So has everyone else apart from Asia & W.Africa.
The value of the pound
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So has everyone else apart from Asia & W.Africa.
Soldato
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The only way I have found to beat bust cycles is to have money in the bank.
Get a better job. Get an extra job. Work harder, work longer. You will be more resilient to boom and bust.
Edit: Christ, I sound like JRM.
Get a better job. Get an extra job. Work harder, work longer. You will be more resilient to boom and bust.
Edit: Christ, I sound like JRM.
Rubbish. Take Germany for starters. Their GDP has grown 33% since the last crash compared with our paultry 14%. Even Italy and France has out performed us by a large margin. We have the lowest growth in the Eu with the exception of Greece.
Most of the world has recovered since the last crash and have been enjoying a good few years with the noticeable exception of us. Which is why we have continued to slide down the scale.
Where is the source for those quoted numbers?
Soldato
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Look at China. The reason they are now riding high is because they had been so low for so long. Their workers don't demand rights and expect low wages. They will continue their pre-eminence until they expect higher wages and/or reasonable working conditions.
And at that time, the moneyed people will look for a better return elsewhere. We need to be cheaper or more efficient. Or both.
And at that time, the moneyed people will look for a better return elsewhere. We need to be cheaper or more efficient. Or both.
Caporegime
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You think after Brexit the UK can offer cheaper goods than China to the World?
Wowser.
Soldato
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I haven't offered any thoughts on Brexit.
Caporegime
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How do you think we are going to be cheaper with our minimum wage laws? In terms of efficiency, a CNC machine is a CNC machine, a human is a human. What we do that can be efficient, so can the Chinese, except they have 10 people doing the same job that pays only 1 person in the UK.
So how do you propose we become cheaper or more efficient or both?
No chance. I used to work for an engineering company and we used stainless steel food grade sprayballs and we used 6 on every product we made. There were 3 UK manufacturers making these and they cost around £65 to £75 each.
We found a company in china that would make them for £20 each delivered by air freight to the UK. £15 each if we wanted slow delivery by shipping container. We ordered 20 as a trial.
There were vastly superior in how they were made and every person we showed one of the Chinese and one of the UK ones to, they all guessed the wrong way round.
Stainless steel is the same price worldwide so the material costs were the same in the UK and in China. It was solely the labour cost which meant one was £65 and one was £15.
So there only way we will compete on things like that is if while we are waiting for Chinese wages to catch up, we freeze UK wages for the next 20 years. Of course our economy then crashes as everybody has less and less disposable income each year.
IIRC Italy hasn't done well at all - in terms of meaningful growth I think we were like 3rd or 4th. We were actually on place to close with Germany more recently until Brexit due to them slowing down.
EDIT: I'm not unhappy about our growth other than if it wasn't for Brexit and the Tory approach we should have switched to a more aggressive strategy the last 2-3 years - Germany played a fairly high risk, high reward game and it worked out for them at least in the short term but it could easily have gone the other way while we played a more cautious game with lower reward but less risk of bust. Germany is starting to see some of the chickens come home to roost now - some of their complex leveraging leaves them quite exposed to a more precipitous collapse if things come undone.
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There are people with 3 jobs working hard and still struggling.
Caporegime
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WORK HARDER, 4 JOBS NO SLEEP!
What's your source?
I usually use the IMF.
We're all very similar according to the IMF for growth per year.
https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDP_RPCH@WEO/FRA/DEU/GBR
It isn't an arbitrary requirement...
If person A has made some money as a result of Brexit on say 20% of their portfolio and made losses on the other 80% of their portfolio and other assets then it is rather dubious to claim they've either profited from Brexit or they desired some outcome, supposedly GBP/the economy collapsing as per the other poster!
Because if you're going to cite the fall in GBP/brexit as a reason for these profits then you also have to take into account the effect on other assets too they don't exist in isolation from each other, especially if a further claim of a conflict of interest is presented.
In reality it is dubious in the first place to attribute much of the dividends he's earned from his stake in the fund management company to Brexit given the growth it was experiencing well before the vote... but again the point I was arguing against when you stepped in here to quote me was that he wants to see the economy /GBP crash... that makes very little sense if he's rather exposed to that scenario (which seemingly he is). His property interests alone have taken a hit relatively thanks to the fall in GBP.
It doesn't though, unless you want to pretend he has no other assets that might be affected by a falling pound... which he clearly does from property alone.
No but you're just making a more measured claim along the same lines re: him personally profiting from Brexit.
In the case of JRM, it seems very dubious reasoning for the obvious reason I've pointed out several times now.
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If you want to say a portion of his assets have profited from Brexit then sure that is possible*, but that is rather meaningless in isolation when trying to make some argument about vested interests. It is like exiting a casino claiming to have profited that night because you won £50 at roulette while ignoring your £200 blackjack loss.
*To break it down he's made some money from dividends from his stake in a fund management company - that fund management company was clearly growing well before Brexit and has continued to grow since. Evidently they're not just reliant on UK resident investors but market their funds in Asia, Europe etc.. and offer investments denominated in EUR, USD etc.. so that the weak pound has little to do with any growth in that aspect of their business, especially the recently launched fund in Ireland! So a fair chunk of the dividend from the management company has come from simply having new investors onboard/increase in assets under management. You could argue that some new UK investors might have been motivated by Brexit and that indeed will have earned them some fees.. so you're talking about only a portion of the increase in dividends he's earned which were increasing anyway. Obviously JRM has perhaps profited from any money invested in the funds themselves.
I suspect though that the tens of millions of UK property he and his wife have an interest in far eclipses both his interest in the management firm and anything invested in the funds themselves. Added to that we have no idea what the makeup of his portfolio of liquid assets is, where he's allocated them etc.. I suspect he's not put all his eggs into the basket of EM funds!
The idea that this interest in the fund management company and some investment in the funds themselves presents a conflict of interests or makes it desirable for GBP to fall is rather obviously undermined by the presence of rather large GBP based assets!
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I thought so as well, we were up there at the top of the G7 growth rankings quite a bit over the last 6 years. We have slipped down now, Italy is still way down on its 2008 GDP and Germanys GDP is nowhere near 34% above its pre crash figure AFAIK.
Soldato
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Neither does, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria the list goes on.
Scottish GDP per capita is higher than a good 50% of EU nations. And it's GDP overall isn't far off. If Scotland has nothing to offer, then neither do the above mentioned nations.
Those countries are all net recipients of EU funds so they are not offering a great deal are they? They don’t hold much influence over the other nations like Germany or France.
They may not be as powerful as them but they will get more of a say than they do now and maybe be a net recipient. Plus I suspect they arent happy about up to 98% tariffs on their agricultural exports and the loss of Scotch Whisky from being only used for whisky from Scotland along with the 20% export tariff on Whisky. Both are massive industries for Scotland. Whisky alone makes up 25% of all of the UK food and drink exports so god knows that that is as a percentage of just Scotland.
If I was faced with seeing the biggest two industries decimated I would be looking for independence and joining the EU.