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Re: Ask a Brit

Postby Learned Nand » Mon Feb 03, 2014 6:01 pm

You guys really need a Nate Silver.

Also, I don't know what employment metrics you guys use, but the Bureau of Labour Statistics here has a few metrics, from U1 to U6. The normal unemployment metric is U3 (which is just the number of people looking for work as a percentage of people in the work force), but U6 includes those in U3, as well as those 'marginally attached' to their jobs or working part time for economic reasons. U6 will be higher than U3, but if it's been dropping with U3 then that's as it should be.
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Re: Ask a Brit

Postby Albatross727 » Thu Feb 06, 2014 12:39 am

Marcuse wrote:Labour is still smarting from the crash that, as much as the 2008 banking crisis was global, they bore responsibility for in the fields of poor financial regulation and an attitude of allowing business to have a free hand in all things.


Yes, this is what the Tories have been saying the entire time that they've been in government (the LibDems might have been as well but you could be forgiven for forgetting that they're actually in government except when the shouts of betrayal go up on Question Time) and while it is basically the case it's one of those statements which manages to be true without being honest.

Labour were in government and deregulated the banks, which made the crash worse when it hit, but the then opposition were at the time saying that Labour should deregulate them further. When you look at it like that you see that while Labour do take a share of the blame they did limit the damage from what it could (and probably would) have been if the right had been in power instead.
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Re: Ask a Brit

Postby Marcuse » Thu Feb 06, 2014 9:59 am

Albatross727 wrote:Yes, this is what the Tories have been saying the entire time that they've been in government (the LibDems might have been as well but you could be forgiven for forgetting that they're actually in government except when the shouts of betrayal go up on Question Time) and while it is basically the case it's one of those statements which manages to be true without being honest.

Labour were in government and deregulated the banks, which made the crash worse when it hit, but the then opposition were at the time saying that Labour should deregulate them further. When you look at it like that you see that while Labour do take a share of the blame they did limit the damage from what it could (and probably would) have been if the right had been in power instead.


I think that the idea that they limited the damage is debatable. Spending a trillion pounds of public money to rescue the businesses of a sector famous for it's insistence on light touch regulation and the phrase "the market is always right" seems a little odd to me. I've said it before and I'll say it again, I would have allowed those businesses to fail, because if the market is always right it told those banks right then that they should fail.

My version of limiting the damage would have been to protect the people who relied on those banks. A state owned bank that depositers could quickly and easily transfer their account to would have prevented runs on banks, and would have allowed the businesses that were viable to remain and the ones where practices were causing that business to fail could have failed without thousands of people losing out.

As it stands, the general public have been made to suffer wide ranging cuts to public services and losses on bank sales after public shares in them have been sold, as a result of the choice of the Labour government to assist banks before people.

None of this in any way means I'm supportive of the Conservatives, and I think their claims of the failings of the "last Labour government" have rung very hollow indeed for a number of years now. They bear the responsibility for the policies they have enacted, and they have pursued an agenda of cuts that is pretty much par for the course for their predetermined ideas.
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Re: Ask a Brit

Postby Albatross727 » Thu Feb 06, 2014 1:44 pm

I do agree that it's incredibly hypocritical of banks to ask for as little regulation as possible and then get billions of pounds of public money when they fail - as you said the market decided it no longer had a place for them and by their own logic they should just bow out. Unfortunately allowing several major banks to catastrophically fail would put thousands of people out of work; I know we all love a nameless, faceless corporation to attack during a recession, Lord knows I'm no exception, but while it may be a few greedy, overpaid oligarchs making the decisions the majority of the company are ordinary folks earning a crust, and most of them have names, faces and votes.
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Re: Ask a Brit

Postby Marcuse » Thu Feb 06, 2014 2:46 pm

Albatross727 wrote:I do agree that it's incredibly hypocritical of banks to ask for as little regulation as possible and then get billions of pounds of public money when they fail - as you said the market decided it no longer had a place for them and by their own logic they should just bow out. Unfortunately allowing several major banks to catastrophically fail would put thousands of people out of work; I know we all love a nameless, faceless corporation to attack during a recession, Lord knows I'm no exception, but while it may be a few greedy, overpaid oligarchs making the decisions the majority of the company are ordinary folks earning a crust, and most of them have names, faces and votes.


While I absolutely understand what you're saying, and I accept that people who work for banks are not entirely reprehensible money demons, I disagree that letting those businesses fail would have been more harmful that the solution that we got. Because the simple fact is, the real economy wasn't at fault here, we had a credit crash, isolated largely to the finance sector, and until that was transferred to the real economy by the bailout of the banks, we didn't seem to have a particular unemployment or economic problem.

The bailout put millions of people, particularly young people, out of work. Many people have seen their living standards drop and their job either be put at risk or lost entirely. At the same time, the Conservative government is pursuing its predetermined agenda of public sector cuts, and putting more people out of work to fulfil some misguided equation of government finances with household finances, like it's the same thing.

As sad, and difficult as it is, saying that thousands of people would be out of work, as opposed to millions is a small price to pay to keep the failure of banking executives and traders from damaging the real economy as well.
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Re: Ask a Brit

Postby Learned Nand » Thu Feb 06, 2014 8:59 pm

Marcuse wrote:While I absolutely understand what you're saying, and I accept that people who work for banks are not entirely reprehensible money demons, I disagree that letting those businesses fail would have been more harmful that the solution that we got. Because the simple fact is, the real economy wasn't at fault here, we had a credit crash, isolated largely to the finance sector, and until that was transferred to the real economy by the bailout of the banks, we didn't seem to have a particular unemployment or economic problem.

Do you have evidence to suggest that the bailouts were what spread the harm around? In America, at least, the theory goes that the bailouts helped us to avoid a depression, as the failure of the government to bail out the banks during the great depression greatly extended the lending crisis.
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Re: Ask a Brit

Postby Marcuse » Thu Feb 06, 2014 10:42 pm

So, I'm going to try and provide some evidence that the result of allowing bailed out banks to continue to exist was harmful to the economy.

Firstly, credit was restricted post 2008 to SMEs, with a disproportionate effect on low and medium risk SMEs. The report I linked appears to form the basis of this UK government report on the subject

The tightening in credit since 2008-9 has disproportionately affected low and average risk SMEs (based on Dun and Bradstreet credit scores). However there was no significant change over this period in the likelihood of rejection for SMEs rated as above (e.g. greater than) average risk. This suggests banks viewed lending to the safer categories of SMEs as relatively more risky in the period after the financial crisis than they did before, although the pattern is also suggestive of a partial withdrawal from SME lending as an asset class. After 2009 there was also an increase in the proportion of SMEs rated as above average credit risk due to the effects of the recession on sales, profitability and asset prices.


The Tomlinson Report details how, post 2008, RBS and Lloyds (both banks which had been bailed out) were profiteering from the deliberate destruction of SMEs through the Global Restructuring Group.

In addition, the massive injections of liquidity did next to nothing to revive the inter bank lending market, as this European Central Bank report indicates.

Neither the recent massive money injections, the coordinated lowering of interest rates
nor the use of public funds to recapitalize banks have done much to restart interbank
lending. This action did not solve the underlying problem preventing interbank lending:
extreme information asymmetry.


Financial Times, November 9, 2008


The enforced low interested rates, deemed as necessary to revive the economy and prevent depression, have had several negative effects on the lives of people in the UK. These include the reduction in the viability of ISAs and other government backed savings programs, and the continuation of 95% mortgages backed by the Government's Help to Buy scheme, which promotes buy-to-let purchases more than it does new buyers.

From what it appears, the bailout of the banks did little or nothing to achieve the stated aim of reviving the inter-bank lending market, which was also subject to common manipulation, allowed banks to continue to exist and operate in ways counter to the interests of the economy as a whole, and placed the public finances in a state which allowed a Conservative government to push an agenda of public service cuts in response to the massive quantity of public expenditure used on the banking sector, liquidity that has been very slow to be released into the economy.
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Re: Ask a Brit

Postby DamianaRaven » Sat Dec 02, 2017 6:38 am

I've been watching Doctor Who a lot lately. Combined with my observation of Everton from Chef!, it seems that there are a lot of Jamaican black people there. At least, the accents of black Brits always usually seem to have a somewhat Caribbean lilt to them. (The main character in Chef! was also black and didn't seem to share the same heritage.) Is there an historical reason for this?

I expect the history of black culture in England is a whole lot less sordid than ours!
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Re: Ask a Brit

Postby Anglerphobe » Sat Dec 02, 2017 11:42 am

A lot of British black families came from Jamaica and other British colonies in the Caribbean from the late 1940s to the 1970s as economic migrants. We also have a lot of Nigerians and other west Africans owed to a wave of economic immigration in the 80s and 90s. Other former British colonies are represented by smaller migrant populations, but British Nigerian and British Caribbean are the main groups of black people here for the time being.
I'd say that British Caribbean culture, being older and more established than other black groups in this country, is still the more prominent black culture here. It would have been preeminent in the twentieth century for sure.
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Re: Ask a Brit

Postby mancityfooty » Sat Dec 02, 2017 4:01 pm

the only problem I had was filling out a personal cheque.
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Re: Ask a Brit

Postby DamianaRaven » Sun Dec 03, 2017 10:14 pm

I was wrong about Chef! Turns out, Chef Blackstock's father is most decidedly Caribbean.
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