I actually subscribe to Moneyweek (only read about half of them, while I'm in the bog mostly since I stopped flying every week) and it's quite obvious that they are trying to scare the balls out of people into subscribing with these particular advert-articles. I'm usually suspicious of publications like this because if they genuinely know something then it's normally in their best interests to keep it to themselves (as in the case of hedge fund managers like John Paulson during the property crash). But, a few others other than Moneyweek were also pushing this line a few years back (such as John Paulson after he had made his billions), telling us that soon governments themselves would be under pressure, and they would inevitably start dipping into the bank accounts of citizens if the situation went to the extremes. Next thing ya know Cyprus starts trying to dip into private bank accounts, and worst of all it was under the advice of the EU/IMF - the same ****s that can make the same decisions over us. So aye, anyway, it's alarmist but the simple fact is that the UK's interest payments are approaching 'half a NHS' (currently £51bn) and even a slight loss of confidence could add a couple of percentage points increase, to raise the costs of future borrowing (we're nowhere near break even yet) and future refinancing of existing debts. At that point something will have to give, someone will have to pay, and you can't exactly take the money to pay for it off the majority of people who are barely living month to month (who also just happen also to be the bulk of the electorate you need to vote you back in), so the minority with any sort of decent savings will be an easy and popular target.
Another good read: http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/moneyweek-and-their-end-of-britain.html I blame the overseas tax dodgers.
I have been following these MoneyWeek articles and like Mick I think that they are really just a come in to get you to invest with them.Whether or not they have the degree of financial prescience that they claim I don't really know. I think though that a major collapse is unlikely,although the slow degredation of the economic situation could amount to the same thing over an extended period.All this talk of economic recover/y is counter intuitive to the evidence of our own eyes.A raging service sector in London does not amount to an economic recovery,it's just a bunch of foreigners living it up in bars,much as Dublin was a few years back. Go a hundred miles out from the capital and you find real economic decay.I am in the motor trade and the number of people phoning round to a dozen garages in an attempt to save a tenner on the price of a service is amazing.A friend does a standard service with all parts and oil for £100,that's about fifty quid profit for three hours work and he still has people tell him they have been quoted less.He has no overheads whatsoever because he works from a garage at home,so just who undercuts a hundred quid I don't know,but they must be desperate.
Yes, Cruyff, but that isn't a symptom of economic decay, more a display of a customer wanting to get real value for their money. Moneyweek have been spinning this line for years, I don't see the 'collapse' of Britain's economics any time soon, but there has been a steady decline in the UK's finances ever since WW2, not helped by a huge state ladled with a massive pension's black-hole and percentage of the population not willing to work as the state provides them with the basic amount of cash and a home to enable them to live. I can foresee a problem with a housing bubble in London. The property prices in the capital has never seen a 'correction' even through the worst financial disasters in peacetime history. Indeed, property prices in London continued to climb. Then with the government intervention in helping 1st time buyers onto the property market, this further inflated the bubble and their has to be an inevitable burst at some point. Alan Greenspan, when questioned on Radio 4 a couple of months ago by Evan Davis on why the US Fed never reined in lending by increasing interest rates to try and deflate the housing bubble in the US, states that you can't deflate a bubble, you can delay the burst but you can't deflate. Apart from that, we're all doomed.
The Guinness really does taste better, and the women are beautiful (or maybe that's the Guinness), but as there's no proper football and the weather's ****e, I think I'll pass.
I wonder is he a Lefty? Given that the cuts are absolutely undeniable, it should be clear that they the Tory led coalition government have been creating false economies. Cutting £1 now at the cost of £2 or more a bit further down the line. A classic example of this type of Tory false economy can be seen in the slashing of £860 million from the flood defence budget. The experts claim that for every £1 spent on erecting or maintaining flood defences, the economy saves £8 in avoided economic damage. Thus cuts to save less than £1 billion now, could end up costing £7.88 billion in flood related damage further down the line!
