What Time Does It All Kick-Off Tomorrow Guys?

[Jeremy]

mockney piers Wrote:

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> Plus getting the city back to a speculation

> footing isn't sensible;

Of course. There will always be a place for speculation within sensible limits... or by private individuals. But not by large banks, and certainly not running into billions of $ - that's not their role. (Or at least, that was what I'd always believed - I was genuinely shocked when I first found out the magnitude of the debt which had been bought by some of the banks).

[mockney piers]

It was easy to rubbish because it was rubbish, it didn't argue for anything, just attempted to poke holes in straw men.

For instance there is no such thing as a free market. there are import duties, and vat and health & safety and unions and laws, and unfair trading practices between rich countries and poor countries. It's a fallacy. So was finkelstein essentially advocating a free market as oppose to the regulated one we have today?

Because the last time anything remotely like a 'laissez fair free' market it resulted in riots in manchester and London (proper ones) and famines in Ireland and India.

Plus what the hell has banking regulation got to do with allocation of resources?

[mockney piers]

Sorry, jeremy and mick mac, that was aimed at finklestein.

Sorry MM, I wasn't having a go at you or jeremy, and by and large I agree with you both, i just think a degree of sanity needs to return.

Just because good times made loads of money, we should be more cautious than to think a return to those ways will solve anything, it'll just mean having to deal with the same problems again further down the raod.

Of course you can't stop speculation (what would quids do without coral?) but you should be able to limit the degree of exposure due to speculation of financial institutions that are gambling with their investors and depositors' money.

Many investors may have signed up to higher risk strategies, but the depositors sure as hell didn't.

[bigbadwolf]

I think we can safely say this will be the dominant thread today.

[Brendan]

DaveR Wrote:

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but its such a lazy

> assumption that you can wave a magic wand and come

> up with a system for allocating resources that

> operates fairly, democratically and without being

> driven by profit.

Nobody is suggesting a move away from the capitalist system just that banks are institutions of law and that therefore they should be subject to laws that properly protect the consumer and the economy. (If the tv I buy is broken I have a legal right take it back and get another one. Apparently this won't work with my pension)

Not allowing institutions to lend if they don?t have the liquidity to back it up would be a good start.

The financial services industry is important but it needs to be kept in perspective. Money has to come from somewhere and yes you can make a lot of it from moving it around in interesting ways, skimming off the top and charging for the service but you can?t just magic it from nowhere. Unless someone somewhere in the world is producing food, digging up coal, making clothes, programming computers, building roads etc. you can do as many clever things with money as you want but it?s going to be worth bugger all.

[Jeremy]

Brendan Wrote:

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> Money has to

> come from somewhere and yes you can make a lot of

> it from moving it around in interesting ways,

> skimming off the top and charging for the service

> but you can?t just magic it from nowhere. Unless

> someone somewhere in the world is producing food,

> digging up coal, making clothes, programming

> computers, building roads etc. you can do as many

> clever things with money as you want but it?s

> going to be worth bugger all.

Well yes... but that's kind of obvious, innit? Lots of industries would be rendered redundant if it wasn't the for existence of one or more other industries. Banking is just one piece of the jigsaw, but a pretty integral piece.

[charliecharlie]

[quote name=The agenda are variously: calling for the protection of people?s savings and pensions and putting a stop to exploitative practices in financial services' date=' calling for political action on the use of fossil fuels, calling for an end to military action oversees and calling for domestic policies of job creation and social stability.

]

Thank you brendan... thanks for the voice of reason.

I've just got back from the march... plenty of down to earth and straight forward, law abiding people, who just wanted to show their concerns about various political/financial/environmental issues (minority after trouble, but what's new).

Things were beginning to get a bit gritty, and the police were starting to pen us in... so I thought it was time to go, at first the police cordon would not let me through but I moved along the line, and a nice softy let me duck under....

I walked back over Southwark Bridge... some of the 'dressed down' city folks looked a bit hilarious... like they had never worn jeans in their life...

Must dash... off to a meeting at the studio.. how bloody contradictory does that feel, yes, I can laugh at myself!!>:D<

but, hey ho...life goes on.

ps Glad I went...

[Moos]

> Brendan Wrote:

Money has to come from somewhere and ..

Jeremy Wrote:

Well yes... but that's kind of obvious, innit?

.... but that's exactly what super-leverage was all about - trying to make money out of no-money. Which didn't work. And hence the need for tighter controls and regulation.

[louisiana]

SeanMacGabhann Wrote:

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> I dressed as normal. Nor would I be worried going

> to a black-tie do tonight.

>

> I'm getting the distinct impression that it's the

> people who are ostensibly "at risk" today who are

> the ones who want the aggro more than any

> protester. For entertainment, depressingly enough

How on earth are the police to justify fresh powers and increasing budgets, if they have nothing to do?

Of course they are going to talk up any supposed threat. Or maybe they just have vivid imaginations.

[louisiana]

MrBen

Presumably several hundred (thousand?) of those police officers will be tumbling to the ground with ailments as we speak??

Just as they did as Kingsnorth:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/dec/15/kingsnorth-climate-change-environment-police

[Mick Mac]

Sorry MM, I wasn't having a go at you or jeremy, and by and large I agree with you both, i just think a degree of sanity needs to return.

No probs MP - no offence taken - certainly no need to apologise. Its all about opinions.

[SeanMacGabhann]

Also in the Guardian today, did you see Simon Jenkins' piece about how everytime the police asked for more power in the 80s, Whitelaw used to send them away with a flea in their ear, and the police chuckled and said "it was worth a try"

Why can't we have someone with that kind of backbone now

[bigbadwolf]

The Guardian eh Sean.

[jaybee82]

Just walked past said RBS...they've made quite a mess of it, and a bit of random graffiti on the B of E itself. So much for a peaceful protest...

Job well done. Now, I wonder who pays for those windows?

[Siduhe]

This picture pretty much sums it up for me - taken outside the RBS branch that got trashed - 1:20 ratio of protestors to photographers...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45623000/jpg/_45623824_rbs_window_pa_2.jpg

[Brendan]

If you read the reports apparently where this and some other incidents occurred was in areas where the cops had confined the protesters to cordons and were stopping them from marching.

[Tony.London Suburbs]

Darkness is when the action normally begins...:-S

[snorky]

Too many hippes on this thread. Im off

[MrBen]

The police are containing different sections of protestors which is causing aggravation as they cant all join up. Just as weel as I'm enjoying teh peace of the climate camp where an obligatory drum circle has just kicked off in earnest.

Did anyone see Southpark when Cartman was a Hippie exterminator? A pest controller for hippies.

"I'm sorry but you appear to have a drum circle in your garden and it will need to be removed".

A nice girl in a bikini is dancing without any shoes on - highlight of the day so far. Well that and Police Skittles.

[AllforNun]

"In a dictatorship, the elite use the military to control the people. In a democracy, they use the media." well said mate !

Aunty spent most of the day in denial as the government requested, "now you know your licence fee review!" every other media outlet was showing smoke bombs going off in the RBS main offices, BBC led with obama, brown lot of smiles and a little couple of lines about a Few protests smashing a window ! absolutely priceless....flick to ITN , CNN, SKY, Even Aljazzy ears and they are streaming footage of a boarded up BANK OF ENGLAND and office furniture falling out of the windows of RBS, green smoke going from inside from, yes wait for it, SMOKE BOMBS !! and riot police charging into the building chasing anarchists around the place.....fuck me what did they need to do to get some coverage, maybe set alight mr blobby on the steps of the bank !!! now that they would have covered and probably run an obiturary while printing a radio times tribute edition !!!

[AllforNun]

Christ now they are talking about france and it wanting tougher rules on the G20 summit!....bribe the tossers at the top with houses in islington and they are an awfully compliant bunch.

[ThinLizzy]

Hmmm, isn't some of this financial crisis down to the fact that the banks lent 'greedily' with money they didn't have to feed our insatiable need to buy property and goods inconsistent with our level of wealth? Surely, we should not only be angry with the banks who did this, but with ourselves for being so greedy! It's a bit like the kid who hassles his mother for sweets and then getting angry with his mother when obesity sets in.

We need the free market -- but it needs to be regulated in the sense that risk should be considered much more than it was in the sub-prime era....the buy/sell model IMHO was good and helped us to boom in the 90s, but the bankers AND the consumers need to be regulated ...but I'm not an economist, just a humble neuro researcher :)

[LegalEagle-ish]

Sorry Allfornun - I'd like to pretend it was me, but I nicked it off Noam Chomsky!

[????]

Well what a damp squid...now the Poll Tax riot that was a proper job, yoof of today can't even riot properly, eh Tony?

[Jeremy]

ThinLizzy Wrote:

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> Hmmm, isn't some of this financial crisis down to

> the fact that the banks lent 'greedily' with money

> they didn't have to feed our insatiable need to

> buy property and goods inconsistent with our level

> of wealth?

It's more like they lent too much money to people who couldn't afford to pay it back. I agree that the customers have to take some of the blame too, but at the end of the day banks should lend money responsibly.

You are right, the risk needs to be considered more. The problem is, credit risk is more difficult to manage than traditional market risk (i.e. stock prices, currencies, interest). Someone said to me the other day that no bank should be allowed to have enough downside exposure to sink the company. But surely if that was the case, nobody would ever be able to borrow anything? So it's not an easy problem to solve IMO.