The reason the banks in 2008 were not allowed to fail, is that their failure would have pulled down every other bank in the world in an unstoppable domino effect.
“Only connect!” wrote EM Forster. Well, everything is connected, and in ways we barely understand. A collapse in the derivatives markets, for example, would cripple the aviation industry. Airlines use derivatives to hedge the price of aviation fuel.
When the Truss government imploded, few noticed the accelerating effect that liability driven investments had on the collapse of bond prices. The Bank of England woke up only just in time. Every other central bank in the developed world thought, “There, but for the grace of God…”
Which is why no one is wildly keen on a Schumpeterian cleansing of the Augean stables – richly though they deserve it.
Different view – BoE was clever! Just simply looking after their own type of people. Those people that matter, that count, that have a voice. In the period between the 2008 crash and Covid interest rates were insanely low. Those who benefitted were those who could profit from an asset price increase. Not simply the majority of us with one home and one major “asset” but those with many. Those able to borrow at low interest and take advantage for those available assets did well.
The other side to this low interest period comes with servicing debt. We had a mortgage drop for ten years of about £10K per annum. Lovely! Spent some and saved some, got ourselves into a fairly safe financial position as retirement and downsizing loomed.
Non of this benefitted those without assets however. My son in the renting cohort saw his rents up go up and up as our “home” costs went down and down.
This is what I mean by the BoE looking after those people that matter!!
indeed-but its not an all or nothing binary choice-the problems of unfettered creative destruction are exacerbated by a poor regulatory framework and consistently poor regulatory policy.You could have a more manged form of destruction ,focused on the most blatant zombie companies -however,this would require a very high level of competence from the relevant policy decision makes and politico’s -so no chance!!!
Jim Veenbaas
2 months ago
Thought provoking essay for sure. Added to this is the actual pursuit of net zero policies that can only lead to degrowth.
“Destruction leads to a very rough road, but it also breeds creation”. This first principle of human existence has been increasingly shunned over the past 50-odd years in favour of a mixed mantra of safety-ism and risk avoidance. Without the injection of energy that comes with change via varying levels of destruction and chaos – we invariably begin to stagnate as entropy sets in. The lack of courage within modern leadership has led to a fixation on maintaining the comfort and safety of the status quo – at all costs. But in the end, reality will always win. The longer we put it off, the bigger the pressure build up, and the larger the resulting destructive “reset” will be. Fun times ahead!
So true. Risk aversion is now embedded deeply in the social as well as business cultures of all EU States. The precautionary principle has seen armies of frit interfering lawyers and bureaucrats kill innovation and squeeze the very life out of a once dynamic worlds of enterprise.
Andrew R
2 months ago
Low interest rates and mass immigration juiced up those assets It also reduced salaries and incentives to work, destroyed innovation and placed a huge burden on infrastructure and services.
The Tories still don’t understand any of this.
Nik Jewell
2 months ago
Has anybody read/watched David Rogers Webb’s ‘The Great Taking‘? (both film and book are free). If so, what did you think of it?
In a global economy increasing the minimum wage will simply add to unemployment with no concrete prospect of new businesses taking up the slack.
One of the problems at the moment as that people on minimum wage are paying income and NI taxes, and have a marginal tax rate of 32%. Increasing tax thresholds would allow a reduction in minimum wage, making marginal companies more profitable and able to invest, and be more competitive internationally.
The Hunt/Sunak combo is of course doing the exact opposite. Freezing thresholds and raising minimum wage. Apparently so that inheritance tax can be abolished or reduced, so ensuring the wealthy get wealthier , and reducing the need for the next generation to actually do something productive.
Increasing the minimum is not confined to a single sector of the workforce; raising the floor means everyone’s pay gets bumped, which leads to higher prices, and a feedback loop as predictable as night following day. In the US, at least, families are not being raised on the minimum wage. Scarcely any business pays minimum to start with those and where that is earned, it is typically first-time workers, people supplementing full-time income, or a part-timer living in a household with a full-time earner.
All that aside, raising the minimum to create a desired effect is an artificial means of doing so that brings about its own set of tradeoffs. If govt simply stayed out of the way, this ‘benefit’ would occur on its own and without the additional issues that arise from political meddling.
Walter Marvell
2 months ago
I dispute the basic premise of this interesting article. It presupposes that the nature of our State, capitalism and the enterprise culture all still exist and function in the post 90s EU Europe/UK just as they did before. They do not. Every Western State has used magic money and bailouts to try and paper over their chronic structural failure – to support growth and to deliver their populations affordable housing, cheap energy, border and food security. Our States ARE anti growth. It cannot last. We exist in a dank dark cage in which the Sheriffs are frantically plundering taxes from us to sustain a failed bloated State. The risk averse suffocating EU regulatory/legal order and madness of State endorsed Net Zero madness means we sit in a straitjacket in that cage – with a gag choking mouths. Mass uncontrolled migration is layering concrete atop our cage by smashing our already broken public services and supplying a vast army of tax takers – not contributors – to join the 10m sitting listlessly as the progressive ethos of human right entitlement gnaws at the spirit of enterprise. This 30 year old Progressive New Order is completely different to the Thatcherite Order and the nation state it broke up. And now it has now played all its cards – QE, property racket, mass migration, furlough, tax credits energy bailouts. None have worked. What follows is the payback.
Too true, Thatcher and Reagan did deregulate the banking system though, allowed outsourcing to the private sector and failed to invest in our nuclear (world leading) energy, they were hardly halcyon days. I blame the malaise on western governments inability to stand up to the greedy, controlling American elites.
Jules Anjim
2 months ago
Developed western economies have been liberated by globalisation and capitalist short-sightedness of all of their inefficient and protected industries (by the world’s biggest protected economy), and plan B is a Finance/Property based economy bolstered by population growth and foreign capital to fund the debt required to maintain living standards.
Over-consumption underpins the global economic (and geo-political) framework. Our constant cycle of asset bubbles – housing or otherwise – are inevitable and necessary in most countries to fabricate the ‘wealth’ required to consume. It is no coincidence that both governments and markets are engaged in fostering them. You can’t square the circle without it. Not sure how the global economy looks without the propensity of a large part of the population to over-consume and believe it can be had for nothing.
Private debt used to fund individuals’ entitlement spending can be injudicious and excessive as long as it is secured by real estate and Bank shares, and the accordant implied support of the public balance sheet (repaired via reduction in health, education, welfare spending) and Central Banks.
Ultimately, one day, far away, there will be no avoiding the hangover from the Champagne Economic policy rationale that conservatives and Labour alike have been swilling for the past three decades. Just be grateful the plebs are too distracted to grab hold of the bottle and start cracking some skulls.
But the original architects of this plan are long gone, the current protagonists happily ensconced in a bubble of wealth and political power. They are not for changing. There is no-one to oppose them. There will be no reflection, no apologies, no retribution, no revolution. Go suck on it, you had better get used to the flavour.
So what can one do ? Borrow to buy inner-city land. Develop. Collect rent. Offset expenses against income. Wait. Leverage equity. Vote 1 Higher Immigration, Bigger Population. Vote 1, Deregulation of the Credit market. Repeat. And quietly hum to yourself “I Like Chinese, I Like Chinese, I Like Chinese”
A slightly vicious but realistic view, shame you consider the less fortunate ‘plebs,’ perhaps that is better internalised.
j watson
2 months ago
V timely if read by sufficient. The day after an by-election kicking the Right in the UK at least is in a spasm on what has gone wrong. Inevitably it’s fixating on the wrong things. More explanation is in this Article on what is wrong with UK capitalism, how investment incentives are not working the way we need and thus low growth etc. Rather than seeking scapegoats and the blather about tax cuts a fundamental pause and thought needed.
Of course letting recessions/slumps run riot because of the potential creative forces it unleashes has considerable risk – basic fabric of society, law & order etc – which is primary reason why our predecessors sought to mitigate. It’s also electorally difficult to do little.
But we can still do better on how investment incentives work. The Author explains how the over-emphasis on land and assets rips potential from other sectors. It’s compounded by over reliance on private sector to deliver capacity/demand equilibrium in housing and related need – it wants scarcity to drive profits and will always profit maximise. Thus Govt has to act.
The game is rigged for the advantaged, and we can ‘un-rig’ without burning the house down.
Alan Thorpe
2 months ago
What a load of rubbish. Capitalism does not create boom and bust cycles when it is based on free competitive trade. It is the creation of central banks and the printing of worthless money that creates the cycles. Politicians should be kept as far away from the economy as possible. All they have done is privatise profit and socialise debt.
Alternatively, we could let markets work without the influence of central planners who have never run a business, dealt with taxes and expenses, or worried about making a payroll. Who knows. It could work. We have certainly discovered that constant tinkering and meddling by politicians and bureaucrats does not work, at least not for the average person. It works great for the oligarchs and the govt people who benefit from the oligarchs’ patronage.
Left to their own devices most markets would quickly coalesce into monopoly positions profit maximising for a limited few. Your suggestion, if you really meant it, v naive.
That doesn’t mean current market interventions all been effective or warranted, nor doe sit mean that some urgent market interventions aren’t needed.
Mike Downing
2 months ago
‘Nature makes no sudden leaps…’
But evolution is full of great extinctions which permit the next groups or species to prosper in the new environment.
We’ve simply lost the will to cope with
any discomfort and instead witter on about microaggressions while life still gets more precarious for those at the bottom of the ladder in any case.
One of the drivers of the disastrous response to the pandemic was this idea that every life could and should be saved regardless of the cost.
This is obviously a luxury belief of the sort that will soon finish off the current model and, probably, result in a cull of epic proportions when our exorbitant and bankrupting support systems finally run out of puff.
Douglas Redmayne
2 months ago
These ideas are goid ones providingbyou dont care a out mass destitution caused by the temporary unemployment and collapse of wealth which, as Keynes demonstrated 90 years ago, could metastatsise into a permanent phenomenon. There would need to be some form of minimum income guarantee operated via social insurance that would protect people from the destitution that such creative destruction woukd cause.
The reason the banks in 2008 were not allowed to fail, is that their failure would have pulled down every other bank in the world in an unstoppable domino effect.
“Only connect!” wrote EM Forster. Well, everything is connected, and in ways we barely understand. A collapse in the derivatives markets, for example, would cripple the aviation industry. Airlines use derivatives to hedge the price of aviation fuel.
When the Truss government imploded, few noticed the accelerating effect that liability driven investments had on the collapse of bond prices. The Bank of England woke up only just in time. Every other central bank in the developed world thought, “There, but for the grace of God…”
Which is why no one is wildly keen on a Schumpeterian cleansing of the Augean stables – richly though they deserve it.
The Bank of England is clueless and putting it in charge of interest rates was a catastrophic mistake.
Different view – BoE was clever! Just simply looking after their own type of people. Those people that matter, that count, that have a voice. In the period between the 2008 crash and Covid interest rates were insanely low. Those who benefitted were those who could profit from an asset price increase. Not simply the majority of us with one home and one major “asset” but those with many. Those able to borrow at low interest and take advantage for those available assets did well.
The other side to this low interest period comes with servicing debt. We had a mortgage drop for ten years of about £10K per annum. Lovely! Spent some and saved some, got ourselves into a fairly safe financial position as retirement and downsizing loomed.
Non of this benefitted those without assets however. My son in the renting cohort saw his rents up go up and up as our “home” costs went down and down.
This is what I mean by the BoE looking after those people that matter!!
Who then, the government?!
indeed-but its not an all or nothing binary choice-the problems of unfettered creative destruction are exacerbated by a poor regulatory framework and consistently poor regulatory policy.You could have a more manged form of destruction ,focused on the most blatant zombie companies -however,this would require a very high level of competence from the relevant policy decision makes and politico’s -so no chance!!!
Thought provoking essay for sure. Added to this is the actual pursuit of net zero policies that can only lead to degrowth.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/642556c560a35e000c0cb167/powering-up-britain-net-zero-growth-plan.pdf
This TERRIFYING!
“Destruction leads to a very rough road, but it also breeds creation”. This first principle of human existence has been increasingly shunned over the past 50-odd years in favour of a mixed mantra of safety-ism and risk avoidance. Without the injection of energy that comes with change via varying levels of destruction and chaos – we invariably begin to stagnate as entropy sets in. The lack of courage within modern leadership has led to a fixation on maintaining the comfort and safety of the status quo – at all costs. But in the end, reality will always win. The longer we put it off, the bigger the pressure build up, and the larger the resulting destructive “reset” will be. Fun times ahead!
…basically this is what happens when “Ladies Day’ becomes every day.
Yeah, well… As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for…
So true. Risk aversion is now embedded deeply in the social as well as business cultures of all EU States. The precautionary principle has seen armies of frit interfering lawyers and bureaucrats kill innovation and squeeze the very life out of a once dynamic worlds of enterprise.
Low interest rates and mass immigration juiced up those assets It also reduced salaries and incentives to work, destroyed innovation and placed a huge burden on infrastructure and services.
The Tories still don’t understand any of this.
Has anybody read/watched David Rogers Webb’s ‘The Great Taking‘? (both film and book are free). If so, what did you think of it?
No, thank you!
If we significantly increased the mimimum wage, would not many ‘marginal or inefficient firms go to the wall’ giving us exactly the same benefit?
In a global economy increasing the minimum wage will simply add to unemployment with no concrete prospect of new businesses taking up the slack.
One of the problems at the moment as that people on minimum wage are paying income and NI taxes, and have a marginal tax rate of 32%. Increasing tax thresholds would allow a reduction in minimum wage, making marginal companies more profitable and able to invest, and be more competitive internationally.
The Hunt/Sunak combo is of course doing the exact opposite. Freezing thresholds and raising minimum wage. Apparently so that inheritance tax can be abolished or reduced, so ensuring the wealthy get wealthier , and reducing the need for the next generation to actually do something productive.
Increasing the minimum is not confined to a single sector of the workforce; raising the floor means everyone’s pay gets bumped, which leads to higher prices, and a feedback loop as predictable as night following day. In the US, at least, families are not being raised on the minimum wage. Scarcely any business pays minimum to start with those and where that is earned, it is typically first-time workers, people supplementing full-time income, or a part-timer living in a household with a full-time earner.
All that aside, raising the minimum to create a desired effect is an artificial means of doing so that brings about its own set of tradeoffs. If govt simply stayed out of the way, this ‘benefit’ would occur on its own and without the additional issues that arise from political meddling.
I dispute the basic premise of this interesting article. It presupposes that the nature of our State, capitalism and the enterprise culture all still exist and function in the post 90s EU Europe/UK just as they did before. They do not. Every Western State has used magic money and bailouts to try and paper over their chronic structural failure – to support growth and to deliver their populations affordable housing, cheap energy, border and food security. Our States ARE anti growth. It cannot last. We exist in a dank dark cage in which the Sheriffs are frantically plundering taxes from us to sustain a failed bloated State. The risk averse suffocating EU regulatory/legal order and madness of State endorsed Net Zero madness means we sit in a straitjacket in that cage – with a gag choking mouths. Mass uncontrolled migration is layering concrete atop our cage by smashing our already broken public services and supplying a vast army of tax takers – not contributors – to join the 10m sitting listlessly as the progressive ethos of human right entitlement gnaws at the spirit of enterprise. This 30 year old Progressive New Order is completely different to the Thatcherite Order and the nation state it broke up. And now it has now played all its cards – QE, property racket, mass migration, furlough, tax credits energy bailouts. None have worked. What follows is the payback.
Too true, Thatcher and Reagan did deregulate the banking system though, allowed outsourcing to the private sector and failed to invest in our nuclear (world leading) energy, they were hardly halcyon days. I blame the malaise on western governments inability to stand up to the greedy, controlling American elites.
Developed western economies have been liberated by globalisation and capitalist short-sightedness of all of their inefficient and protected industries (by the world’s biggest protected economy), and plan B is a Finance/Property based economy bolstered by population growth and foreign capital to fund the debt required to maintain living standards.
Over-consumption underpins the global economic (and geo-political) framework. Our constant cycle of asset bubbles – housing or otherwise – are inevitable and necessary in most countries to fabricate the ‘wealth’ required to consume. It is no coincidence that both governments and markets are engaged in fostering them. You can’t square the circle without it. Not sure how the global economy looks without the propensity of a large part of the population to over-consume and believe it can be had for nothing.
Private debt used to fund individuals’ entitlement spending can be injudicious and excessive as long as it is secured by real estate and Bank shares, and the accordant implied support of the public balance sheet (repaired via reduction in health, education, welfare spending) and Central Banks.
Ultimately, one day, far away, there will be no avoiding the hangover from the Champagne Economic policy rationale that conservatives and Labour alike have been swilling for the past three decades. Just be grateful the plebs are too distracted to grab hold of the bottle and start cracking some skulls.
But the original architects of this plan are long gone, the current protagonists happily ensconced in a bubble of wealth and political power. They are not for changing. There is no-one to oppose them. There will be no reflection, no apologies, no retribution, no revolution. Go suck on it, you had better get used to the flavour.
So what can one do ? Borrow to buy inner-city land. Develop. Collect rent. Offset expenses against income. Wait. Leverage equity. Vote 1 Higher Immigration, Bigger Population. Vote 1, Deregulation of the Credit market. Repeat. And quietly hum to yourself “I Like Chinese, I Like Chinese, I Like Chinese”
A slightly vicious but realistic view, shame you consider the less fortunate ‘plebs,’ perhaps that is better internalised.
V timely if read by sufficient. The day after an by-election kicking the Right in the UK at least is in a spasm on what has gone wrong. Inevitably it’s fixating on the wrong things. More explanation is in this Article on what is wrong with UK capitalism, how investment incentives are not working the way we need and thus low growth etc. Rather than seeking scapegoats and the blather about tax cuts a fundamental pause and thought needed.
Of course letting recessions/slumps run riot because of the potential creative forces it unleashes has considerable risk – basic fabric of society, law & order etc – which is primary reason why our predecessors sought to mitigate. It’s also electorally difficult to do little.
But we can still do better on how investment incentives work. The Author explains how the over-emphasis on land and assets rips potential from other sectors. It’s compounded by over reliance on private sector to deliver capacity/demand equilibrium in housing and related need – it wants scarcity to drive profits and will always profit maximise. Thus Govt has to act.
The game is rigged for the advantaged, and we can ‘un-rig’ without burning the house down.
What a load of rubbish. Capitalism does not create boom and bust cycles when it is based on free competitive trade. It is the creation of central banks and the printing of worthless money that creates the cycles. Politicians should be kept as far away from the economy as possible. All they have done is privatise profit and socialise debt.
Good post.
Alternatively, we could let markets work without the influence of central planners who have never run a business, dealt with taxes and expenses, or worried about making a payroll. Who knows. It could work. We have certainly discovered that constant tinkering and meddling by politicians and bureaucrats does not work, at least not for the average person. It works great for the oligarchs and the govt people who benefit from the oligarchs’ patronage.
Left to their own devices most markets would quickly coalesce into monopoly positions profit maximising for a limited few. Your suggestion, if you really meant it, v naive.
That doesn’t mean current market interventions all been effective or warranted, nor doe sit mean that some urgent market interventions aren’t needed.
‘Nature makes no sudden leaps…’
But evolution is full of great extinctions which permit the next groups or species to prosper in the new environment.
We’ve simply lost the will to cope with
any discomfort and instead witter on about microaggressions while life still gets more precarious for those at the bottom of the ladder in any case.
One of the drivers of the disastrous response to the pandemic was this idea that every life could and should be saved regardless of the cost.
This is obviously a luxury belief of the sort that will soon finish off the current model and, probably, result in a cull of epic proportions when our exorbitant and bankrupting support systems finally run out of puff.
These ideas are goid ones providingbyou dont care a out mass destitution caused by the temporary unemployment and collapse of wealth which, as Keynes demonstrated 90 years ago, could metastatsise into a permanent phenomenon. There would need to be some form of minimum income guarantee operated via social insurance that would protect people from the destitution that such creative destruction woukd cause.