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February 21, 2008
Investment theft ...
So Labour is again stealing investment capital. Northern Rocks long suffering shareholders are to have their shares in the business taken off them at a token value by this government of incompetents and thieves in their latest grab of peoples investments. The excuse that it is "to protect the taxpayers investment" is wearing a bit thin. After all, they created the crisis with their ill considered insistence on making the Bank of England reveal who it was lending money too. The real problem here is that having created the problem they compounded it by letting the panic run on and on until the Bank needed to borrow far more than it would have done. Then, of course, the Chancellor stepped in with that great Socialist/Communist panacea for all ills - put an incompetent bureaucrat in charge.
Or if you don't think you'll get away with that - put one of your tax dodging chums in the driving seat. That has to be the biggest con job of all. After making a huge song and dance about "Non-doms" dodging tax in the UK on money earned in the UK by actually living in a country with a lower tax rate, who does the Chancellor appoint to take over the Bank - a "Non-dom" chum ....
The truth is that the Northern Rock has been nationalised "temporarily" to protect the tax payers investment in keeping the bank afloat. As I said earlier, the crisis was engineered by the government, so I think the money should come from their pockets, not ours. Secondly, the shareholders can expect little or no moeny for their investment - the Treasury's creative accountants will value the shares at way below their market value simply to avoid paying out their real value - and there is no way the investors will be able to recover this. Again, all the Labour Communistas are rubbing their grubby hands gleefully and triumphantly declaring that the investors "can't be bailed out by the taxpayers". I think I'd rather know my tax money was doing that than paying the salaries of worthless bureaucrats and politicians who are totally unaccountable. This is exactly what they did to the shareholders of Rail Track when the same moron re-nationalised that!
The other problem is the word "temporarily". In Civil Service terms that embraces everything from "until the wind blows from the East" to "Forever". I suspect that Northern Rock is going to prove a permanent passenger on the Civil Service list, just getting gradually less and less efficient until it becomes obvious that it has, like the rest of Whitehall, just become a financial Black Hole, sucking in money and producing nothing of any worth or value.
Time, I suppose, will tell.
Posted by The Gray Monk at February 21, 2008 10:17 PM
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