Who did cause the crisis if not banks taking unjustifiable risks with other people's money?
Oh yes, sorry, it was that nasty Gordon Brown wasn't it, who created the US housing bubble that burst and led to the need for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to be taken into Federal Ownership, it was Gordon Brown who lent immense sums in sub-prime mortgages across the US, it was Gordon Brown who packaged them up into financial instruments and sold them on, it was all his fault.
It was Gordon Brown who created property bubbles in Spain and Ireland.
It was all Gordon Brown's fault.
o do with the UK.
Except it wasn't ... and you and I both know it wasn't.
The banks worked within the regulatory framework they were bound by. How would you define unjustifiable. What is your fascination with the U.S. It's got nothing to do with the UK. The problems in the UK are entirely the fault of the last Labour government & it's first Chancellor of the Exchequer
Gordon Brown was indeed guilty of not regulating the banks
sufficiently in the UK ... but let us not forget that it was not he who deregulated the banks in the Big Bang. Let us also not forget that he was roundly criticised by the Tories that he was
regulating too tightly, the same Tories who, now in power, have done feck-all apart from a bit of cosmetic shuffling to improve that regulation.
Sufficiently? He stripped away regulation & controls that were already in place. He set up the useless FSA. It doesn't matter one scintilla what anyone said, it's what he did that brought the crash in the UK.
You say there wasn't a global crisis ... I would agree that wasn't a crisis in global banking (i.e. only Western banking and institutions failed or needed bailing-out) ... but it was quite definitely global in its effects ... even China's growth rate was slowed by it as its greatest exports markets in the West bought less from them.
Glad we've sorted that one out. What proportion of China's output was for export and how much did that fall? How about a comparison in the Eurozone?
As you only deal in facts
would you care to expand on what you mean by "
if, as an example, interest rates had risen as they normally would".
Quite simple really. Before Brown came along, interest rates were controlled by the Chancellor & the Governor BofE & they fluctuated according to the demand for money & it's supply. Brown killed that mechanism of interest rate control & stripped away controls on lending.
Just that earlier you said, in one of your "facts", that Gordon Brown took control of interest rates away from the BoE.
I'm just wondering whether I dreamed the handing over of interest rate control
TO the BoE, by Gordon Brown, back in 1997.
I am also wondering whether I dreamed the existence of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee and its regular meetings to decide the interest rate.
Perhaps I worded that wrongly. He broke with a 300 year old system to cut the B of E free to do it's own thing, as long as it kept inflation around his target. As long as that figure, which was also manipulated by changing how it was calculated, was good for him, he completely ignores what was going on.
Tell me, oh mighty sage, when was that responsibility taken away from the Bank of England?
The responsibility to act in the best interest of the economy by using interest rates to control the demand for lending. We've all seen the results of what brown did. Where is he these days
Oh, and could you let Mark Carney know, he thinks it's his job.
