Man in a Shed: Sell

Friday, September 07, 2007

Sell

Man in a Shed has become spooked by all the grave financial news. I read this week's Economist at lunch time - sold most of my shares by the first cup of coffee of the afternoon ( stop order under what's left ).

What worries me is stability, now if only I can find a trust worthy bank to put the money in.

I'm still haunted by the explanation of how a run on the banks works at school ( the great depression in the US I think - I ended up doing American History for 'O' level).

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: It's quite amusing that they're thinking about bringing in financial management lessons to school classrooms around the country, when the government can't even control their own money.; 5:12 pm

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The pound in your pocket

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists." James Callaghan

“The trouble with theoretical economists is that they don't understand that when you have a deficit, you can only finance it by borrowing, and you've got to persuade people that it's worth lending money to you and that they'll get their money back... there's no way of escaping it.” Dennis Healey during the 1976 Stirling Crisis.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

Inflation is taxation without legislation .. Milton Friedman