Please note, I\’ve not mashed together ideas from diffferent places here. These actually are his own succeeding paragraphs.
We could have a financial transactions tax to make differential trading unprofitable – as it is for the world at large.
We could require settlement of all trading every hour – instead of every fortnight or so – making short selling nigh on impossible. I especially like this idea which is why I expect lots of opposition to it.
We\’re going to tax cash movements. Then we\’re going to insist that cash moves 80 times faster than it does at present.
Wondrous.
And it doesn\’t stop short selling anyway. Most short sellers borrow stock so as to enable settlement.
He doesn\’t know this and yet he\’s willing to tell us how to reform the entire financial system?
You might also like this: governments are like companies… half hour later, governments are not like companies. When this was pointed out he deleted both tweets. Again, class.
On long as he stays ‘on message’ for his paymasters, his audience will lap it up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdZ9ZXFW5io
07:46 “The world isn’t global, it’s regional”
09:55 “This is a global world”
Just makes it up as he goes along.
wow! instant settlement….that’ll sort the sheep from the goats! He really has no grip on reality.
If Ritchie limited his commentary to what he knows there’d be no commentary. Although, you could argue with some justification that a blank Ritchie blog would be a significant improvement…
What David said. With the consequence that since his audience is the TUC, the payback is a parachute into a safe seat.
Praise be that I don’t live in a Labour safe seat.
Tim adds: Nah. If Maurice Glasman can get a peerage then so can our Ritchie I reckon.
He’s positioning himself as the Labour party’s “guru” on matters financial. It’s his future career. Trouble is people who really understand finance and markets are a bit thin on the ground in the Labour party, so nobody’s pointing out the sheer crass idiocy of many of his statements.
Frances: Yet. What happens when he achieves the nirvana of guru status and he has to give interviews… oh, right, yeah. The BBC, the Guardian and the Independent. And the rest he’d either never let near him, or else they’d be equally economically dull.
The man is deranged.
What really laughable / frightening is that Ritchie has no understanding of the volume of, and speed at which, capital which would flee the UK if he was to get even half of what he’s suggesting ‘we’ want.
Capital controls, a limit on pay, a unilateral transactions tax, a ban on differential trading, 1 hour settlement, and a nationalised banking industry paying a special high national insurance rate ?
Fuck me, if this doesn’t reveal how out of touch with reality is, nothing will.
The Bank of England wouldn’t be able to mint new cash at a fast enough rate to meet the outflows, and you could kiss goodbye to pretty much every penny of tax the INTERNATIONAL financial services industry generates for the economy.
Hitting his targets, missing the point as usual
Even OTC trades are T+3 or T+5 settlement so he’s also killed every small brokerage in the land.
Forward trades?
stuartrc
do you think he knows what those are?
[…] pm var addthis_product = 'wpp-262'; var addthis_config = {"data_track_clickback":true}; Via Worstall, we learn of Ritchie's cunning plan to ban short […]
He reminds me of the ludicrous Mark Mobius who, at the height of the Russian debt crisis announced (in a brief intermission between lecture tours plugging the benefits of ‘convergence’) that theonly solution to ‘the problem’ was to close the futures markets and ban short-selling. When I pointed out that the next thing bears do is to buy, he had no answer.
Cunts, all of them…