Labour Government Bails out Bank?
No I haven't made a grammatical error, that question mark is there for a good reason.
For our non UK friends, back in September last year the UK government halted the first run on a UK bank, the Northern Rock, in over 100 years by guaranteeing savers and investors money with UK citizens taxes.
For me there are many things wrong with this. The biggest problem I have with this debacle is a supposedly socialist government propped up a bank, the most anti-socialist institution imaginable a bank, was under-written by the British Labour movement. Now I'm not being naive here, I know its been a long day since they have even pretended to be socialist, but there ya go, I'm old fashioned that way. But and its a very big but, and I don't think its naive to assume this same bank has foreclosed loans and repossessed peoples homes because they couldn't back up promises they had made, now these same peoples taxes are being used to prop up the same bloody bank that took their homes. A bitter pill.
This same bank found itself in this unenviable position had invested heavily in sub-prime mortgages, these are high risk mortgages lending money to people that cannot by definition afford to pay back the loan. For those of you that don't know these people are referred to (by investment bankers) as NINJAS, no income no job no assets, completely charmless I'm sure you would agree.
I find the whole situation disgusting and cynical, Gordon Brown our prime minister, who no-one voted for (at least in the USA you get to pretend to have an election, our guy doesn't even bother) was considering an election (and here we are exporting democracy to the middle east) when the situation with the Northern Rock happened, this immediately gave the opposition Tories ammunition to try and build a momentum running into the election, if it was going to happen. The UK treasury guaranteed the savers money, we never got an election and the Tories never got to use the biggest bomb in the box, thank God , they're fucking idiots as well.
And so to the news today, the Northern Rock has been nationalised so the UK taxpayer can hopefully get its money back, £80 billion and counting, thats more than our health service costs us. But what does all this mean, well I can draw a few messages from it.
1 Our political leaders are cowards and more concerned about power than civil service.
2 Our banking system (I say our but mean theirs) is fatally flawed and is terminally greedy. Privatise the profits and publicise the losses.
3 The working classes are going to bear the brunt of this, we always do.
I live in Northern Ireland and we've seen the price of houses soar and I mean soar over the past 5 years an example of which would be, 5 years ago I could've bought my house for £30'000 or less, this time last year the same house would cost me £150'000. You may think the first figure was to low, but i don't, you see we don't get paid as much as our brothers and sisters in London and Dublin and all our utility's are much more expensive, also no-one I know wages multiplied by a factor of 5, but we've seen our house prices rise and pass a major capital like London, Northern Irelands pretty but its not that fucking pretty. We have no economy, no infrastructure and no hope of paying the mortgages the banks have literally been shoveling out. This time last year we had 36'000 empty houses in this little state-let but anywhere you cared to look houses were being thrown up and selling off-plan, it was a frenzy and quite frankly it frightened me. Any idiot could see it was unsustainable and so it has proved to be. Our little economy has ground to a halt and is going to get much much worse. House prices have started to down turn. Someone I know is already in negative equity and I reckon I'm going to know a lot more before long.
Our Government cannot be trusted to run an our economy and our bankers are too greedy for anyones good.
Cut up your credit cards, buy the things you need with the money in your pocket. By borrowing money from banks you give them power to fuck you over. Government wants its citizens in debt, you become controllable when your in hock to your neck. I don't like the idea of any one, let alone a bank or fucking government, having any power or control over me.
Be good
Andy
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