One of the most damning things a teacher can write on a piece of work, I always reckon, is the infamous "B minus: could do better"... with all it implies of latent ability and lack of application. I'm not sure Gordon Brown's current approval ratings would even qualify him for a B, frankly, but nevertheless he has used the Labour Party Conference to promise that he 'will do better'.
He also hailed Labour as being a 'pro-business, pro-market' party, while simultaneously praising last week's decision to impose a ban on the short-selling of falling stocks (and thus removing one way in which the market self-regulates by adjusting valuations).
According to this BBC article about an interview with Andrew Marr, he also criticised City of London financial institutions for 'irresponsibility', saying that current problems had 'come out of America'. If what he was referring to is over-exposure to bad housing debt because of the sub-prime mortgage problem, it's a bit rich to be blaming the financial institutions as opposed to, say, any regulatory regime which allows them to accumulate such an over-exposure.
But of course, criticising the regulatory regime would be tantamount to admitting that his own tenure as Chancellor had been less than prudent.
He also announced that he is considering imposing limits on City bonuses; again, hardly a pro-market move on the face of it. After all, if those risks damage the institutions in question, the practice will quite quickly self-correct. Mr Brown is apparently of the view that offering large bonuses encourages excessive risk-taking tilted too heavily towards the short term. As a taxpayer whose prudent, long-term retirement plans have been undermined by Mr Brown's raid on pension funds, and a decade of inexorable indirect tax increases, I find that hard to swallow.
![[RSS Newsfeed]](/themes/sotto/images/valid-rss.png)
![[This is a Roller site]](/themes/sotto/images/roller-logo.gif){kind=logo}