If you are pretty much bamboozled by economics, growth figures, different ways of measuring the nation’s wealth and what it produces, and the way the economy can be doing well, recovering, going downhill, or whatever, and we don’t actually get to know about it until three months later when the receipts get counted up . . . and even then different experts argue about what it all actually means, then you’re not alone.
As I see it from a common sense point of view, we are all still working very hard, maybe harder than ever, but we’re in a double-dip recession.
European banks are on the edge of collapse, ours have been bailed out, and the Bank of England has been ‘printing’ money like crazy for years now.
Best explanation seems to be the money is out there but it’s just in all the wrong places.
The banks won’t lend, despite their protestations, and we’re told this is at the heart of why the recovery is so difficult.
They are responsible for many of the problems we are now suffering through their economic incompetence, which some, including me, see as out and out crimes by a bunch of crooks in pin-striped suits.
So, isn’t there some kind of deep irony in the fact that the biggest injection of cash into our cash-starved economy is the nine billion quid these City incompetents are currently paying out in penalties for mis-selling Payment Protection insurance, among other fines for other ill-deeds?
Do two wrongs, in this case irresponsibly gambling customers’ money & lying to them make a right?
I’m not convinced, since I guess we wouldn’t be so desperate for their fines if it wasn’t for their bad behaviour in the first place.
To be honest I’m half expecting one of those morally corrupt and financially bloated bankers to publicly state that if it wasn’t for their £9 billion penance cash we’d all be in real trouble, and that we should be thanking them for it!
