government bailout which its rivals HBOS, Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland are benefiting from. The bank, which last month turned down the Government bailout offered to the sector, announced yesterday that it will raise £7.3bn from investors in Qatar and Abu Dhabi"

Further quotes
"

The reason the future of Barclays is in the spotlight is that no one believes a word a banker says, writes The Evening Standard's Robert Lea...

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But Barclays' major investors, the Abu Dhabi royal family, have released documentation which reveals that if the UK Government were to make a move it would trigger a clause which would not only deliver the bank into the hands of the Middle Easterners, it would also stipulate that the taxpayer would have to pay way over the current price for the shares.

Read more: http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/markets/article.html?in_article_id=469329&in_page_id=3#ixzz0z0dyTSaY"

So let the commentators tell the whole truth and not pretend that there is something wonderful about the way Barclays Bank has been managed and the Mr Diamond is nothing less than an old time spiv.

Here is another example,
"Transocean dismissed BP's report, accusing the oil giant of having designed a "fatally flawed" well and making "cost-saving decisions that increased risk - in some cases, severely"."

How come if the rig was so badly designed were they willing to run the rig and risk the lives of their workers. It would seem obvious that the owners of Transocean should be charges with negligence at least and homicide at worst.