Except you cheated, on the EU, and failed to properly collect the due taxes from the multi-nationals that you lured to that wonderful Island of yours.
As I recall much of the support you got came came directly from the UK?
Brexit, for once some facts.
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As I recall much of the support you got came came directly from the UK?
We're just getting dizzy.
Passing the buck when boom turns to bust
Is Gordon Brown to blame for driving Britain into recession?
Only partly, but then he wasn't entirely responsible for the decade of economic boom either, and he was often more than happy to take the credit.
Even from the earliest days of the credit crunch in 2007, experts identified the UK as especially vulnerable, with its large, complex financial sector, heavily indebted consumers and overvalued house prices. Labour had done little to rein in the City's racy dealmakers or promote alternative engines of growth, and had failed to deliver the unpalatable message to the public that they were borrowing too much and the housing boom would end in tears.
Didn't it all start in the US?
Poor American homeowners who couldn't meet the payments on their sub-prime mortgages were the catalyst, but if they hadn't begun defaulting in droves, some other group of hapless consumers would eventually have exposed the weaknesses in the web of risky financial instruments built up by Wall Street and the City.
So is this boom and bust?
Yes. You only have to look at the proliferation of swanky shopping centres or reality TV shows about profiting from bricks and mortar to see that we have been living in a bubble.
Isn't it the bankers' fault too?
Britain's once-prudent banks and building societies were transformed into high-risk investment institutions sitting on billions of pounds of impossibly complex assets, now apparently worthless. Plenty of people should have spotted what the banks were doing and brought them to heel, but a lot of money was made by bright young things taking gambles that were profitable in the short term.
Who else?
Bank of England policymakers cut interest rates in August 2005 amid signs that the housing boom was ending - and the market quickly began to pick up again. Perhaps they should have let the correction continue instead of allowing the bubble to get even bigger.
The Financial Services Authority, created by Gordon Brown to oversee banks, should have focused more on how risky the financial system as a whole had become, instead of seeing itself as the cheerleader for the City.
And perhaps consumers should have fought harder against collective amnesia and prepared for the possibility that the good times might not go on for ever. Homeowners could often be heard saying properties were changing hands for "crazy prices" but it didn't stop them gambling. That's how bubbles inflate.
Life is not only a financial zero sum equation. Read about the Chinese contaminated baby food scandal(or spend some time in the third world), the infrastructure the EU provides allow for a degree of civilisation
Remind me who called the loudest for de-regulation of the banks?
Whilst I do agree with this we, especially Europe, have an obligation to the rest of the world.. You can cite the baby food scandal of course and equally you could have cited the recent expose of factory pig farming in the US, never mind their washed chickens and I suspect that animal husbandry standards in Europe are equally suspect in some of the countries. Even our own chickens seem to have a hard time in places.
Civiisation and the people who focus their main attention on profit have never been happy bedfellows.
Conservatives are quite simply people not to be trusted with the fate of others.
You only have to look at their "Workhouse" mentality when it comes to welfare.
Small wonder the EU rankles with many of them.
But who implemented it, badly.
Gordon Brown has admitted he made a "big mistake" over the handling of financial regulation in the run-up to the banking crisis of 2008.
The former prime minister told a US conference he had not realised the "entanglements" of global institutions.
He said: "We set up the FSA [the City regulator] believing the problem would come from the failure of an individual institution. That was the big mistake.
"We didn't understand just how entangled things were."
Mr Brown said he had to "accept my responsibility" but added he was not the only one who had made mistakes.
'Global meltdown'
Conservative Party deputy chairman Michael Fallon said: "These are the first words of contrition Gordon Brown has uttered in his entire political career.
"But he hasn't apologised for doubling the debt, selling off the gold and leaving our children and grandchildren paying the bills for his mistakes."
He also called on Labour leader Ed Miliband and shadow chancellor Ed Balls, who were both key advisers to Mr Brown during his years as chancellor, to apologise.
Mr Balls, said the current Chancellor, George Osborne, had been a keen advocate of further banking deregulation when the Conservatives were in opposition.
Mr Osborne had accused Labour of being "too tough", he said, adding: "You aren't hearing that from George Osborne anymore."
Mr Balls also said: "I take my responsibility. I was in government. In Britain, our government, our central bank and our regulator, like in America, in Germany and across the world, we didn't get [bank regulation] right.
We didn't understand how risk was spread across the system, we didn't understand the entanglements of different institutions
Gordon Brown
"But the actions we took to stop this becoming a global economic meltdown were right."
'Across the system'
Addressing the Institute for New Economic Thinking in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, Mr Brown he had come under "relentless pressure" from the City not to over-regulate.
"We know in retrospect what we missed. We set up the Financial Services Authority (FSA) believing that the problem would come from the failure of an individual institution," he said.
"So we created a monitoring system which was looking at individual institutions. That was the big mistake.
"We didn't understand how risk was spread across the system, we didn't understand the entanglements of different institutions with the other and we didn't understand even though we talked about it just how global things were, including a shadow banking system as well as a banking system.
"That was our mistake, but I'm afraid it was a mistake made by just about everybody who was in the regulatory business."
'Incomplete understanding'
Mr Brown said the banking meltdown had forced a rethink of financial regulation "in its entirety".
"I have got to accept my responsibility and I do, and I have been very open about saying we made mistakes on that," he said.
"But in a world where the understanding of what global meant was incomplete, I think many writers as well as many regulators made exactly the same mistake."
The FSA, which Mr Brown established on his first day as chancellor in 1997, was widely criticised for its part in the banking collapse.
Mr Osborne has announced plans to break up the FSA and hand more regulatory power to the Bank of England.
There is an assertion that a cheat was done. The EU have requested.. (required ) that the potential tax liability be held in escrow until the matter is sorted in court.That has been done.
Perhaps you know in advance how the courts will rule?
Yes the UK loaned, and the word is loaned Ireland a sum of money, I think the sum was 4 to 6 billion. , Which has been I believe paid back with interest. Our state was pleased to get the money at the time. , We are grateful for the urgency and consideration of Mr Cameron at the time and his decisive action. However in the context of the problem, "much " is an overstatement.
And the like of Rees Mogg make it very plain that they will be quite happy for standards to decline in favour of profit, haven't they?
One of the benefits of Brexit
Muchly perhaps, but a lot of house building went on, that's for sure. Just linked that we're really short of houses here in the UK.You may well be right as far as the Apple and other things are concerned but I somehow doubt that. Tom might well be able express such wrong-doings clearer than I? Even if it ends up right in the eyes of the ECJ it was certainly wrong in the spirit of such things?
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It's a win, win, lose situation.
The losers are of course PSA's employees in France. So much so that Mr N. Sazrkozy said about the factory in the Czech republic (TPCA, Toyota, Peugeot, Czech Automobile):
"I want us to stop the relocation ... To create a factory in India to sell Renault in India is justified, but to create a factory in the Czech Republic to sell cars in France is not justified".
Nicolas Sarkozy is not even remotely a brexiter.
They asked Carol Malone (ardent Brexiter) on the Pledge,exactly the same question,she gave the standard 'democracy,will of the people' answer but like you and every Brexiter I know she had no answer as to how Brexit is economic sense.
I genuinely don't understand the arguments from Brexiters.
Try me,I will listen,how is Brexit economic sense?
KudosDave
Nothing would please me more than that the ECJ would find against Apple and Ireland and that the 8 billion would be a windfall to the Irish taxpayer. It would make a nice dent in our national debt.
The house building in 2005\6 was insane and the classic definition of a bubble. I think it peaked at 80,000 units . I actually told classes of electrians this at the time, obviously they did not want to hear it.. My arguement to them went as.
using the simple simple calculation . Live births in Ireland were about 50,000 per annum, they grow and being equally male and female they marry and want houses , that means 25,000, . Some use older houses, and some older houses need demolition, so about 22,000 is not a bad figure. Because we have basically had no house building for the last decade, we now have an acute homelessness problem.
What then happened is that mainly Polish immigrants came to build these houses, some people reckoned they were here to stay and factored that in and inflated the expected demand.. They weren't, and when they were here they were saving their money to buy houses and shops in their native land, and were content to live in crowded accomodation while making it...
This is not anti Polish, just a record of an historical event. Things were bad in Poland at the time, things were booming in Ireland. The Poles were \ are probably the best liked immigrant group, for lots of reasons....
The German banks were happy to loan money, at better than their domestic rates, The RBS contributed to the boom by offering over 100% mortgages and the spiral grew.
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I have a customer in Northern Ireland who is doing very well,I have a customer in Ireland who is doing very badly. Both those sellers are close to the border,the only difference between them is the strength of the Euro versus the weakness of the Pound. Customers are driving across the border to buy goods cheaper in the north.
If the north,post Brexit,can import from Asia goods tariff free,this will make the economy of the south even worse.
It is obvious that post Brexit there will have to be a hard border,the EU will insist upon it and we (the UK) will probably end up paying for it and policing it.
KudosDave
Explain that me, simple soul that I am - I assume we are talking about the bikes you sell?
If we don't Brexit then the problem goes away.
But pushing that aside,I haven't yet heard that the EU in the negotiations are prepared to pay us to leave,nobody has suggested that the EU will cough up for anything.....so,if a border is necessary as a result of Brexit,the EU will insist on us paying for it and the ongoing maintenance.
The EU have said often that we are the leavers,they are not pushing us out we have chosen to leave so we must pay for the cost of leaving,included in that will be the border....wait awhile we haven't got to that stage of the negotiations.
As Juncker says 'we must pay'.....or no future trade deal.
Don't misunderstand I don't want to pay a penny but I didn't vote Leave,Brexiters should be pleased to pay...they won,didn't they !!!
KudosDave
Earlier we were discussing the benefits of locating factories to make cars in competition with the parent one. One assumes with financial incentives, such as these. OK this one failed so can I correctly assume that it is 'we' the contributors that ended up footing the bill? Good that the the Polish workers made their money and sent it back home,, only to follow it when the work dried up I too agree they are indeed good and very smart workers and have, by their own efforts done rather well since they joined the EU. Would have made much more sense to have simply given the monies involved directly to them in Poland, far better investment. One, I suggest, that would have been more likely to have been made by a businessman than any politician, or banker come to that.