[RicyReetred]

Why not just print up more $$$ ... going to work wonders in Amerika

BBC News - Spending Review 2010: George Osborne wields the axe

Up to 500,000 public sector jobs could go by 2014-15 as a result of the cuts programme, according to the Office for Budgetary Responsibility.

Mr Osborne has not set out in detail where the jobs will go but he admitted there will be some redundancies in the public sector, which he said were unavoidable when the country had run out of money.

Government departments facing major cuts to their budgets include the Home Office, on 6%, including a 20% cut in government funding for police over four years, the Foreign Office, facing 24% cuts, and the Cabinet Office, which will see its budget slashed by 35%.

The justice department is facing cuts of 6%, with 3,000 fewer prison places over four years.

[advabHixavoip]

Do you equally think that austerity will bring prosperity to Britain with this move? If you do you will see how this turns out for Britain. Ireland and Greece are prime examples of how damaging such a political and ideological decision such as this will be for Britain. As far as printing money..just like the US...Britain is beholden to the central bank known as the ECB which works in the interests of HSBC, Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland Group and not the broader economy. Just like in the US, the people of Britain are paying for the bad gambling debts of the Banks.....

Finally you cannot really compare the US money printing operation via the Fed (NY FED in particular) to that of the ECB since the US dollar is still the world's reserve currency and de facto currency used in international trade which includes commodities such as oil! While this status is becoming tenuous due to the US abusing its currency hegemony and the Chinese, Russians etc angling themselves.... the Euro is still essentially just a derivative of the dollar and the ECB not on par with the US Fed. They don't have the leverage the US does in printing fiat currency at will and engaging in economic war. Again this is not an endorsement of QE since it is causing all sorts of havoc and will be damaging in the long run to the US's money printing monopoly. However, it will be damaging only b/c the US is acting not in good faith and abusing it's status as the reserve currency. This is why the the Chinese have said..we are making our own tomb ...

[SallyIsNice5]

I will first state my ignorance of this subject, but I am curious. Since the British still use the pound, are they as beholden to the ECB as European nations that use the Euro? I thought one of the reasons they kept the pound was to be able to manipulate its value to control inflation/deflation when they thought they needed to?

I live in France and have more than a passing fascination with economics, read: don't know **** but have lots of opinions but open to other opinions (ps I am joking), all nations seem to be going through austerity measures. What are some of the alternatives. I mean part of the problem is pension systems were not designed to support such long living peoples but also many pension systems lost 20-30% of their values when markets tanked recently.

Is it reasonable to ask the public to pick up the slack for tanking markets, tanking markets that may again become exuberant. I mean if it were a tradeoff, pay more in the short term while things are bad, if the markets come back we can go back to the previous arrangement, but if not we will be stuck with these austere plans. People paying into their pension funds didn't do anything but keep up their part of the bargain no?

But I am a pragmatist as well, if these funds are unsustainable then something has to change, but are they really unsustainable, and are these austere plans the best solution?

[RicyReetred]

Doc; the economic & political philosophy in Europe as a whole will not allow prosperity. I do agree w/ the austerity measures for many reasons but that would be ideologue talk. Austerity alone will not bring ‘prosperity’ to Britain as they are to developed, Pink, and wrapped up in PC, Taxes, and Regulation (sound familiar). That said; the more wasteful spending they take out of the public sector with these measures there is a better chance it sloshes around in the private sector which will create some wealth not destroy it. Look to the UK 1st in many cultural, economic, & political developments. This is especially true with political correctness which is ridiculous there. Since Thatcher; we have seen England (UK) move further and further left as we (USSA) follow. The UK’s 'romance' with Conservatives will NOT last; the ‘servants’ will revolt and England will be facing a crisis similar to Greece & what we see today in France. Too many leeches already on the public trough.

Excuse me for my ignorance; isn’t the UK beholden to the Bank of England which issues the UK’s currency & sets their monetary policy? Irrelevant anyhow b/ I may step into conspiracy land to discuss which family controls all the CB’s. I do agree whose interest the ECB, and all Central Banks, work for and it sure isn’t the people. Devaluing currency thru very low interest rates & monetizing debt (money printing) tends to favor a borrower over saver. The largest borrowers around the globe are banks, speculators and large corporations who take advantage of the situation. The largest savers globally are the citizens and their wealth gets destroyed. That is why I am a big advocate of either phasing out the Fed and/or backing our currency by gold or silver; silver being my choice.

It is irrelevant to me to compare the US currency and the Euro, Pound, etc. Print up enough dollars and we have global inflation & hyper on our shores. Print up enough euros, yuan, etc .. and inflation can run rampant in said country (see Weimar) .. who gets hurt the most .. the savers (citizens) of said country and investors financing the planners.

Austerity won’t bring prosperity to the UK but it is a move in the right direction. What is the alternative, raise taxes? Increase spending? When is enough enough? Is there no limit????

[advabHixavoip]

I had a reply all written out and then the database crapped out on me when I tried to post it...grrr!

Anyway, the short of my answer is that you are correct that technically the BOE is the Central Bank that the Brits are beholden to but from a much larger Eurozone perspective the influence of Britain on the ECB monetary policy via membership on the General Council is what I'm speaking of. Generally, the BOE and ECB coordinate their policies like they have done with QE. BOE as more of a sovereign institution has more leverage than the ECB in how it can engage in money printing. However, they have now taken the alternate path more damaging path to "save the banks" at the expense of the broader economy which I repeat is NOT a move in the right direction. Ireland and Greece have already shown what austerity means. When you talk about alternatives and continue to trot out the tax and spend meme..you are oversimplifying the situation and the true agenda of austerity and what it means for the general population and who it really benefits. Again this is about making whole the banks that gave out toxic loans to create bubbles in places such as Iceland and Ireland. This is why England's influence on the ECB is important..they are lobbying for the interests of their banks to get their pound of economic flesh from Ireland for example. Why do you think the Real IRA made that statement about the British banks recently??? This about putting the people in the hole for the bad gambling debts of the major investment banks. This is about transferrance of private debt on to public's balance sheet and then claiming it is "sovereign" debt and cutting entitlements as result when the liabilities of the banks and their toxic leveraged positions dwarf the entitlement liabilities. This is what is causing the global balance sheet recession. The alternative is to not make the people and real economy pay for the sins/bad gambling debts of the banks so they can "grow" out of their insolvent positions...it's about making the people who are responsible pay! If it means bankruptcy so be it.....austerity is an ideological political decision not grounded in sound economics PERIOD! It's a collusion between the political establishment and financial elites. It is the continuence of grand larceny on a scale not seen in history...since it is global. The central banks and the central banking architecture is about the destruction of sovereign states by an international cartel of global financial elites..the sooner you understand this maybe you'll be less inclined to support the insiduous agenda....

[SallyIsNice5]

"The alternative is not to make the people and real economy pay . . . " What would this look like. Please don't read any positions or judgements into this, I am just curious, France is going through a big fight right now and it is hard to imagine what it will look like, an unfortunately only the fiscal conservatives have proposed a plan, the left is just against the plan but does not put their own plan forward. I find the subject fascinating, but won't claim to know more than I do.

[advabHixavoip]

"The alternative is not to make the people and real economy pay . . . " What would this look like. Please don't read any positions or judgements into this, I am just curious, France is going through a big fight right now and it is hard to imagine what it will look like, an unfortunately only the fiscal conservatives have proposed a plan, the left is just against the plan but does not put their own plan forward. I find the subject fascinating, but won't claim to know more than I do.

I've written about this in a number of threads actually...here is an example

http://www.philadelphiaspeaks.com/fo...tml#post194784


The fact is that the debts have to be restructured and written off and the banks have to take the haircut which would mean some would go bankrupt officially. What governments including that of France has done is nationalize private debt. The economy cannot grow in excess of the debts..period. Austerity that the fiscal conservatives are proposing is not a solution..I REPEAT...not a solution. It a a political decision and an ideological one not grounded in sound economics. It is junk economics. Don't believe me..then keep track in the next couple of years how damaging for the real economy it will be. Equally the QE (mistaken as stimulus when it's a massive subsidy to banks) that central banks are engaging in is an abuse of sovereign credit since it benefits the financial kleptocracy b/c they are first to the cheap money. Do you think these people who are sitting on piles of free cash from the Fed/central banks want inflation? No..they want deflation and governments to sell public assets at fire sale/distressed prices. This is the stuff of corporatism. This is the agenda of austerity.

In the meantime, we have currency disorder in the emerging markets. This is why the chinese said the US nationalized it's private debt and now wants to internationalize it by cheapening the dollar and exporting inflation and building up a global asset bubble around the world because of the hot money it is creating which will end in disaster eventually especially if everybody goes their separate ways. The G20 meeting in Nov is about trying to establish some semblance of order but as long as the US manipulates the dollar and engages in economic warfare there won't be a smooth rebalancing.

Anyway..here is some further input in how to deal with the toxic parasitic banks who refuse to pay for their gambling losses which because of their leveraged derivatives positions amounts to trillions....

[advabHixavoip]

This is precisely what I was talking about in my previous posts about what the real deal is with austerity in Ireland and the world over. This is about the broader economies paying the price and making the parasitic banks whole! No more and no less....

A leading economist who predicted Ireland's property collapse is forecasting a new wave of toxic debt could sink the country entirely, this time related to domestic mortgages. As the premium demanded by investors to hold Irish debt hit fresh highs today, Morgan Kelly predicted a 19th-century-style land revolt by the public, warning their patience over the bank bailout is wearing thin.

Irish household were stretching themselves to the maximum to pay mortgages they cannot afford because of the stigma attached to default. "That will change," Kelly wrote in the Irish Times. "The perception growing among borrowers is that while they played by the rules, the banks certainly did not, cynically persuading them into mortgages that they had no hope of affording." The bolded paragraph tells the entire story!

Kelly was vilified when he warned of a property crash in 2007 and this year he said he had been made to feel that he had broken some kind of "Omerta" by speaking out about the state of the economy. Today he painted a bleak picture of the future and implied that hundreds of thousands would go into mortgage default. "The gathering mortgage crisis puts Ireland on the cusp of a social conflict on the scale of the Land War," he said, in reference to public defiance in the 19th century when tenants refused to pay their rents, leading to the phrase "boycotting".

On the bank bailout, he says Ireland has been played brilliantly by the ECB, adding: "Everyone is a winner, or everyone who matters, at least… The Germans and French banks whose solvency is the overriding concern of the ECB get their money back. Senior Irish policymakers get to roll over and have their tummy tickled by their European overlords and be told what good sports they have been. And best of all... the senior management of the banks that caused this crisis get to enjoy their richly earned rewards."

Ireland's new toxic loans will spark social conflict, says economist | Business | The Guardian

[advabHixavoip]

Erin go broke.....French and German banks made whole...
Ireland's young flee abroad as economic meltdown looms

Many young people are seeking to emigrate rather than face a life of hardship as the republic lurches towards financial collapse

Student Niamh Buffini works hard and plays hard. As Ireland's No 1 taekwondo martial arts practitioner – she is rated 12th in the world – her ambitions include winning Olympic gold for Ireland.

But by the end of this month her future will have been decided by forces not just beyond her control but seemingly those of her government also. Ireland is on the cusp of insolvency. Some economists argue that it already is.

Buffini will soon learn if her fees at the Institute of Technology in Tallaght, south Dublin, have climbed beyond her means. Her father is a self-employed builder, which has recently become a euphemism for "unemployed".

"My class size will have dropped by 50% by next year," Buffini said. "Even lecturers took part in the recent student protests over fees because society here is going to be left with very few educated people. My best friends have already left – they're doing bar work in Spain and Australia."

Last week was not a good week for Ireland. Speculation about a European Union-backed bailout pushed its borrowing costs to unprecedented heights.

At Buffini's college on Friday, the day began with a protest by construction workers who were supposed to have been working on a new wing. Their paymaster Michael McNamara – the country's premier construction firm – had been put into receivership under the weight of debts of €1.5bn (£1.27bn), leaving them jobless and out of pocket for work they had already completed.

So far the workers' demonstrations have remained largely peaceful. Indeed, many Tallaght students seemed shocked by the violence they witnessed in TV reports from London involving their British counterparts. But that may change.

Ireland's young flee abroad as economic meltdown looms | World news | The Observer

[mikefertynnz]

Don't flee to Canada.

Canada's housing markets in its most inflated cities that attract the most foreign immigrants (Toronto and Vancouver) is near the cusp of collapse. It's taken a lot longer for them to feel the effect because personal consumption in Canada is high, but personal debt levels among Canadians is very high and consumers in Canada who haven't seen pay increases and job cuts are starting to cut back---primarily because 60% of Canada's business is dealing with the US, who have even cut back on Canada's best export---its natural resources.

[mikefertynnz]

BTW Doom, the sanest option Ireland needs to do is untie itself from Europe. It's farthest removed from the continent anyway.

Going back to the pound would made more sense, and creditors MUST share some pain unless Ireland wants to spend decades in a miasma. I'm sure if Ireland decoupled and striked a bunch of bilateral trade deals at the same time to lure multinationals there, the investor/creditors holding the crap IOUs will take a hit but corps will give the Irish jobs anyway because by that time they'll be willing to take any work they can get.

Hmm sounds a bit like us.

[advabHixavoip]

The Greeks, the Irish, the Portuguese etc need to denominate their debts in their own currency and break the bondage shackles from the ECB and the big banks....membership in the Eurozone serves them no purpose other than as debt peons....

[DoctorNiCYDEn]

BTW Doom, the sanest option Ireland needs to do is untie itself from Europe. It's farthest removed from the continent anyway.

Going back to the pound would made more sense, and creditors MUST share some pain unless Ireland wants to spend decades in a miasma. I'm sure if Ireland decoupled and striked a bunch of bilateral trade deals at the same time to lure multinationals there, the investor/creditors holding the crap IOUs will take a hit but corps will give the Irish jobs anyway because by that time they'll be willing to take any work they can get.

Hmm sounds a bit like us.

I heard the pick-up truck bed based mortar battery was discovered in Londonderry, and where was the first car bomb
discovered?

[advabHixavoip]

I heard the pick-up truck bed based mortar battery was discovered in Londonderry, and where was the first car bomb
discovered?

Cough...Cough

http://www.philadelphiaspeaks.com/fo...k-bankers.html

[DoctorNiCYDEn]

Cough...Cough

http://www.philadelphiaspeaks.com/fo...k-bankers.html

Having followed and sympathised with the IRA since I was a kid, I can imagine that if the Real IRA says they will target
UK bankers, they will. Also to note is the bankers may have drawn attention to their unsavory ways.

I sure as hell would'nt want to be a banker about now, the IRA ain't nobody to f*** with.
Remember what happened to Lord Mountbatten?

[mikefertynnz]

I heard the pick-up truck bed based mortar battery was discovered in Londonderry, and where was the first car bomb
discovered?

First of all... although my family descends mainly from Ulster, I would not openly call Londonderry by that name. It's Derry. The former seems to raise the hair on "some" people's backs if you know what I mean, mate. :-)

And the boro has always been the flashpoint between royalists and republicans. It was the place where The Troubles began, and it continues to be a place to avoid during marching season. I wish all of that crap would just go away. Who the f--- cares about the orange order when over 10% of the population is unemployed and people are fleeing Ireland again like it's the potato famine?

Asenine.

[mikefertynnz]

Real IRA, Traditional IRA... half of their words are useless hot air. Northern Ireland already has local representation in the fullest, so restarting the bombing is likely to just depress their economy even more. Who wants to open offices in Belfast with that crap going on? Nobody. Tourism came back to Belfast too after the nightmare was over... do they really want to kill what's left of their economy?


If the IRA wants to go assassinate British bankers down south in Ireland and in the City, I can hear all of the capital investment being Hoovered out of Ireland and sent back to Britain.

[advabHixavoip]

Real IRA, Traditional IRA... half of their words are useless hot air. Northern Ireland already has local representation in the fullest, so restarting the bombing is likely to just depress their economy even more. Who wants to open offices in Belfast with that crap going on? Nobody. Tourism came back to Belfast too after the nightmare was over... do they really want to kill what's left of their economy?


If the IRA wants to go assassinate British bankers down south in Ireland and in the City, I can hear all of the capital investment being Hoovered out of Ireland and sent back to Britain.

Micky puhhhleeze! Not like all that so called "investment" that the British, French and German banks "lent" during the real estate bubble isn't being "hoovered" up by the ECB......

[advabHixavoip]

try to dispossess the Irish...go ahead you filthy banksters...


Ireland invented the boycott during the land wars, and perhaps it is time to take this effective weapon of resistance down from the thatch to deal with repossessions and resales Despite the spiralling economic crisis we are in, there was, last week, an epiphany at a small auction in Co Meath.

A 67-acre farm in Crossakiel, which had been repossessed by ACC bank, was up for sale. Despite a reasonable attendance by local farmers at the auction, there was only one derisory bid of €1.

There was, according to some present, ‘‘an atmosphere’’ in the room, and the auctioneer later told the Irish Times that ‘‘there was no question but that people weren’t bidding because it was being sold by the bank’’.

At one stage, one person present questioned whether the land was being sold with the goodwill of the owner - and was told that the bank had the authority to sell the land.

The owner of the land had reached this financial crisis after using the land to raise funds for a property development which then crashed. The farm remains unsold.

It is not difficult to imagine the historical ghosts which haunted that Meath auction room, and I make no excuse for returning yet again to the personal debt crisis that I have been writing about for some weeks now.

One result of this issue has been the emergence of the New Beginning organisation, a group of some 50 barristers, businesspeople and citizens who are prepared to give free legal support to those facing repossession. And three cheers for them.

The failed land sale in Meath is yet another sign that, if the banks think they can regain the high financial ground over the thousands to whom they over-loaned in a reckless fashion by repossessing land, they may have to think again.

This applies equally to the government, which scooped up so many million euro in stamp duty.

Given Ireland’s history, those silent farmers in the auction room in Co Meath last week would have had a far better sense of where all of this will lead than the men running our banks. If the banks and the political and financial establishment think that our current bank repossession methods and laws on debt and bankruptcy are adequate for the forthcoming crisis, they had better think again. Parallels with the land and eviction crisis of the 19th century are beginning to look pertinent, particularly when one considers that, by late next year, almost 20 per cent of Irish home ownership may be in negative equity.

At the outset of this crisis, most people didn’t really understand what had happened and were prepared to let the government get on with saving the banks since they were essential - so the government argued - to safeguarding our economic future. Well, we did that, but the economy is still in crisis.


........It seems that, in this crisis, everyone except the taxpayers and homeowners of Ireland were allowed to make up the rules as they went along.

Now is the time for the citizens of the Republic to take back control of their lives and their finances and, like the Meath farmers, bond together in an unbreakable moral crusade for justice.

Our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers did this before, and we can do it again.



Time to reclaim the land that is rightfully ours | The Post

[advabHixavoip]

Bring it on anyway here in the states ...we want some of that economic fundamentalism....

Austerity fails to save Ireland

Troubled European governments are discovering that fasting is no cure for a giant debt hangover.

Just ask Ireland, which is on the verge of signing up for a big bailout from Europe – despite the fact that by belt-tightening standards Ireland has been one of Europe's rare success stories.

"Ireland has been doing 'all the right things' policy-wise," says Jan Randolph of IHS Global Insight.

The country has stopped spending beyond its means, recently bringing its trade account into balance. A double-digit contraction since the 2008 financial meltdown has boosted business competitiveness. The government has slashed spending and socked away enough that it won't need to borrow in the markets till the spring of 2011.

And yet, what does Ireland have to show for it? Even after two years' worth of sacrifices to the financial markets, the long-feared confrontation with bond investors is at hand. The yield on Irish bonds recently jumped 13 consecutive trading days, bringing them near a back-breaking 8%.

Meanwhile, wages have been falling and unemployment has tripled to 13%. So while there is obviously much to be said for putting your national finances in order, in no sense is austerity the silver bullet it has often been sold as.

The scope of the missteps taken during a decadelong credit bubble, both by governments and private actors, are so large that just a few years of austerity aren't going to be enough.

"The tale of Ireland is the banks getting too big and taking on risks and leaving the taxpayers with the bill," Randolph said. "It's a huge moral hazard, and it's no way to run a financial system.

Austerity fails to save Ireland - Street Sweep: Fortune's Wall Street Blog