Economists can't even agree about the causes of the Great Depression, so I wouldn't be relying on them to predict what's around the corner.
Peter Schiff and Nouriel Roubini were two economists who correctly predicted the economic collapse of 2008 well in advance, while the vast majority of economists were telling us all that the economy was in great shape and the only way was up. Both of them get a lot of air time on US tv, which you can find on Youtube. Peter's very sharp, but a bit of a self publicist, always pushing his latest book and promoting his investment company etc. Nouriel looks more and more like he could do with a bottle of Prozac. Maybe he knows more than he's letting on. Here's a collection of Peter Schiff TV interviews where he's ridiculed and literally laughed at by other economists as he explains why everything is about to turn pear shaped.
Cuts
Started by Pat, Jun 08 2010 10:23 PM
826 replies to this topic
#21
yonza bam
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Posted 10 June 2010 - 01:46 PM
Never compose anything unless the not composing of it becomes a positive nuisance to you. GUSTAV HOLST
#22
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Posted 11 June 2010 - 06:03 AM
My once-in-a-generation cut? The armed forces. All of them. We are safer than at any time since the Norman conquest. Yet £45bn is spent defending Britain against fantasy enemies
Simon Jenkins guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 8 June 2010 20.00 BST Article history
I say cut defence. I don't mean nibble at it or slice it. I mean cut it, all £45bn of it. George Osborne yesterday asked the nation "for once in a generation" to think the unthinkable, to offer not just percentage cuts but "whether government needs to provide certain public services at all".
What do we really get from the army, the navy and the air force beyond soldiers dying in distant wars and a tingle when the band marches by? Is the tingle worth £45bn, more than the total spent on schools? Why does Osborne "ringfence" defence when everyone knows its budget is a bankruptcy waiting to happen, when Labour ministers bought the wrong kit for wars that they insisted it fight?
Osborne cannot believe the armed forces are so vital or so efficient as to be excused the star chamber's "fundamental re-evaluation of their role". He knows their management and procurement have long been an insult to the taxpayer. The reason for his timidity must be that, like David Cameron, he is a young man scared of old generals.
I was content to be expensively defended against the threat of global communism. With the end of the cold war in the 1990s that threat vanished. In its place was a fantasy proposition, that some unspecified but potent "enemy" lurked in the seas and skies around Britain. Where is it?
Each incoming government since 1990 has held so-called defence reviews "to match capabilities to policy objectives". I helped with one in 1997, and it was rubbish from start to finish, a cosmetic attempt to justify the colossal procurements then in train, and in such a way that any cut would present Labour as "soft" on defence.
Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and George Robertson, the then defence secretary were terrified into submission. They agreed to a parody of generals fighting the last war but one. They bought new destroyers to defeat the U-boat menace. They bought new carriers to save the British empire. They bought Eurofighters to duel with Russian air aces. Trident submarines with nuclear warheads went on cruising the deep, deterring no one, just so Blair could walk tall at conferences.
Each weekend, the tranquillity of the Welsh countryside is shattered by inane jets screaming through the mountain valleys playing at Lord of the Rings. With modern bombs, no plane need fly that low, and the jets are said to burn more fuel in half an hour than a school in a year. Any other service wasting so much money would be laughed out of court. Yet the Treasury grovels before the exotic virility of it all.
Labour lacked the guts to admit that it was crazy to plan for another Falklands war. It dared not admit that the procurement executive was fit for nothing but appeasing weapons manufacturers. No armies were massing on the continent poised to attack. No navies were plotting to throttle our islands and starve us into submission. No missiles were fizzing in bunkers across Asia with Birmingham or Leeds in their sights. As for the colonies, if it costs £45bn to protect the Falklands, Gibraltar and the Caymans, it must be the most ridiculous empire in history. It would be cheaper to give each colony independence and a billion a year.
Lobbyists reply that all defence expenditure is precautionary. You cannot predict every threat and it takes time to rearm should one emerge. That argument might have held during the cold war and, strictly up to a point, today. But at the present scale it is wholly implausible.
All spending on insurance – be it on health or the police or environmental protection – requires some assessment of risk. Otherwise spending is open-ended. After the cold war there was much talk of a peace dividend and the defence industry went into intellectual overdrive. It conjured up a new "war" jargon, as in the war on drugs, on terror, on piracy, on genocide. The navy was needed to fight drug gangs in the Caribbean, pirates off Somalia and gun-runners in the Persian Gulf. In all such "wars" performance has been dire, because each threat was defined to justify service expenditure rather than the other way round.
Whenever I ask a defence pundit against whom he is defending me, the answer is a wink and a smile: "You never know." The world is a messy place. Better safe than sorry. It is like demanding crash barriers along every pavement in case cars go out of control, or examining school children for diseases every day. You never know. The truth is, we are now spending £45bn on heebie-jeebies.
For the past 20 years, Britain's armed forces have encouraged foreign policy into one war after another, none of them remotely to do with the nation's security. Asked why he was standing in an Afghan desert earlier this year, Brown had to claim absurdly that he was "making London's streets safer". Some wars, as in Iraq, have been a sickening waste of money and young lives. Others in Kosovo and Afghanistan honour a Nato commitment that had nothing to do with collective security. Like many armies in history, Nato has become an alliance in search of a purpose. Coalition ministers are citing Canada as a shining example of how to cut. Canada is wasting no more money in Afghanistan.
Despite Blair's politics of fear, Britain entered the 21st century safer than at any time since the Norman conquest. I am defended already, by the police, the security services and a myriad regulators and inspectors. Defence spending does not add to this. It is like winning the Olympics – a magnificent, extravagant national boast, so embedded in the British psyche that politicians (and newspapers) dare not question it. Yet Osborne asked that every public service should "once in a generation" go back to basics and ask what it really delivers for its money. Why not defence?
There are many evils that threaten the British people at present, but I cannot think of one that absolutely demands £45bn to deter it. Soldiers, sailors and air crews are no protection against terrorists, who anyway are not that much of a threat. No country is an aggressor against the British state. No country would attack us were the government to put its troops into reserve and mothball its ships, tanks and planes. Let us get real.
I am all for being defended, but at the present price I am entitled to ask against whom and how. Of all the public services that should justify themselves from ground zero, defence is the first.
Simon Jenkins guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 8 June 2010 20.00 BST Article history
I say cut defence. I don't mean nibble at it or slice it. I mean cut it, all £45bn of it. George Osborne yesterday asked the nation "for once in a generation" to think the unthinkable, to offer not just percentage cuts but "whether government needs to provide certain public services at all".
What do we really get from the army, the navy and the air force beyond soldiers dying in distant wars and a tingle when the band marches by? Is the tingle worth £45bn, more than the total spent on schools? Why does Osborne "ringfence" defence when everyone knows its budget is a bankruptcy waiting to happen, when Labour ministers bought the wrong kit for wars that they insisted it fight?
Osborne cannot believe the armed forces are so vital or so efficient as to be excused the star chamber's "fundamental re-evaluation of their role". He knows their management and procurement have long been an insult to the taxpayer. The reason for his timidity must be that, like David Cameron, he is a young man scared of old generals.
I was content to be expensively defended against the threat of global communism. With the end of the cold war in the 1990s that threat vanished. In its place was a fantasy proposition, that some unspecified but potent "enemy" lurked in the seas and skies around Britain. Where is it?
Each incoming government since 1990 has held so-called defence reviews "to match capabilities to policy objectives". I helped with one in 1997, and it was rubbish from start to finish, a cosmetic attempt to justify the colossal procurements then in train, and in such a way that any cut would present Labour as "soft" on defence.
Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and George Robertson, the then defence secretary were terrified into submission. They agreed to a parody of generals fighting the last war but one. They bought new destroyers to defeat the U-boat menace. They bought new carriers to save the British empire. They bought Eurofighters to duel with Russian air aces. Trident submarines with nuclear warheads went on cruising the deep, deterring no one, just so Blair could walk tall at conferences.
Each weekend, the tranquillity of the Welsh countryside is shattered by inane jets screaming through the mountain valleys playing at Lord of the Rings. With modern bombs, no plane need fly that low, and the jets are said to burn more fuel in half an hour than a school in a year. Any other service wasting so much money would be laughed out of court. Yet the Treasury grovels before the exotic virility of it all.
Labour lacked the guts to admit that it was crazy to plan for another Falklands war. It dared not admit that the procurement executive was fit for nothing but appeasing weapons manufacturers. No armies were massing on the continent poised to attack. No navies were plotting to throttle our islands and starve us into submission. No missiles were fizzing in bunkers across Asia with Birmingham or Leeds in their sights. As for the colonies, if it costs £45bn to protect the Falklands, Gibraltar and the Caymans, it must be the most ridiculous empire in history. It would be cheaper to give each colony independence and a billion a year.
Lobbyists reply that all defence expenditure is precautionary. You cannot predict every threat and it takes time to rearm should one emerge. That argument might have held during the cold war and, strictly up to a point, today. But at the present scale it is wholly implausible.
All spending on insurance – be it on health or the police or environmental protection – requires some assessment of risk. Otherwise spending is open-ended. After the cold war there was much talk of a peace dividend and the defence industry went into intellectual overdrive. It conjured up a new "war" jargon, as in the war on drugs, on terror, on piracy, on genocide. The navy was needed to fight drug gangs in the Caribbean, pirates off Somalia and gun-runners in the Persian Gulf. In all such "wars" performance has been dire, because each threat was defined to justify service expenditure rather than the other way round.
Whenever I ask a defence pundit against whom he is defending me, the answer is a wink and a smile: "You never know." The world is a messy place. Better safe than sorry. It is like demanding crash barriers along every pavement in case cars go out of control, or examining school children for diseases every day. You never know. The truth is, we are now spending £45bn on heebie-jeebies.
For the past 20 years, Britain's armed forces have encouraged foreign policy into one war after another, none of them remotely to do with the nation's security. Asked why he was standing in an Afghan desert earlier this year, Brown had to claim absurdly that he was "making London's streets safer". Some wars, as in Iraq, have been a sickening waste of money and young lives. Others in Kosovo and Afghanistan honour a Nato commitment that had nothing to do with collective security. Like many armies in history, Nato has become an alliance in search of a purpose. Coalition ministers are citing Canada as a shining example of how to cut. Canada is wasting no more money in Afghanistan.
Despite Blair's politics of fear, Britain entered the 21st century safer than at any time since the Norman conquest. I am defended already, by the police, the security services and a myriad regulators and inspectors. Defence spending does not add to this. It is like winning the Olympics – a magnificent, extravagant national boast, so embedded in the British psyche that politicians (and newspapers) dare not question it. Yet Osborne asked that every public service should "once in a generation" go back to basics and ask what it really delivers for its money. Why not defence?
There are many evils that threaten the British people at present, but I cannot think of one that absolutely demands £45bn to deter it. Soldiers, sailors and air crews are no protection against terrorists, who anyway are not that much of a threat. No country is an aggressor against the British state. No country would attack us were the government to put its troops into reserve and mothball its ships, tanks and planes. Let us get real.
I am all for being defended, but at the present price I am entitled to ask against whom and how. Of all the public services that should justify themselves from ground zero, defence is the first.
The reasonable expectations of honest men must be protected.
'Fiat justitia ruat caelum'
'Fiat justitia ruat caelum'
#23
Iona Weedug
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Posted 11 June 2010 - 06:56 AM
That would be in my top 5 cuts as well along with obscene golden hello's/goodbyes and every other golden obscene payout in between AND 
the banks could do with a make over.
Not so sure about a how much a threat Iran is to the world.They seem to be going to a lot of bother just to sit there and say look what we've got.
the banks could do with a make over.Not so sure about a how much a threat Iran is to the world.They seem to be going to a lot of bother just to sit there and say look what we've got.
"..Really don't mind if you sit this one out.."
#24
yonza bam
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Posted 11 June 2010 - 09:46 AM
Latest news:
George Soros hints at 1930s style economic collapse;
http://www.bloomberg...id=aY_SHqr1LQhk
Japanese PM says Japanese economy at risk of collapsing under 'mountain of debt':
http://news.bbc.co.u...ss/10290933.stm
George Soros hints at 1930s style economic collapse;
http://www.bloomberg...id=aY_SHqr1LQhk
Japanese PM says Japanese economy at risk of collapsing under 'mountain of debt':
http://news.bbc.co.u...ss/10290933.stm
Never compose anything unless the not composing of it becomes a positive nuisance to you. GUSTAV HOLST
#25
samscafeamericain
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Posted 11 June 2010 - 06:04 PM
I wonder how much Mr Soros had short sold the euro before making that comment
The reasonable expectations of honest men must be protected.
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#26
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Posted 11 June 2010 - 09:21 PM
An almighty post there at 22, Sammy, IMHO, and I agree in principle with so much of what you've said there.
The politics of fear, indeed.
How many of us here remember being abjectly terrified out of our wits by Protect and Survive in the 60s? It would seem there's an urgent need to keep reinventing who today's 'enemy' is--- and spend ridiculous fortunes, as you say, to appease the big weapon-making conglomerates.
Of course we could cut 'defence' spending back to the bone; but one consequence would be that the UKE unemployment figures would be even more unpalatable than they are now
£45bil is a lot of money, but does anyone have any clue how much it would cost to support all those who'd lose their livelihood should we trash the defence spend? Are we looking at the lesser of two evils here?
The politics of fear, indeed.
How many of us here remember being abjectly terrified out of our wits by Protect and Survive in the 60s? It would seem there's an urgent need to keep reinventing who today's 'enemy' is--- and spend ridiculous fortunes, as you say, to appease the big weapon-making conglomerates.
Of course we could cut 'defence' spending back to the bone; but one consequence would be that the UKE unemployment figures would be even more unpalatable than they are now
£45bil is a lot of money, but does anyone have any clue how much it would cost to support all those who'd lose their livelihood should we trash the defence spend? Are we looking at the lesser of two evils here?
"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."
#27
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Posted 11 June 2010 - 09:46 PM
Cutting defence has been done before. It was a disaster then.
If you do cut defence you will be reliant on others to safeguard/guarantee your freedom.
I dont think you can rely on the Commonwealth for help any longer
If you do cut defence you will be reliant on others to safeguard/guarantee your freedom.
I dont think you can rely on the Commonwealth for help any longer
#28
samscafeamericain
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Posted 12 June 2010 - 05:41 AM
we could dump trident and stop playing at being a global super power
The reasonable expectations of honest men must be protected.
'Fiat justitia ruat caelum'
'Fiat justitia ruat caelum'
#29
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Posted 12 June 2010 - 08:31 AM
An almighty post there at 22, Sammy, IMHO, and I agree in principle with so much of what you've said there.
The politics of fear, indeed.
How many of us here remember being abjectly terrified out of our wits by Protect and Survive in the 60s? It would seem there's an urgent need to keep reinventing who today's 'enemy' is--- and spend ridiculous fortunes, as you say, to appease the big weapon-making conglomerates.
Of course we could cut 'defence' spending back to the bone; but one consequence would be that the UKE unemployment figures would be even more unpalatable than they are now
£45bil is a lot of money, but does anyone have any clue how much it would cost to support all those who'd lose their livelihood should we trash the defence spend? Are we looking at the lesser of two evils here?
The "protect n survive leaflet and teh movie were all from the 1980s
The money could be diverted tae daein ithur merr realistic stuff, the govt disnae huvtae no spend teh 45 billyin, jist re-allocate some or all of it tae makin ithur things an demploy ra former defence workers in that
#30
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Posted 12 June 2010 - 11:06 AM
It's a total "copy 'n paste" job.
yeah, that will be the bit at the top of the article saying it was from the Guardian that gave you that clue
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#31
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Posted 12 June 2010 - 04:08 PM
Yeh - you accidently copied that bit didn't you.yeah, that will be the bit at the top of the article saying it was from the Guardian that gave you that clue
Notice you were willing to take Rolo's plaudits despite not one word being yours.
Haud up yer heid like a thistle
#32
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Posted 12 June 2010 - 05:30 PM
Yeh - you accidently copied that bit didn't you.
Notice you were willing to take Rolo's plaudits despite not one word being yours.
there was no accident and there were no plaudits.
The reasonable expectations of honest men must be protected.
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#33
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Posted 12 June 2010 - 07:47 PM
......... and there were no plaudits.
An almighty post there at 22, Sammy, IMHO, and I agree in principle with so much of what you've said there.
.and "what you've said " was absolutely nothing
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#34
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Posted 12 June 2010 - 07:58 PM
The "protect n survive leaflet and teh movie were all from the 1980s
...
Indeed, the daft "protect and Survive" booklet was from 1980. Movie, I don't remember, but if you mean the film of the Raymond Briggs "When The Wind Blows" book, oh yeah, that was good.
For anyone who wants a laugh at the stupid stupid evilly doubleplusstupid "Protest and Survive" booklet, here it is in all its glory. Or gory.
http://www.atomica.co.uk/main.htm
The very good "Protest and Survive" by E.P. Thompson is also online somewhere, but right now I don't even know where it is on bookshelf, never mind where it is in the interweb tubes.
As for "defence" spending, well, kill off the Trident replacement thing for a start. I mean, just how well that does fit with obligations under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty anyway?
Oh, and mibbe the U.K. could stop invading places: that might save a bob or two.
And, if we are all to become poor, or in my case, poorER, perhaps some money (and fuel) could be saved by not having the R.A.F. run around the sky just for Brenda's birthday.
#35
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Posted 12 June 2010 - 08:16 PM
That would be in my top 5 cuts as well along with obscene golden hello's/goodbyes and every other golden obscene payout in between AND
Def. get rid of golden goodbyes to M.P.s etc. If anyone else takes a job, knowing full well that it might be temporary, they don't expect a big load of dosh when the job comes to an end.
Go and update C.V. and go to the Jobcentre like, you know, real people. The people who DON'T get to claim expenses for wallpaper or duckhouses or cleaning ladies or dodgy "flipping" of their extra houses.
#36
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Posted 12 June 2010 - 08:40 PM
.and "what you've said " was absolutely nothing
I posted it because I agreed in principle with it. Now tom, have a day off.
The reasonable expectations of honest men must be protected.
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'Fiat justitia ruat caelum'
#37
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Posted 12 June 2010 - 09:16 PM
I posted it because I agreed in principle with it........
Principles are important.
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#38
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Posted 12 June 2010 - 09:53 PM
Def. get rid of golden goodbyes to M.P.s etc. If anyone else takes a job, knowing full well that it might be temporary, they don't expect a big load of dosh when the job comes to an end.
Yes, definitely a bit of saving to be made in these departments.
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#39
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Posted 24 June 2010 - 10:28 PM
What's so different about this country and France. They've already taken to the streets because of proposals to raise retirement age from 60 to 62.
BBC
Perhaps we will see mass emigration across the channel to avoid spending longer in the workplace?
BBC
Perhaps we will see mass emigration across the channel to avoid spending longer in the workplace?
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#40
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Posted 24 June 2010 - 10:51 PM
Here government old age pensions are means tested. Over a certain income you just dont get one
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