Gordon Brown has the dubious distinction of going to great lengths to praise the banking industry and tell them all what fine fellows they were just a short while before the biggest financial crisis ever seen. He was praising the people who were at the heart of the banking crisis and he was the main man responsible for the huge government debt we are all being required to repay now.

How can this man possibly be considered for the role of head of the IMF? Perhaps it just demonstrates that the financial world has little connection with the real world and the sooner it all collapses the better. It will be tough getting through such a major change in the way we manage our society.

It is a strange situation. A financial system that is obviously broken with more debt than can ever be repaid yet we need it as the alternative is just too horrible to contemplate. Gordon Brown as head of the IMF? They must be joking.

It is a wonderful thing to see the people having a voice at last and having a say in how their country should be run, and who should be allowed to get the money produced off of the backs of those ordinary people who work hard every day to provide for their families.

It is hard to argue that this is not a good thing and the only people who would see this as a bad thing are the people who have benefited from such evil behavior. The people who have taken millions of pounds and stashed it away in their personal bank accounts.

So we should all work hard and support efforts to prevent these evil people who cheat the populations of their countries out of their hard earned money. No longer should the Banks and financial institutions of this world be allowed to get away with such behavior.

Time after time we have heard politicians critisise the city institutions that have done all but destroy our country along with many others but those same politicians have done little to change the structure of how these companies operate. Ordinary working people are now suffering because governments chose to side with the banks rather than the people who elected them to power.

Anybody who has worked in these financial organisations over the last ten years should ask themselves if they made the right choices and decisions. They should ask themselves if their bonuses were truly deserved or whether they took those bonuses under the false pretences of actually doing something constructive and beneficial to the company they worked for.

Either the bonuses were deserved, and the people who decide such things were acting in the best interests of their shareholders or they were not. The argument that you have to pay such high salaries and bonuses to retain staff only works if it is actually a good thing to keep those people and that assumes they are going to help make the company successful.

It didn’t work in the past so why should we assume it will work in the future?

It is hard to understand that so many huge corporations could be brought to their knees by careless and stupid behavior by so many apparently highly talented and highly paid people. If they are that stupid then it was criminal behavior to pay them so well. If they are not stupid then they were acting criminally by knowingly destroying the businesses that were paying them. Somebody should be going to jail but of course, nobody has.

Nobody has gone to jail because these small cliques of powerful people are able to ignore any laws that apply to ordinary working people. The take vast sums of money and stash it away in their private bank accounts while ordinary people suffer and have to pay for their greed.

We need a peoples revolution to take back control and prevent these little dictators controlling our lives and denying ordinary woking families the opportunity to lead happy and healthy lives.

Bank rates are a clumsy weapon to use to control financial problems and at this time the problems of inflation are not being caused by people spending lots of money. The cost of living is rising because raw materials costs are rising and this is likely to be a continuing problem for years into the future.

There will be more rises ahead as growing demand in China , India and elsewhere causes increases in the prices of all types of raw materials. Changing the interest rate in the UK will have virtually zero impact on such rises or on the inflation rate.

Figures showing lack of growth in recent months prove the point that inflation has nothing to do with consumer spending at the moment.

The best thing the government could do to help consumers and boost growth would be to force credit card companies to charge more reasonable interest rates and enable people to manage their debt problems more easily.

Having the lowest bank rate for 300 years has made no difference to the credit card companies who currently have some of the highest interest rates we have seen in years.

The financial system is broken and increases in bank rates will just break us all even more when house prices collapse and even fewer people are able to pay their monthly bills. We are at a crucial point in time and we must hope those in charge can see how devastating any action they take could be on ordinary voters and citizens.

Bank bonuses contributed to the financial crisis but were not its main cause, head of the Financial Services Authority Lord Turner has said.

The chairman of the City watchdog said there was a need to “move beyond the demonisation of overpaid traders”.

Instead he said “ill-designed policy” had been “a more powerful force for harm than individual greed or error”.

via BBC News – Financial crisis ‘not due to bonuses alone’.

Taking a similar view of the credit card problems people have got themselves in we can say that consumers were not simply stupid to rack up enormous debt. They were misled and even encouraged to do so by those same banks, where staff got bonuses for getting people to take out a new credit card.

Banks were paying bonuses to their staff to persuade people who could not afford their overdraft to take on yet more debt with a credit card or a loan.
The banks were behaving in a careless and stupid way which was leading the whole country into disaster and all because everyone was getting bonuses.

People are struggling to survive. Stuggling to pay their rent and pay their credit card bills thanks in a large degree to greedy bankers and their bonus culture. Don’t tell me that bonuses did not play a huge part in the downfall of the financial system. It was and probably still is rotten to it’s very core.

This from a man who has, in the past recieved bonuses amounting to up to around £20,000,000 in a year.Well, he would say that wouldn’t he.  It would seem rather unlikely that he would support measures to restrict bonuses having benefited so much himself, in the past.

What we need are bankers who are prepared to do their jobs for a fair salary and a fair bonus. The sorts of figures thrown around of just how large a proportion of bank profits are given out in bonuses is staggering. A bonus of 5% would be a lot but in some cases it is up to 50% that is surely a bad business practice by any standard.