What goes around...
This is all nothing new - idiots in finance chasing each other's bullshit to create an over-hyped market, followed by huge reality check, financial meltdown and hysteria. Rinse and Repeat - it's been done three times in my lifetime (four if you count the Dotcom bubble) - end of the 70s when we were toally buggered, mid-Thatcher-ite 80s (Black Wednesday), then the 1990s Recession...This is without things like BCCI crashing, the Barnigs scandal, Enron, Athur Andersen, Japanese property bubble, etc, etc, etc...

In fact, things like this have happened for hundreds of years - as someone mentioned earlier, there was the South Sea bubble of 1720 when people went crazy investing in totally bogus and idiotic business based on the strength of the Government giving sole trade rights for South America to a company in return for a loan to bail it out of debt.

When it crashed, however, the company directors had their lands and property repossessed and were treated like the unethical thieving shits they were. The difference is that now, despite one of the core tenets of capitalism being the ability to fail as well as succeed as being a major balancing factor, the government would have defended the actions of said unscrupulous cunts and bailed them out with yet more money plucked from the hands of the public - in the 1720s, the newly-named chancellor (the previous one having been expelled for his incompetence), one Robert Walpole, spilt the debt across the Exchequer, the Bank of England and the "Sinking Fund" and England returned to normal after a few years of paying a portion of the national income into the Sinking Fund.

Now, why have Brown and Darling not been strung up and why have neither of them learned anything from history? Of course, "we're not allowed to learn English history in schools now, for fear of upsetting the minorities who were once colonised", but seriously, this is almost an identical situation, so surely we should be looking to it for an answer?
(Chad, Thu 29 Jan 2009, 12:08, Reply)