HM Treasury and the Financial Crisis: Review

Read the critical review here and reflect on any lessons for the operation of the Irish department of finance.

4 replies on “HM Treasury and the Financial Crisis: Review”

Wow ,I can’t believe they are reducing staff because they think the crisis is over.
Although you could argue the financial crisis is now morphing into a full scale physical world breakdown crisis as capital has not been directed towards increasing the core capital base for a long long long time.

Have they really no idea ? Privatisations of utilties withen the UK to “save money” (as if money was a physical good) finally gutted the remaining bits of the production economy, leaving just the consumption economy to ring the bark of the economic tree.
The UK is in a self inflicted Maltusian energy crisis because great masses of capital was extracted to provide false profits for the City.
And yet there has been no counter push to this neoliberal nexus – even after all the evidence has been collected…….incredible – truely incredible.

The North Sea is in dramatic decline yet the UK Goverment has no more levers to pull – they gave them away and if they had any remaining they would gift more natural utilties to the market.
Eon & RWE have publicly declared the emperor has no clothes

From a very quick skim of the report the following stood out:

“7.9 As the Government’s economics and finance ministry, the Treasury has sought to lead by example and restrain relative pay for its staff …. Treasury policy officials are now the lowest paid in Whitehall: median pay is at least 10 per cent lower at the Treasury than in other departments. For Senior Civil Servants, the pay disparity is 14 per cent.”

Contrast this with the situation in Ireland where civil services grades, in the Department of Finance, at Assistant Principal level and upwards receive a higher salary than their counterparts in other government Departments.

Is their still a justification for the additional payment to D/Finance (and presumably D/PER) at middle and senior management level?

I was idling my way through the report when the phrase “fog in the Channel, Continent isolated” came to mind. I entered the word ‘euro’ in a search; result,
zero. I then tried European Union and obtained one substantive result.

It is at page 7;

i”nfluence negotiations effectively on financial regulation in the European Union (EU), G20 and Financial Stability Board (FSB);”

Meanwhile, back at the ranch.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/d01b8d14-7a88-11e1-8ae6-00144feab49a.html#axzz1qXNrJHHY

I can’t help but feel Ireland was too naiive. A new, neutral, country that never suffered through the great depression really even as it was still a developing country at the time of the great depression. Our government and country just didn’t know what hit them and were inflexible, gullible and naiive.

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