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@MajorRage said in Brexit:
@Victor-Meldrew said in Brexit:
The big issue is growth in EU GDP/capita has been poor compared to other Western countries like Australia & Canada. The EU is good at old technology like cars and such but lags behind on new technologies such as nanotechnology, life sciences and IT. Airbus - touted as a EU success story - has been a perennial loss-maker costing billions in state subsidies.
The EU can't hide uncompetitive industries behind protectionism forever - not when the likes of India & Indonesia start to flex their economic muscles,
Agree, although more personally aware that EU GDP/head low than time series for same.
UK far ahead on new technology. Cars is about to cross over, which was behind last minute haggling on car batteries.
I wonder how much is down to the EU redundancy laws? In my experience EU companies often limp on with bloated cost structures because the cost of redundancies is prohibitive.
Contrast with States, where failing company can fire as required and bounce back sometimes within months. I imagine EU bankruptcy laws also an issue, although no direct experience.
EU redundancy laws inhibit growth. The amount of deadwood where I work is completely insane. I work at a financial firm & their approach to work goes against everything I've ever worked in. It has it's advantages, but serious disadvantages as well. Case in point was very early on last year, I needed to get to see a client in AMS - large client, their request to have me in to brief on what we are building / selling as they had serious interest. It was a no brainer. Travel rejected. It was deemed that I should be able to give the pitch to the local sales guys, and they could deliver it. The local sales guys were proper chocolate teapots and all knew it. Upshot was I didn't go, they tried to pitch it and the client walked away.
Cost of ticket for me to go - 95 EUR + admin expenses DECLINED.
Two weeks later, a training course was on about how to learn more about yourself. Mandatory for all in my division. Two days long, and unequivocally a complete and utter waste of time.. Cost? 480 EUR. Approved.
I said, why don't I stay one more night and go and see the client. Additional cost - 45 EUR (cheaper flight offset by extra accommodation). DECLINED.
Now this is obviously an example where you can't see an of the additional context and if it was an isolated incident, then so be it. But these sort of decisions are minimum monthly. Trying to build a truly competitive financial offering is completely destroyed by beaurecratical red tape and continual spending of EUR salaries to complete and utter pieces of dead wood.
As I said early, the London financial system has NOTHING to be afraid of from Europe. Literally, nothing.
EU MSs have all sorts of regulations which make it hard post Brexit to visit for work. Could get worse before it gets better.
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@Catogrande said in Brexit:
@Victor-Meldrew said in Brexit:
@Catogrande said in Brexit:
@pakman There is a view that the support dished out by governments since the GFC has actually hindered recovery, keeping zombie businesses in life support.
Was working in financial Services around GFC time and that's possibly true for banks. Insurance, on the other hand, didn't get as much support and bounced back far quicker.
Sort of illustrates my point. More support has hindered recovery. You have to let the dead wood rot. Not suggesting allowing banks to fail, more that a blanket approach was not the right way. My point about support though goes wider. Artificially low interest rates, governmental lending targets for banks, QE propping up asset prices have all provided lifelines for businesses that normally would have failed.
That's right. And bought time for upskilling so population more able to cope in modern world. Instead, asset price inflation backed spending has meant the hard decisions have been avoided. Deadweight on system.
Other issue is/was regulation. After the GFC, banking regulation was based on reducing risk of bad loans so collateral of up to 110% on a business loan required (in case property prices crashed). You had politicians and regulators exhorting banks to lend to business while threatening to jail bankers for "reckless lending" if their loans went bad.
Two issues here and I’m not arguing against you on either really. Firstly bank solvency. Before the Basel agreements the “rules” around bank solvency were wildly different according to which country the bank was from, which is not helpful when the banks can operate globally. So some form of regulation was probably overdue.
Basel regs include the concept of 'risk weighted' assets. In practice, the calculations are theoretically flawed, and, perhaps more dangerously, encapsulate a large degree of false precision. Allied to the governmental put, casino banking lives on. I have lobbied for the ring fenced and casino parts of UK banks to have to publish separate balance sheets, with the put only applicable to deposits/mortgage bank. Then casino banks would have to borrow unsusbidised, and guess what, the market would levy a chunky risk premium, rendering many speculative activities unviable.
Secondly those “rules” were pretty lax to say the least. In the UK there were effectively no rules. No formula for solvency that was enforced. No minimum requirements. More “well you chaps know what to do, just don’t be silly eh”?
Friends tell me some of the margin regulations in UK are the most lax in world?
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@Victor-Meldrew said in Brexit:
I could also add that the regulation put in place post '97 moved the management and control of risk away from shareholders and the folks at the workface actually doing the lending face-face, to bureaucrats.
Those bureaucrats seemed to have little knowledge of what was actually going on and thought if you policed checklists and conformance to capital adequacy figures, all would be good. Add to that, political & FSA directives to force banks to lend to riskier demographics and it was a recipe for disaster.
The shareholders and taxpayers took the hit - the politicians blamed the bankers. The bureaucrats hid.
Bureaucrats who nowadays don't have to have ever worked in a real market. Like me regulating surfing!
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@MajorRage said in Brexit:
Travel rejected. It was deemed that I should be able to give the pitch to the local sales guys, and they could deliver it. The local sales guys were proper chocolate teapots and all knew it. Upshot was I didn't go, they tried to pitch it and the client walked away.
Cost of ticket for me to go - 95 EUR + admin expenses DECLINED.I have a great example of corporate stupidity which I often related to MBD's who thought counting the pennies and not the millions was essential
Major US bank had its international networks operations run out of London. Early days of TCP/IP and there 2-3 network engineers who were seriously essential to the network. Often worked 6-7 days a week all over the world and were head-hunted regularly.
Claiming of expenses was petty and rankled. Two of them billed for UK newspapers when they were working in Germany over the weekend and the expenses were rejected. They said "Right, fuck off then", resigned and were escorted out of the building.
That week the LoveBug worm struck....
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At least two of the big three UK banks were insolvent. Government had to put them on life support for several years.
They should have let them go down the pan, while protecting depositors. Gordon Brown's arm-twisting to get (very) solvent Lloyds to takeover the basket-case that was HBOS just magnified the problem.
Arguably the worst thing The Great Moron ever did - which is saying something.
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@Victor-Meldrew said in Brexit:
At least two of the big three UK banks were insolvent. Government had to put them on life support for several years.
They should have let them go down the pan, while protecting depositors. Gordon Brown's arm-twisting to get (very) solvent Lloyds to takeover the basket-case that was HBOS just magnified the problem.
Arguably the worst thing The Great Moron ever did - which is saying something.
Worst Chancellor ever.
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@Victor-Meldrew said in Brexit:
At least two of the big three UK banks were insolvent. Government had to put them on life support for several years.
They should have let them go down the pan, while protecting depositors. Gordon Brown's arm-twisting to get (very) solvent Lloyds to takeover the basket-case that was HBOS just magnified the problem.
Arguably the worst thing The Great Moron ever did - which is saying something.
Sir Victor Blank, chairman of Lloyds, said to have been promised a peerage.
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@Victor-Meldrew said in Brexit:
At least two of the big three UK banks were insolvent. Government had to put them on life support for several years.
They should have let them go down the pan, while protecting depositors. Gordon Brown's arm-twisting to get (very) solvent Lloyds to takeover the basket-case that was HBOS just magnified the problem.
Arguably the worst thing The Great Moron ever did - which is saying something.
Worst Chancellor ever.
Surely you mean "most prudent"? After all he told us that often enough. No doubt selling half out=r gold at a low valuations after announcing the sale beforehand was also prudent.
One eyed scotch fluffybunny.
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@Victor-Meldrew said in Brexit:
At least two of the big three UK banks were insolvent. Government had to put them on life support for several years.
They should have let them go down the pan, while protecting depositors. Gordon Brown's arm-twisting to get (very) solvent Lloyds to takeover the basket-case that was HBOS just magnified the problem.
Arguably the worst thing The Great Moron ever did - which is saying something.
Worst Chancellor ever.
In a position with 800 years history (there are audit records from the Exchequer/revenue department dating back to 1129, and those records are clearly continuous with previous records, and the first recorded Chancellor was appointed in 1221), I doubt Brown is the worst ever, although he might be the worst modern Chancellor, which for a position with that history is probably either Neville Chamberlain in 1923 as the first Chancellor who wasn't also the PM, or Sir Robert Peel as the new Chancellor (and also PM) following the first election after the Great Reform Act of 1832 expanded the voting franchise significantly.
This pointless tangent was brought to you by me, some moron in NZ.
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@Catogrande said in Brexit:
One eyed scotch fluffybunny.
Oh, I don't know. He certainly had his finger on the pulse of global affairs....
"Our ability to connect as a nation with other nations around the world is enhanced dramatically by the Internet." Gordon Brown, 2005.
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@Victor-Meldrew He’s a godamn genius
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@Victor-Meldrew better than a series of tubes at least...
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Jesus H Christ
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@MiketheSnow said in Brexit:
Jesus H Christ
Meanwhile EU Parliament is debating whether to aprove the bill OR NOT.
Isn't the pantomine season finished?
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@Victor-Meldrew said in Brexit:
That is certainly trade orthodoxy. But if such agreements lead to substantial job losses as e.g. Chinese imports replace Northern jobs, the net is more of the population reliant on social welfare.
It's going to happen anyway, so be prepared to compete . No point in protecting all those highly paid jobs producing those shiny BMW's when your export markets slap quotas on your goods in retaliation.
At the risk of offending the purists, I see no point in facilitating the migration of manufacturing offshore when the crucial overseas competitive advantage is lower/no environmental/labour conditions/social welfare standards. So if the UK has sensible standards in these areas, and its cost of power is competitive, then the labour content of manufacture is going to have to be very high to outweigh appropriate tariffs and the cost of transport from, say, the Far East.
WTO tariffs are inadequate to compensate, so China being admitted was a massive con job. Carbon border tax would be a way of rasing tariffs towards reasonable levels.
A key question becomes the cost of labour. Here things become quite distorted by the minimum wage question. UK has made a big thing of the virtue of setting level for these ever higher, but if that prices manufacture out IMO such minima do more harm than good. Even then, EU and UK cheat by allowing Eastern Europeans in and allowing practices which usurp the regulation, albeit in quite limited areas. Which to me is just a tacit admission the the levels are wrong, even if the concept itself has merit.
Trivial example, maybe, by it seems wholly incoherent to pursue policies which result in chocolate good manufacture in UK to be unable to compete viably with mass production in China and shipping across to the other side of the world. To me bonkers.
As a consequence, I'm not opposed to tariffs being set at a level which protects economies with decent social welfare, environmental and labour laws. WTO levels too low. I'm all for carbon border taxes.
Needs to be managed carefully, for sure. A short-term measure while you address the need to become competitive.
I think it's more fundamental. For now China relies on coal power to produce a huge amount of its energy. The alternatives are more expensive. CBT ought to be retained until and unless China moves to greener energy sources. BTW no idea how anyone can ever verify compliance.
There's very, very few leading edge industries in the EU compared to the US, China or Japan.
Absolutely right.
Now you're taking!
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@majorrage said in Brexit:
Confusing article this one.
I can't see how this can be anything but a good thing for the UK? Reading through it, it's almost like the author is desepreatly trying to figure out how this is bad for GB, but can't ....
Very tough on Welsh ports
Brexit