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As I've said many, many times, the blame rests with three sets of people:
i) Government; deregulation of the city, raiding of the pension funds, overstimulating the economy by forcing the banks to flood the market with liquidity it could ill afford. Take your pick.
ii) Financial Services; a very, very, very small number of top people within the fin.services companies made some very bad decisions. Though I know most people would love to think we're all conniving, greedy, fat cats, etc.etc. we're not. 99.999% of people employed by banks are honest, hard-working, profit generating folks, not making millions of pounds. In fact, most areas of the banks in question are exceptionally profitable. For example, RBS' FX (Foreign Currency) trading division made £1bn profit in October last year. Did you hear about it? Nope. Of course not. Cos we're all too busy on our fleets of yachts...
iii) The public; Yes, you. And me. And everyone else. Private sector debt in this country, discounting student loans (mercifully, my only current debt), currently stands at about £1tr. Yes, one trillion pounds. That's a lot of money that, sooner or later, the people who lent it out, are going to want you to pay back.
You might argue that banks shouldn't have offered loans / credit cards in the first place, but guess what, they're commercial organisations, operating for profit. That's what they do. Commercial organisations offer me stuff hundreds of times a day. Just because it's there doesn't mean you have to take it. People living far beyond their means for too long will be the major inhibiting factor to long-term recovery.
Recently, I was working at one of our TASs (Telephone Advisory Services), where people ring up and ask for loans, credit cards etc. (not the other way I hasten to add).
I was genuinely staggered by the lack of financial knowledge and prudence most of the customers whose calls I listened to. Seriously, most people were just plain fucking ignorant of how or why banks operate.
Case in point: 19 year old girl, employed, living with 'rents, earning about £1k after tax per month, calls up wanting a loan of £15k; half on her wedding and half on a new car (because she wants one, not needs one).
Seriously, how the fuck, at 19 years of age do you expect to be able to afford a £15k loan? You're effectively selling yourself into a lifetime of debt.
Before I go and buy any product I'm not amazingly knowledgable about, I go and do my research. People should do the same when shopping for financial services. Sadly they don't. All they see is all that 'free money' that will result in a plasma telly and a shiny new car, both of which will halve in value the second you get it home.
Still, in the society in which we live nowadays, nobody takes responsibility for their own actions. It's always someone else's fault.
Lastly, I wish to share a very apt quote for the proceedings:
"Moral indignation in most cases is, 2% moral, 48% indignation, and 50% envy." - Vittorio De Sica
PS, I also find it quite funny that a large proportion of the protesters, who were protesting in the City today about how taxpayers' money is spent, probably aren't taxpayers themselves. Will probably get flamed for that remark but it's how a lot of us City folk feel.
theres a lot of police brutality from what i've heard, and people aren't being let out to have their injuries treated...
lol you weren't one of those waving tenners out the windows at the protesters today were you?
i agree there's plenty of blame to go around and there's lots of stupid people getting themselves into debt, but that's how the system's designed to work so my moral indignation still lies primarily with those preying on the public's stupidity. i'm not staggered by the lack of financial knowledge and prudence of the average person because it's not taught in school, and the machinations of global finance are deliberately obfuscated from public view. you work in a bank so you might be relatively intelligent but you probably don't know half the shit that goes on, most people i've met in the banks are just as clueless as the rest.
i've worked in several banks and brokerages so i know the average hard working employee, and they're not the ones who invented the massively over leveraged toxic financial securities. so don't take it so personally but it's the banks who fucked up, and the government who turned a blind eye.
what is really delaying global economic recovery is the lack of transparency even still which means no trust in the credit markets, meanwhile governments are colluding with the banks to rape what's left of the country's wealth at the taxpayer's expense. classic example today is the big GM bondholders deliberately bankrupting the company because they will receive a bigger payout from their CDS hedges via AIG, 100% guaranteed courtesy of the US taxpayer. if the average person understood what's actually going on you really would have bankers and politicians swinging from lamp posts, never mind a few broken windows. maybe when the sovereign bond markets and FX dislocations start rolling, but i doubt it.
http://market-ticker.org/archives/921-GM-Bankrupt,-UNLESS.....html
Paul's blog would be more accurate if it said something like
"20,000 protestors surged forward, some started smashing windows, some started throwing missiles. The police respond by surging back".
When they do respond the crowd start shouting "shame on you" completely forgetting that maybe throwing a crash barrier at them might piss them off a bit.
No, sadly I was working from home so I missed all the fun, though I was watching it on the news.
Might be reasonably intelligent?
I don't think financial prudence should be taught in schools, as it would inevitably be devalued by virtue of it being on the national curriculum, and fail to cover off points which actually matter to people. There should be an inherent culture within people, within families. My parents taught me the value of savings, who were in turn taught by their parents (much to my chagrin, when all I wanted was to blow my birthday money on an Super Nintendo...), and I'm very grateful for it. One thing I inexplicably neglected to mention - when I was doing my work at the TAS (see above), of the 30 or so people whose calls I listened to, not a single soul had a savings account or any sort of long-term financial planning. Therein, methinks, lies the problem.
Personally, I believe that before contracting out any service, be it financial services, getting a new telly, hiring a plumber, or whatever, do your research - what do you need, why do you need it, can you afford it, and what your obligations will be should you go ahead. If you don't do your research and jump at the first bunch of cowboys offering their services, expect to get completely fucked over.
Hmm, not sure I really agree. I think the credit markets are so tight because the private sector is so hugely over-leveraged that no-one in their right mind would want to lend to it. If I was looking at a company that was so highly geared (if you equate the private sector to a company for the purpose of an analogy), I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole. Interest on equity capital does not have to be paid year on year. Interest on loan capital does, and if the company (private sector), cannot sustain is high gearing, and, as we've seen, it invariable cannot, investors will scram quick smart in their droves.
Max Keiser in his inimitable way advocates decapitation !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzvMh73WflQ (part 1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GxIUhd1pAk&feature=related (part 2)
(Around 1.05 mins of part 2 he touches on the Afghan opium money but unsurprisingly is not encouraged to expand by the host. That is a whole new topic for another day).
Around 6.25 mins of part 2 Keiser suggests a plan of real/sound money which his adversary, the academic economist, agrees with. Somethiing I would not have anticipated.
That kind of heresy is banned from state education for good reason. The obsfucation you allude to aids in the emptying of wallets and purses.
But feel free to ignore the countless accounts (corroborated by independent witnesses) of completely unjustified police brutality by some of the coppers present yesterday, if that's what floats your boat.
I'm with you re: the protests at RBS, but there is no getting away from the fact that sections of the police were ridiculously over the top, and unprovoked, on Bishopsgate after dark. Even at Bank they charged a separate sit down protest without warning.
That isn't provocation, that isn't proportional response - that's unwarranted police violence.
**yawn**
Must have been your TV, but I didnt see any police smashing windows and throwing bottles at a dying man.
Lets put this in context - a dying man was helped out by police medics, they were crouched down treating him near the front of the cordon.
Before the man fell down, there were objects flying, a lot of which were plastic bottles.
When the medics were treating him between 3 and 4 objects believed to be plastic bottles were thrown; shouts of 'stop' went through the crowd to the back, where the bottles came from. Then several people threatened to come back and beat the bottle throwers if they did not cease, which they promptly did.
In a related thing, Auntie dropped a huge reporting bollock by stating that the police have stated he was knocked down by bottles (the police did NOT state this) - don't know if it's been ammended yet.
I've yet to see any real evidence of the police acting "brutally".
The only videos that appear on Youtube are the badly edited ones that convieniently miss out the throwing of crash barriers or glass bottles that start the surge off in the first place.,
There will be cases where the police do respond wrongly, but more often than not the police tend to be a lot more restrained than counterparts overseas.
As for "independant" witnesses, define an independant witness during a protest turned violent.
People there fit into 3 categories:
Protestors
Police
Reporters (who will have their own bias anyway).
I'm sorry but I won't trust the testimony of a protestor at an anti-establishment protest unless they've got UNEDITED evidence to back themselves up, ie a video with footage from a good few minutes before as well as the event itself.
I suspect deep down you know it happened. But keep telling yourself otherwise. Keep telling yourself that the protesters all lied and the journalists who saw it also lied. Obviously only the police tells the truth :rolleyes:
Incidentally, if you think hundreds of accounts corraborated by independent accounts are not good enough, I hope you keep that in mind the next time you come to arrest somebody. Because 95% of arrests or convinctions would never happen if everyone were to take such approach.
I don't think stating that a lack of any real video evidence is going to extraordinary lengths, do you? I've stated before that I accept that some instances of police acting over the top will happen, but certainly not to the extent the protestors claim. If it were happening as much as you believe, the video evidence wouldn't ever be as edited as it is.
With the exception of some of the more unbiased journalists, a mass of protestors, who are all there for the same reason are going to support their friends, and they are going to exaggerate what has happened. Of course the protestors are going to say the police started it, it stops them getting into trouble.
At the end of the day, I'm going to side with the police. You know that, so do most people here, and I will continue to do so. If I didn't it would be a pretty boring debate don't you think?
I don't have a clue. All I know is that if it does kick off having a half dozen cops in place is only going to end with the cops getting a good kicking. Much better (in my humble opinion anyway) to have enough cops there that if it does kick off fewer will get hurt.
The leverage and gearing is part of the problem, but the lack of credit is affecting all businesses even those who aren't highly geared or leveraged, because the banks just don't have the money to lend.
The reason noone is lending money is a) banks don't want to accept the market price for what their securities are worth because it would make most of them insolvent, and b) as a result they have to hoard whatever cash they can get from the central banks to meet capital ratios. Just today FASB announced they are relaxing M2M accounting rules to help banks keep hiding the real value of their assets, because the value of assets is now fictional it doesn't matter how geared or leveraged you are because noone can know what they are buying with any confidence. No transparency = no confidence = no liquidity. Investors aren't going to put anymore money in while these games are being played.
The central banks are therefore taking on all these worthless securities at face value because noone else will and recapitalising the banks via the taxpayer, putting all the risk onto the sovereign bond markets. This is not sustainable as you are now seeing with ever more desperate measures like quantitative easing and the FED having to buy US bonds because there's not enough foreign demand to fund these trillion dollar bailouts. Gearing and leverage is somewhat irrelevant at this point, with no transparency and investor confidence this is going to end very badly.
Don't want to jump in but I've read about this before, in the 'olden days' police used to have a hands off approach but that led to huge riots that would last days with many injured and/or killed. The strategy now is one of prudence whereby if there is the potential of trouble then they prepare to react instantly in order to stop in excalating uneccesarily. You can argue that having a heavy police presence there beforehand may antagonise otherwise peaceful protestors but also I think it's important to beware that there were certain elements (at least this is what has been reported) that were going there to incite a riot in others due to their own frustrations.
If you lived in an area where a protest that had a fair probability of turning nasty, would you prefer the police to wait until the shit hits the fan out of fear of antagonising the protestors or would you prefer them to be highly visible and help to put off protestors? Anyway, as above that's just what I read when doing a levels or something by a senior policeman as in the 60s / 70s or something they had real troubles with big, nasty riots and so now are very proactive in trying to stop them escalating to that stage. Supposedly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3YtmBD_thM&NR=1
You think the police have changed that much in 25 years?
The police love a good riot as much as the protesters. Free reign to throw their weight around smashing skulls without any comeback.
It should be pretty obvious IMO that the presence of riot police for no apparent reason is going to antagonise any crowd that would otherwise have not felt threatened or annoyed by the presence of an adequate police presence. Riot police means only one thing: riots are expected and the riot unit is ready to chage. Unless there is a certainty of that happenning, riot police should never be on sight of a demostration. It certainly does not deter anyone.
The technique of penning people for simply being at a demo for up to 8 hours at a time is not only counterproductive, it should be made illegal. There were numerous reports of people being told by the police to piss on the street (tricky that, seeing as everyone was penned tight) or people with injuries not being allowed out to seek medical attention.
Extensive damage *by a few* might have been avoided, but the operation will not be remembered as one of the Met's finest hours. Ironically the only damaged that occurred was carried out by no more than a handful of individuals while the press looked on. A vanload of normal coppers would have been enough to prevent this.
Mind you it's a big fuss about nothing - the way people are talking makes it sound like a cross between the Sharpeville Massacre and the police station massacre in Terminator. No petrol bombs, no tear gas; they didn't even have any live rounds fired or have to call in APCs - I wouldn't get out of bed for it.
The French on the other hand...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7979960.stm
Maybe some, but I don't know any personally who are like that.
As for Aladdin and other's points. It's Catch 22. You know there are going to be protests but you limit police numbers. Protestors take it as a sign that they can do whatever they like and things go out of control OR they behave.
People, without forms of control do not behave, and in a large scale disorder situation you can't just send in small numbers of cops without protection.
It might be antagonistic but the alternative is anarchy.
Definitely agree and as skive said or alluded to many people's experience is that the police are just thugs in uniforms anyway and looking for a legitimate reason to beat people up. Of course this like most generalisations isn't true but back in my first job at the co op we got told in our induction how important appearances were - if one person in the uniform misbehaves then it does loads of damage to the corporate image.
The police having a few bad eggs that let things get rough when they needn't be or even more ridiculous actions like the use of anti terrorism laws to stop protestors and/or journalists are seriously seriously damaging the police's reputation. A police officer should be beyond reproach. It shouldn't be the excuse that 'theyre only human' because these people are given special rights and special powers and as such need to be held to a much higher standard.
I don't believe in a public trial by fire as obviously joe bloggs on the street doesn't understand what it's like to be a PC dealing with an unruly crowd so isn't the best person to say whether it's excessive or not (relating back to whowheres point also about there not really being 'impartial' people at the protest - journalists want news and police being well behaved isn't news, similarly anti-establishment protestors will try to justify their own ideas so if they see a PC arresting someone of course they are going to scream 'police brutality! see! I told you!!' a la monty python heh). However I think it's undisputable that the damage being done to the Met's reputation and the police and even the civil services as a whole is unacceptable and those in charge really need to be proactive in countering this current distrust of the police.
Afterall the last thing any reasoned citizen wants is for there to be such a distrust between the services and such that firemen need to be careful of running into a burning building in case piano wire has been strung across the doorway.
This is the image on the front of the newspapers. That is the reputation and corporate image the met is garnering for itself. Whether they need to train officers more to weed out the bad eggs or whether its just a case of journalistic bias and actually the coppers are not a bad lot (and maybe just need a PR guru on their side) it must be dealt with before the situation descends into animosity between people and police.
Incidentally, if you think the above image is in any way a deterrent to future would-be trouble makers you are sorely, sorely mistaken.
clearly meaning you believe the police were responsible for the man's head injury.
Seeing as neither you nor me know what the man had done (if he'd done anything at all) I find it rather worrying that you are pleased that the police caused bleeding head injuries to a member of the public without even caring what he was guilty of.
Does that mean you trust the police to only cause injury to citizens in those cases that merit it (and if so, what merits getting hit on the head with such force)?
Or does it mean you don't really care what the man had done and that by simply being there demonstrating he probably deserved what he got?