So, who reallocates to what?

Presumably they’ll be dispatched to toil on the Collective Farms – under the direct, personal supervision of the Lord High Potato himself, naturally….

“They’ve only counted how much they were paid to extract value, when in fact, if the resources, those young people, those able people, those well-paid people, were reallocated within our society, to do something that was much more useful – anything from teaching, to innovation, to managing services that provided care, or whatever it might be – we as a society would be much better off.”

The value of education, purely in terms of monetary value, is close to zero for over 80% of kids over the age of 13. Unless you’re going to get a degree in the sciences or engineering, it is a waste of money. You’ve learned the generally useful maths, English, science by then. And if you didn’t get it, you can go watch some videos on YouTube.

Care? That just needs middle aged women looking after grandad.

And financial services ARE innovation. Most retail banking is really computing now. That means lots of highly skilled people to make it work. It’s why you can now trade stocks from a phone for a few quid per trade in your SIPP rather than paying some besuited wanker to get 2% of your money per year. I’m looking at various jobs right now, and the highest paid C# work is in London, doing things around trading. And it’s the most demanding work in terms of high volume, high performance software.

How about accountants? Aren’t they just in existence because the State decrees that we must all account for our income and pay taxes? What actual value do they add to society? Surely we should remove all taxes and reallocate accountants to some productive employment, like toilet cleaning?

And don’t get me started on lawyers……..

It is a massive post so will Fisk it in stages but the arrogance of someone who is:

A – the equivalent of a human tapeworm

B – a man whose capacity for unremitting evil was previously thought theoretical

Does get the blood pressure up. Here’s part 1

What do the 678,000 people who work in the City of London do for us? It seems to me a pretty important question to ask because I don’t really know the answer.

I wasn’t aware you were a shareholder in any institution or had a governmental position that required you to know what any people employed in a given area do?

What I do know is that according to latest data, and I’m looking at it, there are 8, 600 people who actually live in the City of London. And 678, 000 people apparently work there, according to the City of London Corporation, which runs the administration of the City area, which is a very small part of London as a whole, remember.

As you would find in New York, Singapore or a raft of other centres? So what?

So, what do those people do? Well, the City of London Corporation does actually provide some information. The number’s gone up dramatically. It’s actually increased by something like 20 per cent since 2019 – since Covid began. Over a hundred thousand more people are working in the City than were before. There is no obvious explanation for that.

Actually there are – vast increase in regulatory complexity, Significant technological developments, greater competition to name a few. Just because you are too stupid to understand it doesn’t mean there’s no explanation.

What else do we know about what those people do? 32 per cent of them work in financial services. 25 per cent work in professional services. That is lawyers, accountants and other related activities. Fifteen per cent work in tech, supporting financial services and professional services. Twelve per cent are in support business services, running the properties, all the ancillary facilities that those people need, and 15 per cent are others, baristas in coffee shops and everything else that a large city requires to keep going. In fact, quite a lot of retailing, of course, because those people have money to spend, particularly in lunchtimes and after work, and therefore there are things for people to do in those retail activities.

All of which if it supports populations you consider worthy, as in Universities peddling bullshit like MMT needs to be supported?

So this is a population that is working very heavily in financial services and all support facilities.
It’s a very male population. 62 per cent of the people who work in the City of London are male, and only 38 per cent are women. Guess what? The salaries are skewed that way.
It’s a young population. 56 per cent of workers are under the age of 40, which is way out of line with the country as a whole.
It’s a very well-paid population, although I don’t have as clear data on that as I do on some of the other figures.

Ambitious people migrate to money – who knew??

These are young, well-paid people.
Quite surprisingly, 32 per cent of them come from the European Economic Area, and they are not, therefore, here for the long term.

I work with colleagues from Lithuania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Poland and Hungary. Not a single one manning to return and most of my colleagues in Warsaw and Budapest are looking to transfer here: You are as arrogant as you are stupid.

17 per cent, in fact, come from other areas outside Europe. Only 51 per cent are from the UK as a matter of origin.
So, it’s a surprisingly diverse population that works there, which is not that surprising because very large numbers of the companies that work in the City of London are not UK-owned, so they are seconding staff from wherever they might be to work here temporarily before they return again. But what we end up with is a view of a place that is completely abnormal.

Strangely you aren’t permitted to discriminate on nationality grounds if someone is permitted to work here. Are you that lacking in basic knowledge of employment law? No wonder you are being retired.

But that doesn’t explain what they all do. According to the data, roughly, and again I’m going to look at some different information, one in every five financial services jobs in the UK is in that tiny area around the Bank of England.
Four in five are outside, and that’s not too surprising. They are, if you could still find them,  routine day-to-day bankers. They are accountants. They are lawyers who will do wills and conveyancing and everything like that, which is still very often considered to be financial services by the way.
So this is the oddity about the City. It does something different from financial services outside the City.

My bank has offices in five separate U.K. locations of above 1500 people. You are a fucking moron pontificating on a subject on which you know less than nothing.

It’s really hard to respond to what he writes as it’s so confused and uses terms he either has his own definition of or doesn’t understand. I assume he read about “extracting value” somewhere recently and now everything is about that. In a couple of days (or maybe hours) it will be something else.

The figure he’s using seems to come from the House of Commons library and only relates to financial service exports. This is not the same thing as he seems to claiming and cannot be compared to GDP, which includes domestic activity. Oh what a shock.

Without the money brought in by the city we’d probably have to close down the NHS and maybe the entire welfare state.

I make that 4% of GDP?
Hardly insignificant to an accountant.

Govt spends 35+% of GDP, get rid of the useless half of that and watch the progress.

Second part of the article and his ignorance is profound frankly offensive

And that something different is that it manages vast amounts of money.
The amounts of money in question are staggering. They include pension funds. So, for example, the biggest pension fund manager in the UK is Blackrock Investment Management, based in the City of London. It has £92 billion under its management.
And there are plenty of other funds of the same size. The next biggest is one that is more familiar by name to many people, Legal and General. The point is, that most of what the City does is either manage other people’s money or speculate with other people’s money.
Because that is what the stock market is about.

In the public sector obviously speculation is a bad thing. Their pensions remain bomb proof and stuck in the 1950s in terms of calculations. But of course the Oracle has declared that £1.5 trillion exists that the government can spend but it still IS NOT ENOUGH

That is what the future exchanges, which trade in all sorts of commodities, everything from copper to wheat to orange juice if you so wish, that’s what they do.
There are shipping exchanges where you can hire any type of ship into the future.
There’s the Lloyd’s Insurance Market, which may underpin the car insurance policy that you’ve got, but might equally not, but which is a much more specialised financial services centre than is the standard insurance company.
Now, I’m not disputing that some of these things are of value. Maybe Lloyd’s is.
Maybe it is worthwhile having a shipping exchange.

While we are at it let’s audit the value of the public sector – I’d suggest at least 2 million could be dismissed with zero impact to the general public

– All DIE related employees
– Anyone involved in LGBTQIA Alphabet soup
– All people related to Net Zero

And that’s just for starters.

Maybe we do need to be able to trade, to some degree, commodities into the future.
But what we don’t need to do is speculate in the way that we do.
It is thought that a hundred times the volume of real foreign exchange transactions are actually undertaken for the purposes of speculation alone.

That’s how prices move – and why the U.K. (largely not thanks to the likes of you) is a more desirable place to live then North Korea – at least for now.

There is vast amounts of trading that takes place on the London Stock Exchange every day that is purely for speculative reasons trying to make tiny profit margins out of literally dealing in billions of pounds worth of funds, all in the space of seconds in very many cases.
Vast numbers of very well people spend their lives setting up the tech to do this and then managing this and then glowing in the glory of supposedly having succeeded in doing this.
Does it matter? Does this add value to our society? I would beg to suggest it doesn’t.

And since when did your opinion on the societal merit of activity become holy write you arrogant fat unconscionably evil bastard?

Lord Keynes, John Maynard Keynes, the greatest, in my opinion, economist of the 20th century, knew a lot about stock exchanges because he was actually a very successful stock exchange investor. He reckoned that in reality, all the stock exchange investments that needed to take place every day could be done in a period of 10 minutes, after which the markets could be closed and the people engaged could do something more useful.

And Keynes can get stuffed too frankly – but the fact you are quoting an economist multiple decades deceased speaks volumes

Is that still true, because he was talking in the 1930s? I don’t know. We haven’t extrapolated the data from then to now, but let’s be clear. There are vastly more people working in the City now than there were then, and there’s vastly more money engaged than there was then, because wealth has actually grown because of the scale of pension fund management that now exists. But I suspect that, in principle, he was right, and he still would be right.

Let’s turn that round shall we and examine the size of the state in the 1930s – even more useless jobs have proliferated in the century since and add almost no value to any GDP calculation – ideally perhaps we need to reduce the size of the state to that era?

I don’t know. Having worked in the City, I think it might be worth it just in amusement value to pay them £98bn to teach schoolchildren. Just think of the reactions from the teaching unions and pedagogical experts.

@VP
You appear to endorse Murphy’s statement that Keynes was a successful stock picker.
He was treasurer of a college fund at Oxford, among other activities. Research has shown that the fund lost money during his tenure.
So either he wasn’t a stock market genius or he was front hedging for some other scheme, i.e. he was a crook.

Final part attached – thinking about it his grift means sucking up to the Muslim vote, especially with the collapse of the SNP so his disdain for the primarily Jewish (at least in his eyes) Finance industry now makes sense:

Because if we actually limited the activities of the City so that only those transactions that took place were those that were for the real benefit of society, and not purely for extracting rewards out of the money that had been entrusted to the care of the City itself, then we would need very many fewer people in that City, and very much less capacity within it, to undertake trades that are wholly unnecessary.
I can’t tell you precisely how many of those six hundred and seventy-eight thousand people aren’t needed in the City of London. But I can tell you it’s a great many of them.

At the risk of repeating myself I once went through the Society section of the Guardian in the Gordon Brown era and determined at least 500 jobs advertised in one week didn’t need to be there then – that was prior to Net Zero. If we audited the public sector In estimate at least 2 million jobs can be eliminated with no impact on anyone other than the job holder. Leaving that aside – who deems what ‘the real benefit to society’ is? – if it’s someone who bears an uncanny resemblance in his outlook to an unemployed Austrian from the 1920s, not least in his disdain for Jews then we are all in trouble

And I can tell you that they’re very well paid.
And I can tell you that the only reason that they are very well paid is because they extract value from your savings, from our society, and from the way in which taxes should be paid but aren’t as a consequence of their planning. And so much more besides.
They are fundamentally running a parasitical operation that extracts value rather than adds value. The city likes to claim that it adds £97 billion of value to the UK GDP, which actually isn’t that big when the total UK GDP is over two and a half trillion, which is £2,500 billion, which puts the £97 billion in context, But, even if that was true, that they added £97 billion, they have not counted the negatives.

A man who has consistently tried to steal savings and whose grift has been ongoing for three decades and continues even when he is past retirement age has the chutzpah to call out industries, which as other people have pointed out on this thread mean that his entire metier would not exist – even the primary reason he isn’t homeless -which is the NHS, and specifically his ex- wife’s salary (which is retained despite not having worked for more than a decade.)

They’ve only counted how much they were paid to extract value, when in fact, if the resources, those young people, those able people, those well-paid people, were reallocated within our society, to do something that was much more useful – anything from teaching, to innovation, to managing services that provided care, or whatever it might be – we as a society would be much better off.

I am guessing he thinks there are an awful lot of Jews in Finance. This could quite literally be lifted from Mein Kampf.

And that’s my problem with the City. It just manages money. And managing money is overall a pretty useless activity. I’m not disputing that a bit needs to happen. We clearly need routine banking. We clearly do need, as I have said, insurance. We clearly do need some pension fund management, although, actually, not as much as you think, because most pension fund managers are pretty lousy at their jobs.

We need absolutely nothing related to diversity, Net Zero and LGBTQ Alphabet Soup – that much is certain. Of course you’d disagree but I think your perception is flat out wrong. And your published output and videoed lectures suggest you’re pretty fucking terrible at your job which is why Sheffield is giving you the boot.

Instead, what we need are people doing real things that add real value for the benefit of real people, because we can’t eat money, but we can consume care, and we can consume the well-being that is created by the added value of people doing something that is of benefit directly to improve the well-being of people in the UK.
I don’t think the City’s doing that.

There’s an obsession with moving people into old age care. Once one of these ‘journalists’ / bloggers does a stint at a care home rather than spouting utter bollocks I might give them the time of day. BF as he always does put it far more succinctly and accurately than I can. The man is a cunt – nothing less.

We really do need to rethink what it’s all about. Because instead of seeing it as Rachel Reeves does, as the hub and the jewel in the crown of the British economy – and she used that phrase, jewel in the crown, recently – I see it as a parasite, sitting on the back of the productive capacity of ordinary people in the UK who are having to suffer the consequence of this place extracting value from them.
It’s time we reframed what we are about. And if we did, the UK economy might begin to behave like other economies do, which do not have this parasitic financial services sector. And we might all be better off as a result.

I would say this is the sole bit of the entire diatribe that makes some kind of sense. The problem being that it is the public sector, not the finance industry that is a parasite – , most specifically the Non- productive public sector (NPPS) introduced under Gordon Brown and hugely multiplied under the Tories – these jobs are the equivalent of tapeworms , undermining the health of the U.K. economy – promoting left wing shibboleths like DIE, Net zero and LGBTQ Alphabet soup. Their abolition is the first step to curing the U.K. economy’s malaise.

It occurs to me that I live in one city and work in a different one. I actually work where I live, as I’m still remote.

For the figures he’s looking at, which city would I be counted in?

…and specifically his ex- wife’s salary (which is retained despite not having worked for more than a decade.)

How does that work? Do you have a citation for this, VP?