Royal Bank of Scotland has the power to print its own banknotes.
Royal Bank of Scotland also seems to be a bit short of money.
So why doesn’t Royal Bank of Scotland simply print some more banknotes to meet its bills?
After all, when the Bank of England does this it’s called “quantitative easing” and the Chancellor thinks it’s just a wonderful idea.
I can’t help feeling that there’s something missing from this though….
Ambrose has always been very sceptical about the long term viability of the euro (for very much the same reasons that I have been similarly so) but this does ring true:
Mr Fischer now thinks monetary union is beyond saving. A massive rescue will be needed. It will not be forthcoming. German-French relations are the worst since the war, he said. The European insitutions have lost virtually all authority in this crisis. The half-century Project is collapsing. .. or words to that effect, from what I hear.
As regards Prof’s Pohl’s comments, they are revealing. Why should the currencies fall 60pc unless they are massively overvalued? If they are massively overvalued by anything like this amount - or even half - how can they possibly rectify this within the eurozone? Is Germany going to inflate at 10pc to let them claw back competitiveness? Of course not. This is pure madness.
Prof Pohl shrinks from the implications of his own logic, as almost everybody does in Euroland when they near the high-voltage line. EMU is inherently unworkable. It was launched before there had been real convergence of productivity growth rates, wage bargaining systems, legal practices, mortgage markets, etc, and without the fiscal transfers and debt union that makes monetary union work (badly, but on balance positively) in, say, the US, Canada, and Britain. The destructive effect has now brought the EU project to this unhappy pass, where even Joschka Fischer is giving up on it.
In short, either there is an economic government for the entire euro area or the currency will fall apart. And as no one is willing to have such an economic government, or thinks it is possible, therefore…..
It’s not going to be pretty and it’s most certainly not going to be enjoyable. But then the fallout from deeply stupid economic plans never are.
I think we an all decode this little bit, can’t we?
britský europoslanec Nigel Farage.
“Europoslanec”….just sounds rather lovely, that’s all….
Irwin Seltzer makes an important point:
Then there is the competition between nation states for businesses and mobile talents. Nothing offends Brown quite as much as “tax havens”: he plans to attack them at the G20 meeting in London in April. Illegal havens, of course, should be shut down. But legal competition by governments to attract businesses by offering the most attractive mix of low taxes and quality public services is as effective in making government efficient as competition among retailers, or producers of a host of household goods, is in forcing private firms to be efficient.
France’s Nicolas Sarkozy is offended when Brown cuts VAT; he doesn’t like the competition. And Brown is offended when other governments woo British firms by offering to lower the “price” – taxes – charged for residence. He doesn’t like competition that might force him to lower his cost of doing business – the wage bill of the bloated public sector.
Just as we know that competition between companies improves the services that they provide to consumers (and lowers the price at which they provide them) so competition between governments lowers the prices (ie the taxes) and raises the quality of services.
This is why tax harmonisation across the European Union is such a bad idea: because it takes away that competition and thus that incentive for government to become ever more efficient.
Nigel’s on Newsnight tonight.
Just recorded a little clip for them about the Post Office and how the tribulations are all down to the EU insisting that things be done their way.
A real glory here:
The British tax system urges us to use property as a bank, because it is barely taxed.
Now it’s certainly true that it could be differently taxed, better taxed. But the claim that property is barely taxed in the UK?
Actually, we have the highest property taxes amongst the advanced nations.
| #1 | United Kingdom: | 11.9% | |
| #2 | Japan: | 10.3% | |
| #3 | United States: | 10.1% | |
| #4 | Canada: | 9.7% | |
| #5 | Australia: | 8.9% | |
| #6 | Switzerland: | 8.1% | |
| #7 | France: | 6.8% | |
| #8 | Ireland: | 5.6% | |
| #9 | New Zealand: | 5.4% | |
| #10 | Netherlands: | 5.4% |
Makes you wonder why anyone listens to Polly Toynbee really, doesn’t it?
There is something almost comic (as well as the more obvious something enraging) about this from Alistair Darling.
Alistair Darling today defended his decision to allow Northern Rock to resume offering 90% mortgages, insisting the bank has learned from its mistakes.
Allowing Northern Rock to loan an extra £14bn over the next two years would help to kick-start the mortgage market, the chancellor insisted this morning.
He also confirmed that the bank, which was brought down by its reckless lending policy and reliance on wholesale credit, would be allowed to lend customers up to 90% of the value of their home. Most other lenders are unwilling to offer more than 75%.
Northern Rock of course went bust because it was offering greater loan to value numbers than anyone else: 125% in some cases. Thus it ended up with a very much higher proportion of dud loans than anyone else did.
And, of course, we’ve had our various “leaders” telling us that this was a very bad thing and how could the bankers have been so naughty?
Darling is now saying that this very same action, offering higher loan to value than anyone else, thus ending up with a larger number of dud loans, is a very good thing indeed and how could anyone be so naughty as to doubt his word?
Bad when it’s done privately and good when it’s done by a politician? Bad when it’s done with private money but good when done with our taxes?
The arrogance amazes…..
It’s easy enough to get terribly confused in the alphabet soup that surrounds any interaction with the European insititutions. Especially with such things as the Human Rights Act, the various European Courts and so on.
We have that old phrase, that justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done. I’d add a further clause, that it must be understood to be done as well. As, sadly, for all too many of us at the moment it isn’t.
For we’re told that we cannot deport a man and then the next day that we have to compensate him for keeping him in jail while we tried to deport him. Or something, I’m afraid even I’m getting confused here.
But this sounds like a rather neat solution:
Of course the Law Lords are not perfect. But they are far more capable of making decisions appropriate for Britain than the judges in the Strasbourg court. With some notable exceptions, the European judges are, to put it mildly, lightly qualified for the job of interpreting the Convention on Human Rights in a British context. Judges from Albania, Serbia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Russia, Romania and Latvia do not come from countries with a tradition of respect for the rule of law, or even much experience of it. One British observer has said that seeing how they come to their decisions is a bit like watching the East European judges in the Eurovision Song Contest. That’s an exaggeration – but you see his point.
The most incisively intelligent of the Law Lords, Lord Hoffman, has suggested opting out of the jurisdiction of the European Court now that the European Convention on Human Rights has been incorporated into our law. Can anyone seriously maintain that the judges in Strasbourg are more likely to reach wise decisions on how to apply human rights law in Britain than our own judges? Can it even be claimed that we would lose anything at all by reverting to the age-old system of having our own judges interpret our law, rather than having, as the ultimate authority, foreign judges who know nothing of it? To pose those questions is to answer them. The sooner we extricate ourselves from Strasbourg, the better for the rule of law in Britain.
Our judges interpreting our own laws? Something of an idea that, isn’t it? I think there might even be a word for it, a phrase….being sovereign, isn’t it?
And what do you think was the reason the council gave for the repainting of the spaces? Because they had to comply with an EU Directive which lays out how big the spaces must be. I ask you.
What on earth has the size of car parking spaces in Tunbridge Wells got to do with the EU?
This is a very useful little list from the UKIP Witney site. A list of terms used when talking about the European Union.
Even people like me who are already supposed to know all this stuff will find it useful as an aide memoire.