Will the UK Recover From Financial Decline ?

[Guest barab]

Were one of the G5,of course we will,or the world will implode!!:yes:

[Guest LukeSkywalker]

Will the UK recover? Who knows. The main question is will England recover enough to keep paying for the other parts of the UK to have free elderly care, free prescriptions, free university etc. And if it does recover enough to do so, will the English want to keep paying? I really believe the worm is turning now and the English as a group have had enough of being trodden on by all comers.

 

The current No 10 incumbent has proved to be completely incompetent and a liar. A man who has transferred 6% of all English wealth directly to his homeland.

 

Personally I hope the SNP sweep him away, the Scots go it alone (taking the RBS debt with them) and that England gets to be its own country.

[Guest flipflop]

Thanks for the info and also your own impression of how things stand. I'm thinking of returning to the UK for a couple of years possibly next year. Always been meaning to do it and time is slipping away so it's next year or never. My partner is very keen. She's a New Zealander and loves the UK, and I'm from Scotland and speak regularly to familly in and around Edinburgh. Oz will always be home now or mabe NZ. I haven't lived permanently in the UK for many years. It was an easy place to leave back then, and despite many visits since, I've always been settled here in Sydney. However the prospect of revisiting Europe with Edinburgh as a base is appealing. Thanks again for your insight on the UK.

Syd.

I think things are picking up in the UK, plenty of people were fearing a much biggere recession to be honest but people seem optimistic at the momment, my work suffered and I had to take a pay cut or be layed off but my firm has ridden the recession and we are picking up.

[northernbird]

Have to disagree there Mike and Connie. The Oz press has printed a fair bit of negativity over the last two years about our economy over here, and I don't think we're out of the woods by a long way, but the economic data, for the UK, (not necessarilly from the UK), is quite negative, and the recent downgrading of their financial status isn't just mischevious journalism. I'm quite concerned for the UK to be honest, and can't see how they'll recover from such increases in debt that won't be repaid in our lifetime. My original question was to hear the views of UK residents on what's to come, and I hope someone can add something. I don't think the occasional full pub, and a couple of million Poms going on holiday is indicative of how things are. I hear 50 pubs a week are going out of business, and credit card vacations aren't unusual.

 

Exactly. My brother and his girlfriend are typical of generation Y. They both work, not earn fantastic money but are working. They have 2 foreign holidays a year, have every gadget under the sun, have wardrobes full of clothes and spend their weekends eating out and going to the pub. They have 10 credit cards between them and pay minimum payments off all of them. On the surface they appear to be comfortable, I suspect there are a lot of people like them. If the banks/credit companies suddenly call time on all the personal debt in the UK I think all hell will break loose.

[Sydney]

Will the UK recover? Who knows. The main question is will England recover enough to keep paying for the other parts of the UK to have free elderly care, free prescriptions, free university etc. And if it does recover enough to do so, will the English want to keep paying? I really believe the worm is turning now and the English as a group have had enough of being trodden on by all comers.

 

The current No 10 incumbent has proved to be completely incompetent and a liar. A man who has transferred 6% of all English wealth directly to his homeland.

 

Personally I hope the SNP sweep him away, the Scots go it alone (taking the RBS debt with them) and that England gets to be its own country.

 

A good point about England now being the poor relation in the UK. They're the only country without their own parliament, and the fall of the empire continues to haunt them.

I wasn't aware university was still free in the UK. Students lost that concession in Oz quite a few years ago now. NZ the same. Cheap loans are available to those that want to study, and I have to agree. I think we should all pay for our learning, maybe the Tories will change things when they inevitably win office.

I can't see Scotland gaining independence in my lifetime, but I can't blame the SNP government from maximising their leverage in fine tuning legislation in Scotland to their benefit. Memories still remain of unfair taxes exclusive to the Scots, such as Thatcher's Poll Tax. In fact if a state funeral is held for Thatcher when she eventually dies it could be the first time a 21 gun salute is fired directly into the coffin.

The situation in Ireland is a warning to everyone, and if the UK was hampered by a strong currency like the Ireland we'd have an even more dire UK right now.

I think we have a lot more pain to come in Oz and the UK through the fallout of the financial mismanagement of the past, and more casualties to come.

It should be interesting times when the new government introduce what will be massive public spending cuts in the UK. The world recession might be nearing an end but unemployment still has a long way to go before it bottoms. Interesting times indeed. Incidently, the RBS was started by Englishmen and Scots loyal to westminster as competition for the the Bank Of Scotland, and has never been accepted as true Scottish.

[Guest LukeSkywalker]

Exactly. My brother and his girlfriend are typical of generation Y. They both work, not earn fantastic money but are working. They have 2 foreign holidays a year, have every gadget under the sun, have wardrobes full of clothes and spend their weekends eating out and going to the pub. They have 10 credit cards between them and pay minimum payments off all of them. On the surface they appear to be comfortable, I suspect there are a lot of people like them. If the banks/credit companies suddenly call time on all the personal debt in the UK I think all hell will break loose.

 

Dont think this is just the UK. It isnt. Australia has the highest house prices in the world now - and 60% of people have under 1 months savings. Very close to where the UK was 2 years ago. In NSW 47% of people rely on credit cards to pay their FOOD bill. The cold win is blowing across Europe (esp UK) and the USA right now. But at some point it will blow across Australia.

 

Bottom line? Credit (globally) has to be used to pay for items that need credit, not just for "whims". Read what happened in the 1930s - we are there again. Not many people realise that consumer credit was huge in the 30's. When peopel stopped buying consumer good, Australia was hit (primary producer). There is NO country insulated against this current mess.

[northernbird]

Dont think this is just the UK. It isnt. Australia has the highest house prices in the world now - and 60% of people have under 1 months savings. Very close to where the UK was 2 years ago. In NSW 47% of people rely on credit cards to pay their FOOD bill. The cold win is blowing across Europe (esp UK) and the USA right now. But at some point it will blow across Australia.

 

Bottom line? Credit (globally) has to be used to pay for items that need credit, not just for "whims". Read what happened in the 1930s - we are there again. Not many people realise that consumer credit was huge in the 30's. When peopel stopped buying consumer good, Australia was hit (primary producer). There is NO country insulated against this current mess.

 

I never said it didn't. I didn't realise this was a UK vs Australia thread :err:

[ezzie]

Well the only thing keeping Oz going right now is it's coal, oil and gas reserves and our uranium of course. The reason why everyone is patting themselves on the back over here about how well Australia has weathered the recession is because the Rudd gov't has spent our surplus plus more on keeping it all going. Not only that, they've spent very unwisely. Just look at the education stimulus package - is it going on actual education, on fixing leaky loos or airconditioning buildings...nope! Schools have been given a mandate to spend silly money on buildings they don't even want. Then we've got the laptops for kids - well, my twins have theirs. They certainly don't weigh one kilo either! They're already 'over them' and are discovering just how useless they are in a class. It took all of 30 seconds for someone to drop theirs and destroy it!

 

The big problem the UK has is that it's SO ageist. It needs experience now to lift it's game but refuses to employ anyone over the age of 49. Madness!

[Guest LukeSkywalker]

I never said it didn't. I didn't realise this was a UK vs Australia thread :err:

Oh, I wasn't meaning that in any way at all - apols if iot cam eover like that. I was just pointing out that we are all in the poo. Just different types and different depths.

[Guest flipflop]

Dont think this is just the UK. It isnt. Australia has the highest house prices in the world now - and 60% of people have under 1 months savings. Very close to where the UK was 2 years ago. In NSW 47% of people rely on credit cards to pay their FOOD bill. The cold win is blowing across Europe (esp UK) and the USA right now. But at some point it will blow across Australia.

 

Bottom line? Credit (globally) has to be used to pay for items that need credit, not just for "whims". Read what happened in the 1930s - we are there again. Not many people realise that consumer credit was huge in the 30's. When peopel stopped buying consumer good, Australia was hit (primary producer). There is NO country insulated against this current mess.

Are you sure about that, living in the South East of England makes me wonder if you are correct.?

[Guest LukeSkywalker]

Are you sure about that, living in the South East of England makes me wonder if you are correct.?

 

On median house prices versus average income, Australia has exceeded the UK finally.

 

The least affordable city in Australia is Mandurah (sixth-least affordable overall), south of Perth, where houses cost 9.5 times a household's average annual income, with Sydney (8.6), Perth (7.6) and Melbourne (7.3) in 11th, 19th and 22nd place overall.

 

 

Demographia rates a city's housing market "affordable" when the cost of an average home is three (or less) times average household income, "seriously unaffordable" for four times the average and "seriously unaffordable" for five times.

 

 

I guess its like everything else .... statistics!

[Guest treesea]

Thanks for the info and also your own impression of how things stand. I'm thinking of returning to the UK for a couple of years possibly next year. Always been meaning to do it and time is slipping away so it's next year or never. My partner is very keen. She's a New Zealander and loves the UK, and I'm from Scotland and speak regularly to familly in and around Edinburgh. Oz will always be home now or mabe NZ. I haven't lived permanently in the UK for many years. It was an easy place to leave back then, and despite many visits since, I've always been settled here in Sydney. However the prospect of revisiting Europe with Edinburgh as a base is appealing. Thanks again for your insight on the UK.

Syd.

 

Well, even though I'm English, if one is going to be out of work, I would rather be in Edinburgh or Dundee or (chasing the sun a bit more) North Berwick - no work at all but a very nice spot to live, than somewhere like Manchester or Birmingham. Manchester, for instance, is a great place to live if you have enough money to buy a nice pad somewhere like Didsbury, Wilmslow or the Trafford area, but we lived in Cheetham Hill, just north of the city, and all I can say is that the Scots idea of poor (as in Wester Hailes, Craigmillar and the like) looks absolutely palatial compared to some of the poor areas down south.

 

Will the UK recover? Who knows. The main question is will England recover enough to keep paying for the other parts of the UK to have free elderly care, free prescriptions, free university etc. And if it does recover enough to do so, will the English want to keep paying? I really believe the worm is turning now and the English as a group have had enough of being trodden on by all comers.

 

The current No 10 incumbent has proved to be completely incompetent and a liar. A man who has transferred 6% of all English wealth directly to his homeland.

 

Personally I hope the SNP sweep him away, the Scots go it alone (taking the RBS debt with them) and that England gets to be its own country.

 

The problem for Scotland is that the North Sea oil is going to run out, there's a huge dependence on the public sector for work and an ever rising number of unemployed. I don't think that the Scots are going to vote to break up the union anytime soon, because at the moment they heavily rely on English taxes to subsidise their economy. It's not as if there's enough manufacturing going on in Scotland to employ all the people who want employment, let alone support both the public sector and the unemployed.

 

But having said that, there are first world attitudes to housing and infrastructure up here that seem sorely lacking in England. Edinburgh city council, for instance, is currently building new council houses, likewise East Lothian council. Well, there are lots of city councils down south which would love to do just that, but they can't get any money from Westminster to do it. And even when private developers offer to come to the party, in exchange for providing a certain percentage of social housing, the government stands in the way again, because even though the land is brown field, rather than green field, so can be built on, the government doesn't want to invest in flood defences! Up here, at The Inch, an Edinburgh suburb where back gardens - back gardens mind you - flooded, the SNP couldn't get in there with the Edinburgh City Council quick enough. They were building flood defences within a couple of weeks. Yet down south some people have been flooded out three times.

 

It looks like the UK will be increasing its population by half a million a year from now on, if the 400,000 or so the population went up last year is any indication. After all, we do live in a place where one is paid handsomely relative to most other places, via the child tax credit system and the child benefit, to go on having children. Most of those people will live in England. When does Westminster think would be a good time to invest in the country where over 80% of the population live?

[Guest sh7t man no way]

yes it will recover--history proves that

[Guest LukeSkywalker]

When does Westminster think would be a good time to invest in the country where over 80% of the population live?

 

They NEVER will until we boot the Scottish out of the English parliament. The Scots control the UK, not the English.

 

Why would they want to stop sending our money back home?

 

They are no different to Bangladeshi restaurant workers. Make money, ship to back home. Except Scottish MPs do it in the billions.

 

But with luck the current hard times will open English eyes to how we are raped of our cash byt the Scots, EU and others.

 

Charity begins .... at home.

[Guest flipflop]

Don't really understand all the economics about this "worldwide recession", but what I have noticed is that here in Au they seem to grab every little bit of good news whereas in the UK (BBC website) they seem to grab and publicise every bit of bad news.

Mike

The UK has always been glass half empty as far as I can see,

[Guest flipflop]

yes it will recover--history proves that

It is recovering now, the doomongers always make it out to be worse than it really is.

[Guest]

It is recovering now, the doomongers always make it out to be worse than it really is.

 

It isnt recovering, the rate of decline is not as steep, but thats not a recovery.

 

The UK will struggle to acheive anything you could realistically call a 'recovery' for a very long time.

 

Quite simply the crisis in the financial sector has ripped the base out of the UK's one remaining 'manufacturing industries'....(the banking system being the producer of money/investments/speculation etc which all resulted in tax payments to UK PLC, and even the bonuses payed resulted in cash being regularily pumped into the economy).

 

The rest of the UK economy is based on B&Q/Tesco and the Public Sector......

Person A works at Tesco and produces nothing but delivers food for Person B and Person C to buy, in return they recieve a wage that pays taxes and the remainder they spend at B&Q.

Person B works at B&Q and produces nothing but sells stuff to Person A and Person C, in return they get a wage which pays taxes and the remainder they spend at Tesco.

Person C works for the government/council/NHS and produces nothing but provides a service to Person A and B who also pay their wage which they spend at Tesco and B&Q.

As a system it is basically flawed as there is always a small drain on the circulation of cash as some is spent overseas outside of the chain or god forbid put away as savings.

This drain has been increasingly hidden by us all being encouraged to take on debts as credit so the whole system begins to become inflated on imaginary money that no one actaully has.

For many years that wasnt an issue tho, as there were enough injections of real cash being input thro tax income from the large financial institutions (which helped to pay for more of Person C, who in turn passed more money to Person B and C etc)

 

The stimulus package which most current governments are maintaining is simply propping up the sytem with imaginary money from borrowing and then being used to finance more Person C.

 

Once a country has borrowed as much as it can, it has to pay it back tho. Either by making and selling stuff abroad....which the UK can't because it barely has a manufactoring sector left. Or by raising taxes and cutting services.....which means less Person C to put wages in the system, which means less work for Person A and B and therefore even less taxes to fund Person C.

 

Unless we can make something to sell that is cheaper and better than anyone else, then there is no injection of real cash. Regulations, paperwork, wages etc make that a difficult prospect when compared to the Asian and increasingly African producers. And a weak pound might be good for exports, but you have to buy the basic materials to make the stuff first and thats is increasingly expensive as the pound gets weaker.

 

Overall, the UK economy is b*ggered for a long time to come

 

To mis-quote Maggie Thatcher 'Socialism is a great idea til the money runs out'

[Mike@Bonbeach]

Hi

Maybe someone out there can answer something I've never really understood.

 

If all the major countries are billions, even trillions in debt from the stimulus packages, who are they borrowing it from?. Someone must be making a fortune somewhere.

Mike

[Guest guest30038]

Hi

Maybe someone out there can answer something I've never really understood.

 

If all the major countries are billions, even trillions in debt from the stimulus packages, who are they borrowing it from?. Someone must be making a fortune somewhere.

Mike

 

The Freemasons :mask:

 

kev

[Guest Aldo]

Rockefellers, Oppenheimers, Shiffs, Morgans, Rothschilds.:policeman:

[Guest shorty]

Doom and gloom eh, thats what the press will print the UK is screwed the pound is screwed, years of hardship etc. What a load of ****e, Hitler said it the argy's said. In the short term it will be hard for alot of people but long term the UK will rock on always has always will, do you honestly think 60 million people will give up.

[Guest LukeSkywalker]

Doom and gloom eh, thats what the press will print the UK is screwed the pound is screwed, years of hardship etc. What a load of ****e, Hitler said it the argy's said. In the short term it will be hard for alot of people but long term the UK will rock on always has always will, do you honestly think 60 million people will give up.

 

60 million? Thats excluding the illegals.

 

I agree the UK will fight back but only when the imbecile Gordon Brown is kicked back to Scotland.

[Guest treesea]

It isnt recovering, the rate of decline is not as steep, but thats not a recovery.

 

The UK will struggle to acheive anything you could realistically call a 'recovery' for a very long time.

 

Quite simply the crisis in the financial sector has ripped the base out of the UK's one remaining 'manufacturing industries'....(the banking system being the producer of money/investments/speculation etc which all resulted in tax payments to UK PLC, and even the bonuses payed resulted in cash being regularily pumped into the economy).

 

The rest of the UK economy is based on B&Q/Tesco and the Public Sector......

Person A works at Tesco and produces nothing but delivers food for Person B and Person C to buy, in return they recieve a wage that pays taxes and the remainder they spend at B&Q.

Person B works at B&Q and produces nothing but sells stuff to Person A and Person C, in return they get a wage which pays taxes and the remainder they spend at Tesco.

Person C works for the government/council/NHS and produces nothing but provides a service to Person A and B who also pay their wage which they spend at Tesco and B&Q.

As a system it is basically flawed as there is always a small drain on the circulation of cash as some is spent overseas outside of the chain or god forbid put away as savings.

This drain has been increasingly hidden by us all being encouraged to take on debts as credit so the whole system begins to become inflated on imaginary money that no one actaully has.

For many years that wasnt an issue tho, as there were enough injections of real cash being input thro tax income from the large financial institutions (which helped to pay for more of Person C, who in turn passed more money to Person B and C etc)

 

The stimulus package which most current governments are maintaining is simply propping up the sytem with imaginary money from borrowing and then being used to finance more Person C.

 

Once a country has borrowed as much as it can, it has to pay it back tho. Either by making and selling stuff abroad....which the UK can't because it barely has a manufactoring sector left. Or by raising taxes and cutting services.....which means less Person C to put wages in the system, which means less work for Person A and B and therefore even less taxes to fund Person C.

 

Unless we can make something to sell that is cheaper and better than anyone else, then there is no injection of real cash. Regulations, paperwork, wages etc make that a difficult prospect when compared to the Asian and increasingly African producers. And a weak pound might be good for exports, but you have to buy the basic materials to make the stuff first and thats is increasingly expensive as the pound gets weaker.

 

Overall, the UK economy is b*ggered for a long time to come

 

To mis-quote Maggie Thatcher 'Socialism is a great idea til the money runs out'

 

Ericfish, I thought you summed up the UK at the present moment pretty well. Much as Gordon would like the banks to open up the taps again, pouring money, real and imaginary, back into the economy so that people turn into credit junkies again and "get the economy going", the banks are very disinclined to follow his "lead" at the moment. Mortgage lending is still pretty restricted, and I noticed the other day that one of our credit cards has now got an interest rate of almost 20%. That's up from 13% when we first got it, just over five years ago. There's a huge incentive for people to be paying off their debt. I suppose every cloud has a silver lining. Many of us are weaning ourselves off credit and becoming less indebted by the day - which is great.

 

Britain does have, as world economies go, a huge amount of exports. Even now. Nuclear related goods and services, medicines, petroleum based products, motor vehicles, alcohol, photographic equipment, precision instruments and machinery. On the face of it, the strategy makes sense. Import cheap stuff that takes relatively few skills to create, e.g. mass produced clothing, and export valuable, highly engineered things, e.g. precision instruments. The problem is, we import more of those very same things than we export.

 

Oddly though, when it comes to people, the strategy is reversed. We export our experienced, highly skilled people - teachers, engineers, scientists (who migrate to the States in their thousands every year), nurses, doctors - and import relatively low skilled labourers in their hundreds of thousands. What is the point of that? What are the crop harvesters going to do in their off season, once all the farm produce has been picked? Go on the dole?

 

In Germany, subsidies are used to keep people in work. So, if there is only three days work a week, the government picks up the tab for the other two days, so the people can continue to be paid enough to live on. The company gets to retain the workers.

 

Over here what tends to happen is a company will lay off workers rather than going to a four or three day week, and those skills just get lost forever. The taxpayer still picks up the tab. They'll pay income support, and even the mortgage interest after 13 weeks. For the rest of that person's life. A lot of the people being laid off now will never work again. I just don't get that. Why is it more attractive for the UK government to pay people not to work than to subsidise them in work?

[Guest guest30038]

 

Why is it more attractive for the UK government to pay people not to work than to subsidise them in work?

 

Because it creates a bigger pool of labour...........a larger crop if you will, which them leads to lower prices to buy that crop.

 

"Aha" you may say, " but that doesn't mean that if the price of labour is reduced, then that labour will seek employment, in fact, they're less inclined to be employed on lower wages if they can survive on benefits"

 

Maggie Thatcher had it sussed...........reduce labour costs by creating a bigger pool of labour, then curb benefits (time limit to drawing them which was 6 months) and then they'll have to return to work. Only problem with that was although, they stopped the dole to the breadwinner, SS was still payable to the dependents, along with rent rebates, milk vouchers etc...........bigger families for bigger SS payments was the product of those who never intended to be part of that cheaper labour pool anyway.

 

kev

[Guest treesea]

Maggie Thatcher had it sussed...........reduce labour costs by creating a bigger pool of labour, then curb benefits (time limit to drawing them which was 6 months) and then they'll have to return to work. kev

 

The Americans have the same basic idea, with their limited time unemployment benefits, though somewhat more generous than Britain's dole payments. But look at the consequences of that policy. Tent cities springing up all over the place. Not just the homeless poor either. Plenty of those homeless families currently being profiled in the American media were from the middle class. I don't think, thank goodness, that Brits are quite as tolerant as the Americans when it comes to turfing families out onto the streets to live.

 

Sure, our benefits system is perverse, because as soon as you have children, you can support your family better by not working than by taking a minimum wage job. But when you hope to work for someone else, there's no such thing as "having to" return to work. What if no one offers you a job, which is pretty much standard these days for anyone over 50 years old who is out of work, whatever their skills? Even those in work are not in control of whether they get to keep their jobs, let alone being able to control getting hired in the first place.