Tag Archives: financial irresponsibility

Can you tell the heroes from the villains in the sub-prime mortgage disaster?

Michael Lewis’s highly readable account of the collapse of the US sub-prime mortgage market and the worldwide financial crisis it triggered focuses on a small number of characters. People with iconoclastic views determined not to be constrained by the old conventional rules. People who created new financial investments. People who put money into places their investors did not really understand on a good day and did not even know what had been done with their money on a bad day. People who made huge profits …

Posted in Books | Also tagged , and | 8 Comments

Labour’s legacy: £1 million every month on unused fire stations

We are used to stories of how Labour in Government wasted stacks of cash during their 13 years in office. From aircraft carriers to PFI projects to centralised ID databases and other IT projects, billions were needlessly thrown away. Those billions burnt the gaping hole in our public finances that the Coalition is trying, in difficult circumstances, to fix.

Another example of Labour profligacy came to light this week in the Times (£). Apparently, £1 million a month of our hard earned taxes is going to pay costs on unoccupied state of the art fire service control rooms built by …

Posted in News | Also tagged and | 11 Comments
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Recent Comments

  • Chris Perry
    It would be nice to hear from a few people in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, please?...
  • Marco
    In my view we should keep the 1p rise whilst raising the income tax threshold to about £16000. Then we could present ourselves as a tax cutting party for low e...
  • Steve Trevethan
    Is it then in order to understand that there is enough money for banks to put some of it in reserve accounts but not enough money for all children to be well fe...
  • Peter Martin
    I seem to remember similar arguments some 40 or so years ago when computers, computerisation, and automation were starting to generate similar concerns. It didn...
  • Joe Bourke
    A 1p rise in income tax would be expected to raise about 5.5 billion across the year, about 2 weeks debt service costs at the current expected cost of circa 131...