The Tyrie Commission, after 9 months of deliberation and 571 poages of reporting, has disappointingly limited its purview to governance, standards and culture – issues which certainly cry out for reform, but which are not at the heart of what is really wrong with the banks. But on those issues it has been promisingly radical. […]
Posts under ‘Finance’
The Tyrie Commission report on banking is too narrow and misses the real point
Jun 21st, 2013 by Michael Meacher.
Unite backing for continued public ownership of RBS
Jun 17th, 2013 by Jon Lansman.Ahead of the report by the parliamentary commission on banking standards, due to report back this week on the future of RBS, Unite, which represents workers at RBS and 120,000 workers altogether in financial services, has called on the government to commit to the full nationalisation of RBS in which the state currently has an […]
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Demand, debt mountains and the next crash
Jun 17th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.The problem – a very big problem indeed – for capitalism at its present stage is that demand is flat, or falling. That underlying pattern has existed for the past 40 years, since the demand for continent-wide reconstruction after the Second World War gradually petered out in the 1970s. Thereafter the flatness of demand was […]
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Abenomics: works in Japan, rejected by Osborne – and now Balls
Jun 8th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.Since Shinzo Abe came to power, the Japanese stock market has risen an astonishing 50% in 5 months, and the replacement of the fatalism which has dogged Japan’s economy by a new burst of policy activism has profound implications for the UK. There is another precedent for this policy activism other than the General Theory […]
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The FT, hedgehogs and the scale of the crisis
Jun 3rd, 2013 by Michael Burke.In analysis of any issue it is crucial to distinguish between factors that are of primary or decisive importance and those that are secondary or lesser matters. This applies to economic analysis as much as other disciplines. There is a vast amount of economic data which is produced by innumerable public and private agencies internationally, […]
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Why the US-UK economic model fails the test on almost all counts
May 29th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.Whilst the City of London, the Stock Exchange and super-rich investors strive continually to assure us that growth is returning and that we can all soon return to business-as-usual as though the biggest financial crash for a century was just an unfortuante blip rather than integral to the core system, they never ask the really […]
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The biggest banks are still not curbed
May 23rd, 2013 by Michael Meacher.In the 1960s banking assets accounted for some 50% of GDP. By the late 2000s they had risen to about 200% of GDP. In the case of Britain with its grossly over-extended international banking sector, they had risen to 500% of GDP. The reasons for this were partly to enable large companies to start doing […]
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Fat cats won’t lose a moment’s sleep over Osborne’s banking bill
May 9th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.Arguably the most important bill in a weak and flaccid Queen’s Speech today is the Banking Bill. But it is a fiasco. It has one central objective – to prevent too-big-to fail banks from being bankrupted by the recklessness of their investment bankers and requiring another gargantuan bail-out at ruinous cost to taxpayers and deep […]
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One rule for Goldman Sachs, and one for everyone else
May 4th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.Praise be to UK Uncut. It’s only due to them that we’re now learning what really lay behind the Blair-Brown policy of ‘light regulation’, now gratefully continued by the Tories, and the world of difference between the treatment of the hyper-rich on the one hand and the defenders of the poorest on the other. The […]
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Osborne’s smack in the face for all victims of cuts
May 3rd, 2013 by Michael Meacher.So Osborne, we now learn, is determined to sell off RBS and Lloyds before the election to prevent Labour, if it wins the next election which looks increasingly likely, from keeping them in the public sector and breaking them up in order to reconstruct them as agents to drive a national economic recovery. That says it all about the government’s […]
