Inspire Wales Awards 2014 launch

6 thoughts on “Inspire Wales Awards 2014 launch”

1. NB: these comments have nothing to do with the above article. This is just a conveniently empty comments section to continue a debate that threatens to monopolise another thread.

   In response to Rhobat’s comments on the article posted 13th March, 2014:-

   Rhobat, far from being the benefit of hindsight, it was a widely shared view in the business community from the late 1990s on that a recession had to come and the longer it was delayed, the worse it would be. Of course, no one knew the precise time, and it was, if anything, surprising that it was delayed as long as it was.

   Your helpful quoting and dating of Mr Brown’s comment actually makes the point that he was in denial about this throughout his time at the Exchequer and was following the delusional “no more boom and bust” right up until 2008 – at which point the bust was so complete that he lost all ability to control the situation.

   Throughout that period, he simply spent the money generated by the boom that begun under Ken Clarke. Do not believe the ‘Iron Chancellor’ image pushed by Mr Brown’s PR people. It is difficult to think of a recent Chancellor of the Exchequer with less control over public expenditure. The appalling waste is well-documented, and British taxpayers are still bound by some of the expensive bad contracts agreed during that period.

   At the same time, he had no interest in improving the productivity and competitiveness of British business, which he treated with contempt as a cash cow.

   Finally, as Prime Minister, he went back on his manifesto promise and raised taxes – at the very moment Lord Keynes said they should be cut.

   All that said, in order to be absolutely fair, he does deserve commendation for encouraging charitable giving through some excellent reforms to tax law and for the good intentions behind tax credits – even if he must share the censure for the disastrous implementation of the latter. No one is all bad or all good

   …Which leads neatly on to Hank Paulson: it is hardly “sanctification” to praise a man for one particular policy, in his case the Troubled Asset Relief Programme or TARP. One of many things never mentioned in the British media is that the strongest critique of the G W Bush Administration comes from the right: basically Bush the Younger spent like a Democrat. True, the inadequacies of the American Constitution mean the Administration does not bear the blame for this alone, but, like the current Administration, it showed no appetite for reform.

   The fact still remains that, as pointed out in the previous comment, TARP succeeded in its objective of stabilising the situation and most of the money was soon paid back – so it was not “costly and ineffective” as you claim.

   The same cannot be said of Mr Brown’s nationalisation of the banks.

2. I refer to previous thread on 2008.

   Gentlemen, the important point about 2008 isn’t whether someone could foresee the crash or not since it is a contradiction in terms to claim that it is even a possibility. By definition a financial crash is a sudden series of chain reactions that have never happened before in the same place and will never happen again in the same way. They are unique in time and space and whilst it is theoretically possible to predict elements of the sequence it is impossible to the predict the whole event. To shamelessly steal Einstein’s phrase (or was it Steven Hawkins?) “If time travel were possible, where are the time travellers?”, if the crash was capable of being predicted why wasn’t it predicted, since there was overwhelming financial interest to do so (in the same way as isolated crashes are hedged ‘organically’ in the markets every day of the year)?

   In any case, and in the context of politics or economics, it is of no use to say (and disingenuous to claim that it is of any use) that an avalanche will fall, without adding when and in which direction, since the shopkeepers and bar owners in the ski resort below need to maximise trade (and will do so whether the authorities intervene or not) up to the last minute.

   Also in the context of 2008, it is really important to distinguish between economic downturn and systemic crash. Everyone anticipated downturn at some point and we all had our eyes firmly fixed on the USA for signs of this, but if you’re honest with yourselves you’ll also remember the BRICS questions and the widespread theories of continual growth on the basis of Chinese expansion. I think the jury was very much out on whether the West would go through its usual cycical downturn or be carried along on another ten years of growth based on the developing world.

   To extend my ski resort metaphor… the natural winter season had been extended and distorted by the import of snow from elsewhere and customers and traders were still happy to take advantage of it. A potential avalanche loomed high in the cliffs as the result of criminal activity – some theorists had seen this coming, others didn’t know it existed or had no idea if, when or in which direction it would fall, meanwhile the political and economic imperative in the valley was that trade must go on, since if ‘we’re’ not exploiting the extended season ‘others’ are.

   I’m no fan of Gordon Brown, but I think criticism of his performance needs to be seen in the context of the bigger picture.

3. Phil, you answer your own question about why no one acted when the Crash was so foreseeable: greed. No one wanted to bale out first. A cautious Bank CEO who started to cut lending substantially in, say, 2004 would probably have been deposed by shareholders angry that competitors were making more money.

   Governments, including that of which Mr Brown was a leading member, fell victim to a similar mentality. To use your analogy, they were resort managers who, instead of closing the slopes, kept piling snow on dangerous overhangs because each was afraid the tourists would go to other resorts. Mr Brown was worse than most in this regard.

   You are right that a systematic crash should be distinguished from a recession but there is a relationship between them. The delayed recession increased the pressure for systemic failure – there was too much cash in the system – and the systemic failure triggered the overdue recession. In the end it was US sub-prime mortgages that caused the explosion, but it could have been any one of half-a-dozen other potential time bombs that did so, including sovereign debt, pension underfunding, and credit card debt. Most of these bombs remain unexploded and undefused.

   The time-traveller argument sounds like a variant on Fermi’s Paradox – which applied originally to extra-terrestrials.

4. There were a few people predicting a crash before 2008. The trouble is most of them were ‘perma-bears’ who are always forecasting a crash. I would distinguish a crash from a recession too. The latter was predictable, the former less so. I was running the Cadwyn Global hedge fund when I became convinced a recession was in the offing in December 2007. I bought Japanese yen, went short the semi-conductor index (a cyclical play) and stocked up with CDOs, expecting credit spreads to widen and defaults to increase. That’s on the record – the fund did very well in 2008. But I had no idea of the extent of problems within the international banking system. I knew the US housing market was in big trouble (I sold the house-builders against the S&P in 2007) and institutions associated with it. That plus a doubling of the oil price was enough to predict a recession. But that it would hit German Landesbanks and cause turmoil world-wide, I had no idea. Bear Sterns did not surprise me much but I was as shocked as anyone by Lehman. Brothers And no-one was arguing that I was too optimistic! On the contrary Kenneth Clark argued with me on Newsnight that the BoE should not cut rates by 25 basis points in May 2008! When I agreed and said they needed to cut 250 bps, he wrote me off as a sensationalist. The Bank and senior Conservative politicians had no clue.
   Gordon Brown’s macro-management errrors were relatively minor and his blindness to the incipient banking crisis was universal. He was ,it’s true, silly to promise an end to boom and bust, which is beyond human capabilities in a market system. As for selling gold, his timing was poor but instinct right. Gold has been a lousy investment for most of the past 100 years. i have no idea how you time the gold market.

5. The joy of being a permabear is that, sooner or later, one is bound to be proved right! Deep underlying problems remain.

   That many other people made the same mistakes as Mr Brown does not excuse him. The whole point is that, as the Minister of Finance of the United Kingdom, he was meant to be the responsible adult in the room.

   Perhaps it should be emphasised at this point that none of this is written out of hostility to Mr Brown. He is undoubtedly a very intelligent man and sincere in his beliefs, which is not something that can be said about many people in ‘the Project.’ We might be in agreement on one point – that his public image is unfair – but such is true of many politicians and is, sadly, the nature of the game in this country.

   There is actually a case for saying he was better at Number Ten than at Number Eleven.

6. The joy of being a permabear is that, sooner or later, one is bound to be proved right! Deep underlying problems remain.

   That many other people made the same mistakes as Mr Brown does not excuse him. The whole point is that, as the British Minister of Finance, he was meant to be the responsible adult in the room.

   Perhaps it should be emphasised at this point that none of this is written out of hostility to Mr Brown as an individual. He is undoubtedly a very intelligent man and sincere in his beliefs, which is not something that can be said about many people in ‘the Project.’ We might be in agreement on one point – that his public image is unfair – but such is true of many politicians and is, sadly, the nature of the game in this country.

   There is actually a case for saying he was better at Number Ten than at Number Eleven.

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