(1) avarice – as in expenses claims
(2) ignorance – as in the familiar adage: Ignorance is Strength
(3) stupidity – as in claims that the international recession is all down to GB
(4) tribalism – as with never deviates from the party line

Remember this? “Public funds totalling £500 million a year are being spent on an army of at least 29,000 professional politicians in the UK, according to new figures.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/feedarticle/8605308

Compare that with the British electorate of more than 44 million.

A salutary insight: I – or you – would become comfortably affluent if every adult in Britain were to agree to pay me – or you – just one penny each year.

Damn you, Liberal Conspiracy!

Including John McCain. It’s a diabolical intrusion by the socialist government into the freedom of companies to employ rapists and then sack the victims if they complain. Yet more proof…

“What the court did not hear was that ‘Major’ Colclough – who in fact has earned six figure salaries in finance in the City of London – is a serial fantasist who once briefly obtained a job at a university in Prague by claiming to be a professor and friend of Stephen Hawking.”

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1219741/Victim-lying-Major-TA-girl-fell-serial-fantasist-said-hed-Army-medic-fighter-pilot-psychiatrist.html#ixzz0U29t5TNE

As well as this report about the Savings and Loan Association crisis in America during the 1980s and 1990s and then asking why no lessons were drawn:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_crisis

Quite – but then a damn fool government minister reportedly approved his pension arrangements with the then nationalised RBS before Sir Fred retired.

“the aftermath of Thatch’s attack on the coal industry in mind when he made this comment?”

Thatcher didn’t attack the coal industry.

The Yorkshire NUM launched upon a stupidly suicidal strike for a year without calling a strike ballot in the region when such massive coal stocks had been pilling up at power stations and pit heads that there was difficulty in finding where to put it all – in fact.

Another embarrassing fact is that both the Thatcher and Major governments poured billions of taxpayers’ money into propping up the coal board before and after the year long strike 1984/5.

Yet another is that both the Labour opposition in Parliament and other trade unions backed off supporting the NUM.

Yet another is that the world oil price – which determined how much the electricity generators paid for coal since they weren’t permitted to import any – almost halved between 1985 and 1986.

For curious reasons, those who complain about Thatcher attacking the coal industry never mention what was happening to world oil prices. It is not self-evident why taxpayers should have gone on spending even more billions propping up the coal board when there were many other budget lines on which the money could have been productively spent – such as schools, hospitals and upgrading the railways.

In the run up to the 1992 election, Kinnock correctly made the point that for all the Conservative’s rhetoric about cutting taxes, tax revenues as a percentage of Britain’s GDP were about the same as when Thatcher took office in May 1979.

Major’s government privatised the nationalised coal industry, not Thatcher.

Btw I didn’t vote at the last election and the last time I was a member of any political party was in 1976 – the year the Labour government at the time had to borrow from the IMF to bail out the Pound.

http://bit.ly/1yBlB5

Read through a few chapters, and see how an Oxford degree in Anglo-Saxon & Norse turns you into a “best-selling” author of two million books, while preparing you for a role in your national legislature.

Gasp at how every woman realises her ambition: an impossibly pert bum; marriage to a billionaire; excitement; travel; and the occasional fling

Be awestruck how a Tory Government will make this possible. You too can claw your way from boredom and poverty to a life of unimaginable wealth and luxury by making best use of your ‘assets’.

Sprawl with Louise Bagshawe through endless pages of emetic neo-Mills & Boon

Despair that, under a Tory Government, her books could find their way onto TV and into the national curriculum.

Shudder at what some people will do to get rich

Yes, Sir Fred is really suffering for his business failings
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23571948-bankers-should-repay-bonuses.do

Or did baby-face have the aftermath of Thatch’s attack on the coal industry in mind when he made this comment?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2405885.stm
http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/sr219/simons.htm

Pouring himself a nice whisky in his posh Eaton Square flat, eh – I’m sure McGregor must have felt very pleased with himself?

Osborne was correct about saying that capitalist markets to function efficiently must punish business failure in order to reallocate resources to other uses which will perform better at producing those things buyers want to purchase.

Two comments are appropriate. Economists have long recognised that markets can send incorrect signals about the true social costs of business activites – hence a daunting literature about the causes – and remedies for – market failure. We got as far as this analysis 50 years ago:

Francis Bator: The Anatomy of Market Failure (QJE 1958) – large PDF file
http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/econ335/out/bator_qje.pdf

Since then, other potential causes of market failure have been recognised, notably network externalities (the value of a telephone handset with its network to me depends on how many others have handsets with access to the same network) and information asymmetries (if buyers and sellers lack access to the same information about the product they wish to trade it is unlikely that purchasing decisions and prices will be efficient). The latter applies, among other cases, to healthcare markets but another factor also applies – the prospect of daunting costs should a serious medical problem develop for an individual without insurance cover.

What Osborne somehow failed to notice was that traders and dealers working for many leading financial institutions were contracting transactions which were bankrupting their employers on a colossal scale, thereby jeopardising the entire global financial system with awful prospects for all the major market economies and raising the high likelihood of a global depression on the scale of that in the 1930s.

This behaviour by employees in financial institutions wasn’t regular, sustainable behaviour so questions naturally arise as to why the management of afficted financial institutions allowed it to happen and what can be done to prevent the like of it happening again.

Sadly, the necessary actions of governments in bailing out failing financial institutions are only too likely to promote repeat occurences because the management and traders of financial institutions will be encouraged to maintain a belief that while gains from dealing decisions can be privatised, large losses are socialised to prevent systemic market failures. But those aren’t and cannot be continuing operating rules for capitalist markets.

Oh, hadn’t seen that. Great. Take it all back from @16 and @25. Bagshawe goes straight back in at no. 2 (yeah, ok, behidnd Redwood) as sales have surged on the basis of her newly released back catologue. Is it in digital?