It's been a bad week for UK Chancellor, Alistair Darling. (Not that he doesn't deserve it, of course.)First there was the glorious and popular campaign to bar him from every pub in Britain. Then there were his pathetic plans to get traders to rat on each other, thus revealing his complete lack of understanding of the basic relationships of traders, i.e. if you have a record of ratting on people, you'll never get to trade with anyone else ever again. And then there was this quote which I read today in, of all places, the Grauniad.
"I can't allow us to get into a situation where people quite deliberately manipulate markets for personal gain and with the potential to destabilise the financial system."Just what on Earth does Alistair Darling think has been going on for the last few hundred years, with the Bank of England hoovering up all UK government bonds with money out of thin air, the abandonment of gold in the early part of this century to make this process easier, and the use of fractional reserve banking to pyramid even more debt and credit on top of all this paper? All of this criminality has been caused by the deliberate manipulation of the markets by generations of government finance ministers in return for personal gain (whether for power or money) and in the full knowledge (one hopes) that they were destabilising the long-run prospects of the financial system for the rest of us, to boost short-term gain for themselves, their friends, and their miserable political careers.
Either Alistair Darling knows this and he is an evil sophist. Or he doesn't know it and he's a stupid patsy. Either way, he deserves all that's coming to him when Gordon Brown uses him as a scapegoat to soak up all of the blame for the forthcoming recession.
2 comments:
I sense no evil. My vote is for stupid patsy, but you have to admit, as fall guys go, he's one of the best.
His personality suits this role down to the ground. When Brown dumps him I don't expect Darling to indulge in constant backbiting like we got from Ted Heath all through Thatcher's reign, and there will be no bitter attacks a la Charles Clarke. There will just be a tearful resignation speech followed by a sheepish withdrawal to the House of Lords.
It wouldn't surprise me if Darling didn't know how the fiat fractional reserve banking system works. Does ANYONE in the current government know how it works? Or is it just a magic circle of Treasury and Bank of England mandarins? One suspects the latter. Though surely Brown knows how the counterfeiting scam works, with the BoE constantly buying up gilts with previously non-existent paper? If he doesn't, then no wonder we're in such a mess.
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