The Government is the Servant of a Square Mile of Money and Greed
THE Government is standing by and doing nothing to help the British people struggling to cope with soaring shopping bills and spiraling credit card statements. What a difference to its attitude to Northern Rock which it bailed out with a blank cheque taken from our taxes without a second thought.
Northern Rock was saved from collapse, whilst the plight of our people is being ignored, because our Government, whether it is Labour or Conservative, is just the servant of the City and the Banks and now a light has been shone on this murky and corrupt world that British politicians have placed themselves in hock to.
A new book – Cityboy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile, written by a City banker with a conscience, Geraint Anderson, has just hit the best-seller lists.
Cityboy is a thinly fictionalised account of Anderson’s 12 years at the heart of the City and paints an unflattering picture of the decadent dregs and spivs making up the core of Labour and the Tories’ beloved financial services industry. Anderson exposes the obscenely lavish lifestyle of those bankers who have exploited the British people and lifts the lid on where the funds come from to bankroll it and provide the bungs to New Labour funds that ensure the Government does nothing to cramp its style.
Despite insider trading being rife, Anderson says that during his 12 years in the City, nothing was done to tackle it revealing that share prices are regularly manipulated by small teams of hedge fund operators.
“Day in, day out, you’d see the shares rise slightly. Rumours would go round that the company was being taken over. These nasty little toerags, they work in little groups on mobiles, and it’s very difficult to prove who started the rumour. The shares would go up by 30%. Then they would sell.
“It’s a practice known as pump and dump – you would spread a false rumour that shares were going down. At which point the ‘hedgies’ would ‘short’ the shares, namely borrow them from, say, a pension fund, sell them, watch the rumour do its work and then buy them back”.
So who pays for all this? Anderson pulls no punches – we do, the British taxpayer. The manipulation of the stock markets leads to financial instability and the soaring prices and credit crunches we are now experiencing. The lavish lifestyle of these wheelers and dealers is funded in the end by ordinary people like us because the shares are being bought from YOUR pension fund or from YOUR Isa and someone else is getting the benefit of that 30% premium. These people are stealing from you!
The corruption is also wrecking Western economies.
“The reason the credit crunch occurred is because people thought that loans to poor Americans weren’t going to explode and because they are greedy, malicious, short-term gamblers,” says Anderson.
“The bonus culture only dictates what happens one year ahead. And if there’s one thing the City hates it’s the notion of jam tomorrow”.
Having spent a dozen years at its heart, Anderson summed up the City and the financial services sector that both Labour and Tories alike want to put at the heart of Britain’s economy as “just about money and greed”.
