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Oct 2015
11:15am, 28 Oct 2015
8,081 posts
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Chrisull
(PS I knew Binks would bite on this one  )
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Oct 2015
11:22am, 28 Oct 2015
243 posts
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Shadowless Formless Legs
You're right about Greece. And they will have the same problems again in the not too distant future.
However the UK government bailing out UK banks is a totally different situation.
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Oct 2015
11:26am, 28 Oct 2015
244 posts
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Shadowless Formless Legs
Your problem Chris is that you think that you can lift a situation out of context and apply it elsewhere under entirely different circumstances and achieve the same outcome.
Comparing the UK financial sector with Greece is as fundamentally flawed as believing that a German rent control system could be applied in the UK. You can't just bodge together bits of what works / doesn't work elsewhere and create a coherent system.
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Oct 2015
11:34am, 28 Oct 2015
6,796 posts
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Binks
Not all banks would have gone under. Just the poorly run ones.
The promise of being bailed out leads to the wreckless behaviour of the bankers in the first place. Plus the additional pressure governments were putting on them to lend to every man and his dog for mortgages.
No industry should be ring fenced and guaranteed by taxpayers money. Banks are a service like any other. If I decide to put all my money into a HSBC account and then they engage in risky behaviour and go under I should take that as a sign to think more about where I put my money.
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Oct 2015
11:38am, 28 Oct 2015
6,797 posts
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Binks
Government secured fractional reserve banking.
A monopoly on currency.
Centrally set interest rates.
These are things that would get eliminated in Binksword
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Oct 2015
11:45am, 28 Oct 2015
6,798 posts
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Binks
The steel issue is tricky and I have sympathy. These UK steel manufacturers are competing against others that enjoy subsidies/protection from various places. These protections distort the market.
I guess there is an argument to say we should artificially prop up UK steel in the same way. I would suggest getting rid of all protections and let people choose what is important with their own money.
Its similar in reverse to the who Uber/Black Cab thing. Black cab drivers (and New York Yellow Cab drivers) have to suffer an absolute ballache of regulation and licence fees to drive people around in a car. Something we all do quite regularly anyway. uber comes along as makes a huge dent into their business by simply recruiting people and their cars.
The typical reaction is to say "make the uber drivers suffer the ball ache too!" rather than suggesting that the ball ache should be taken away from the black cab drivers.
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Oct 2015
11:48am, 28 Oct 2015
1,227 posts
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Spleen
Tonybv: If you remove VAT from tampons then there are dozens of equally important things you would have to remove it from as well.
There should be no such thing as zero rating, it's a silly political gesture which creates pointless arguments like the Jaffa Cakes court case and requires us to spend more on employing tax inspectors to decide which category something falls into. There are dozens of "essential" items which are VAT-rated and there are dozens of non-essential items which are zero-rated. If zero-rating was eliminated the overall VAT rate could be reduced, not just because of the "pasty tax" but because of the money we would save on tax inspectors' salaries and pensions. No-one would starve if beefburgers and salted nuts were subject to the same tax as frozen peas.
Children's clothes are zero rated, children's car seats are reduced rated and prams and buggies are standard rated. There is no logic apart from the desire to trip up some future hapless politician who tries to reform the system by crying "Tories want to tax children's clothes! Tories want poor children to wear burlap sacks!" See also the "pasty tax" furore.
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Oct 2015
11:57am, 28 Oct 2015
1,228 posts
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Spleen
It should be added to Binks' post that if the banks had been allowed to go under, the vast, vast majority of individuals in this country would not have lost any money or life savings. Even if they had decided to put all their money with HSBC. They would be protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, unless they had more than £50,000 with one bank. (The limit has since increased. And if you stuff more than £50,000 into HSBC it is not the government's responsibility to bail out your poor investment decisions.)
The compensation scheme is not taxpayers' money (though the government likes to pretend it is), it is paid for by a levy on financial services firms.
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Oct 2015
11:58am, 28 Oct 2015
245 posts
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Shadowless Formless Legs
The problem is that if more than a couple of banks were to fail the FSCS would fail and the government would end up paying out the cash anyway (but to depositors rather than banks). By bailing out the banks rather than the depositors they are able to recoup (the majority) of the bailout money, while at the same time protecting a huge tax revenue generating sector.
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Oct 2015
11:58am, 28 Oct 2015
5,167 posts
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paul the builder
But I expect that levy is also something that would be banned in Binks-world
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