Finance Friday | Eurozone Crisis

The problems in the Eurozone rumbles on and it appears to affect the UK economy. The left wingers in Europe want to borrow money and print money and go on a spending spree and the right wingers want austerity. The former appears to be folly and the latter means fewer police officers and nurses and more unemployment. Mere mortals like me tend to invest and cut down on spending on trivial things. The government could invest in some things and keep building companies afloat. When I was a child there was a baby boom after the war and the government had massive debts. They built council houses, cheap houses for people to live in; no buy to let then.

It is a good idea to invest when times are good, but governments just spend and never save for a rainy day. When they should have saved, they were spending on all sorts of crap where I live. The local council is now making cuts, mainly to social services, but the new college with it’s wave shape roof is still a priority and they spend money on consultants for the pink arts centre. The traffic calming that rips apart the council vans as they drive over the stupid humps, is being extended and maintained. Kerbs jut out into the road and cause accidents, have they no sense?

In Europe, they talk and talk and the uncertainty makes the buyers of government debt nervous, they then demand higher interest rates for lending governments money. Banks now seem to prefer to buy government bonds, rather than invest in housing for the people. Economies have been greed driven for too long, we need a return to social responsibility. We need a house building program in the UK to expand social housing. They stopped building proper social housing so there would be a housing boom, then they pushed up rents for social housing forcing young people to get into debt to buy their own homes. Now young people can’t afford the deposits banks are asking to buy and couldn’t  afford to live in social housing; even if they could get one.

If the last government had been as fiscally prudent as it claimed to be, there would be plenty of social housing now and house prices wouldn’t be extortionate. We wouldn’t have buy to let parasites trying to make a killing and people might be investing in this country, not constantly trying to move into more expensive houses with bigger and bigger mortgages.

We hear of governments spending hundreds of millions of pounds on ‘consultants’. That’s like me spending thousands on a  consultant to tell me what colour to paint my kitchen. They shop at the most expensive places and go to Starbucks while we shop at discount stores and use instant coffee.  We can learn something from governments, we can be financially responsible. We can use money wisely and invest for the future rather than living for today. I saw politicians debating on TV last night, they all talked predictable rubbish and followed the party line; but I suppose we voted ‘em in…

If you fancy a decent bottle of wine at a price you can afford, you could learn how to become an expert wine maker. You can make decent wine at a fraction of the price you can buy it with no duty or VAT. I started a series of blogs last week and the second instalment was today, over on Zillion Ideas, pop over there and read how you can make wine too. Remember to follow that blog, so you get the emails as new blogs are posted.

Related articles

• The London social housing squeeze (guardian.co.uk)
• A Home for Social Finance in Social Housing (socialfinance.ca)
• Council houses are homes for the poor, not assets for the rich (thisislondon.co.uk)

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