GBP Sinking.

Oh you really don't want to ask me that Jim.

The dogma ladden tory morons that have just been handed power by conservative party members think that trickle down economics works, it doesn't 40 years have proven that it doesn't but they are so inflexible and so desperate to win power again in a couple of years that they attempted to buy the electorate with giveaways.

But not giveaways to the working and middle class, no, giveaways to their rich pals in the city the bankers and the already extremely weathly, god knows how they imagined that would work did they think they could con the electorate one more time.

They are utter morons, greedy selfish morons, people are seeing their electric bills triple while the stupid electric market they created in the late 1980s shows itself to be utterly incapable of dealing with this kind of shock, the remaining companies in that market are still making profits huge profits, back in the 1980s we had two highly efficient electricity generation and distribution companies the SSEB and the CEGB that provided well paid jobs and a planned broad power generation plan, power is fundamental to a modern society it should never have been under market control and it never resulted in reduced costs at any point in the last 4 decades.

The fallout from Friday's budget has already wiped out all of the giveaways that's how dumb they are, Sunak, a man I dislike at least understands economics, he was stating this result just weeks ago, but no the tories have bought into the bullsh*t so deeply that you will never get them to wake up.

On my current salary I benefit in numeric terms to the tune of about £1000 a year, £480 just on the NI reversal alone £400 on the electric freeby and a few hundred on the 1% reduction on Income tax, I could increase that benefit to me by reducing my pension salary sacrifice next year. I didn't need any of that yeah life would have been harder but I sure as hell could have survived, the poor sods on here who are on minimum wage can't survive, a percentage of a large number is numerically much larger for me but those poor sods are faced with cost increases that represent a vastly greater percentage of their income.

Ten percent inflation makes me poorer but next April we will pass that to our customers and that represents well over a £6000 a year numeric increase in my salary next year, my personal costs won't go up anywhere near that numeric value, inflation does not have the same impact on the already wealthy, those already rich.

The dollar is strong at the moment had the peso not also dropped against the dollar the impact of triangulation could have pushed GBP/PHP well down towards 55 peso.

And note once again blaming the victims, tightening the universal credit rules for the low paid, I mean they've only had 40 years but no they still peddle the story, the narritive that workers are feckless and and need to be kicked into work and that's BREXIT for you, we were virtually at full employment but now the sick and disabled are going to be further forced into work to make up the shortfall of workers created by BREXIT.

When are we all going to wake up and realise the manipulation these monsters engage in, they want rid of the NHS, they want rid of benefits, bring back the workhouses, this lot would have been happy to reduce the surplus population during Covid and probably were because they are being given credit for doing a brilliant job when in fact we had one of the worst Covid outcomes in the world, of all countries with a population over 30 million we had the 7th highest per capita death rate despite being the 2nd wealthiest nation in that list of 7.

These people are evil, they don't give a sh*t about any ordinary people, they don't even care about people on fairly high salaries like mine they only care insofar as they can con that demographic into voting for them and they do that through lies and deceit.

And when this now pushes up the cost of government borrowing which it will that will be used as the excuse to break the triple lock on pensions and to cut NHS services or to bring in mandatory private medical insurance so their buddies in the financial services sector can provide us health services American style.

When the origins of the financial crisis started in the USA back in summer of 2007 and evolved through the next couple of years UK public debt, UK bonds (public borrowing) had been issued at very low interest rates for an extended period of time, a lot of bonds had 10 or more year maturity dates on them, that is not the case now, now when they issue debt the rates the market will give them will be punitive that's why the markets are spooked with Kwartang and Truss's absolute incompetant idiocy because they are paying for all the lovely tax cuts for their mates with debt that you and I and every working person and pensioner in the UK will have to pay back when someone finally has to raise taxes, and when they raise those taxes which could have been used for social programmes instead it will be paying down debt for the very large amounts of money they have just handed to the already very rich.

For gods sake when are the people going to wake up and realise they have been taken for fools.

They were talking about expecting a 15% crash in house prices today (I don't mean right now but over the next couple of years) because of the increase in rates, yes negative equity will be back and at the same time rents will go up dramatically.

The negative equity of the 1980s trapped a lot of people through the 1990s, it's why I have always said buy a home to live in not an investment to speculate with. I had colleagues in well paid jobs in a horrible position in the early 1990s.

The fiscal position that Sunak had adopted should have been retained.

Regards the energy market it should be renationalised immediately, this artificial bullsh*t of competing providers needs to be dumped immediately all it acheived was a ridiculous short term (last 30 years) switch to natural gas so the generators could keep costs down and generate a profit with artificial competition between energy providers, basically people in call centers selling, if you remove the profits from these artificial businesses you cut the cost to the government of subsidising energy in terrible exceptional times like these but remember energy is not going to get better the gas will run out the oil will run out and when it does the current mess will look like a party.

That was the immediate problem that needed solving, Johnson would not have nationalised energy but his chancellor would have tried to come up with something that reduced the costs for the duration of this crisis.

This applies to water too nationalise it, water quality is sh*t now compared to when I was a kid and sewerage also sh*t pun intended.

Taxes needed to rise for the wealthy and not by a small amount and for businesses, this bull about high taxes de-incentivising investment is crap capital is fairly useless if it is sitting around and profits in most large businesses are now obscene, they minimise profits through dividends and share buybacks and stock options to reward those at the top.

This was more evident in the USA back in the 1950-60s when tax rates on the top earners were up in the range of 70 odd percent at that time you had a large middle class and the equity and fairness of income distribution was far greater than it is now, all the money they poured in to bail out the banks in the last 15 years ened up in the pockets of investors in the hand of the rich it didn't increase employment it didn't increase the wealth of the poor.

We need fairer taxes with much higher rates of tax for high earners and fewer ways for them to escape paying taxes, and I'd be fine if they started increasing those taxes on my level which is between 50,000 and 80,000 a year.

This current disaster is an absolute own goal that they can't and won't back away from because they are idealogues not pragmatists.

From Reagan onwards they have been selling you a pile of ideological poo.

My mate, a tory, is going to shut his pub because he can't make a profit with electricity at the price it is now, even with the proposed freeze at this level it was already uneconomic for him.

I was shocked when he agreed with me a few weeks ago that we needed to nationalise the energy and water companies, I mean he is a true blue lifelong tory, he is in his 70s and runs the pub out of his pension (SIP) and he's done a fantastic job of promoting it this last few years even through Covid, but now he is sad that all his employees will be out of a job and the village devoid of a pub.

I don't care as long as they have policies that make sense and are socially democratic, UK politics has always been about power rarely about policy, yes in the 1970s the unions were out of control Thatcher's answer was to burn the economy on a bonfire to create fear, that dismantled industry and brought in financial services, the spivs.

The government should serve the people, our governments seem to only serve factions, and more often than not they serve the rich, we need government that is planning for the country beyond the next election and beyond their own self interest, will we ever get a government like that, no we won't, because too many people in this country want to make a fast quid at any cost.

A nationalised energy provider does not have to pay dividends to shareholders, a nationalised energy industry can focus on setting profits at the level required for reinvestment in new energy generation, it will provide far fewer stupid low grade jobs in call centers running an energy market that was made up that does not exist.

Electricity and gas are more expensive and have been more expensive for the last 30 odd years than they would have been under the SSEB and the CEGB and the old state gas companies, yeah wholesale gas would remain at the same price that represents a generation cost, so you only have one thing to solve namely subsidise the generation cost, right now you have to prop up and bail out failing market providers whose business model can't cope with price fluctuations like this, right now there are a whole load of useless pointless people working in an artificial energy market, hell in the past and probably even now all that artificial competition made a lot of money for software engineers like me and for all the other hangers on, these fake markets have only ever been an opportunity to increase the price the costs for the retail customers namely you and me and all the rest of us.

So yeah wholesale gas remains expensive but you remove the arguments about windfall tax, Truss during her campaign was defending energy company profits, I mean jeez!

And lets think about that wholesale gas price, it's so important because gas turbines are now the primary means of generating electricity, it's not going to go down a lot is it chances are that it will get more and more expensive over the next few decades so implying that somehow green energy is still so expensive is nonsense as the true cost of fossil fuels has never been properly accounted for, basically they never ever factor in the climate damage, just like in the past Nuclear was never costed to include decommissioning, these things are convieniently shoved under the carpet.

Now don't get me wrong, I support nuclear power as a large component of a broad mix of energy sources, I worked in nuclear when I worked for the SSEB in the 1980s I played a small part in design and construction record keeping back in the day.

So yes I agree that nuclear should be part of the solution and it would have been if they hadn't dismantled the SSEB and CEGB but now well they simply don't have the capacity to construct enough nuclear in a short enough time.

Nah Mike some things should be talked about publicly and yes I am probably abusing my power with this, the question was about economics but the answer would invetably be political.

I never said any ever had, I was pointing out the weakness in our system.