I don't know anything about Iceland.
I've never claimed to know anything about Iceland.
I've never pretended to know anything about Iceland.
I don't need to know anything about Iceland.
Then stop criticising people who do happen to know something about a subject then.
As I've already pointed out, it's not necessary to know anything about Iceland to know that the following type of post is nothing but a mixture of hot air and hypocrisy:
I am going to send a little note with my next council tax payment "Please be careful with this cos I ain't paying it again".
And here's the question I asked in response:
Which one of you moaners can honestly claim that, in the absence of a credit crunch, if it were uncovered that LAs were not making best use of our money, you wouldn't have been critical of that failing?
Nobody has attempted to answer that question, but, amongst everyone, you agreed with its underlying point, thus:
£50m in the bank?!
Shouldn't they have spent it on things like, oh I don't know, street lighting,police,education...or maybe they need that huge sum of money earning interest to pay their inflated wages.
There has to be a contingency fund, and if they just left it sitting around, people might complain about them not investing and earning interest!
Given our evident alignment on this point, there appears to be only an
ad hominem reason for taking up the mantle of objecting to my blunt criticism of the moaners. No surprises then, that you start out with an to attempt to pick apart what I've written, and poke fun at it, instead of responding factually to it.
So do you still claim that..."Not one single institution, or governemnt, or expert, understood the risk or foresaw the severity and impact of the current crisis"?
Even with the 'facts' from my last post but one?
Indeed I do. Ignoring my error wrt to "top-top", unless you want to labour that point and dance around its grave, I stand by the statement that you appear to regard as thin ice, viz:
Not one single institution, or governemnt (sic.), or expert, understood the risk or foresaw the severity and impact of the current crisis, and yet a bunch of you expect amateur investors to have behaved differently.
You view this as an erroneous statement, hence your rhetorical question, viz:
But tell me - what would have happened if government officials had come out and told the real story publicly...?
...which implies that you thought nobody had done that.
But later in the topic you cite a BBC report that Lord Oakeshott claims to have written down the risk and sent it to the government. Whilst there's no smoke without fire, i.e. there must be some truth somewhere in this story, you seem very ready to believe what you read in the press.
So you're asking me to be equally gullible, and to believe that an apparently experience economist wrote to the government, warning of exactly the situation that we're in now, i.e.
a global financial crisis, received an unsatisfactory answer, but didn't go to the press and didn't take any further action, preferring instead to smugly wait until everything went breasts skyward?
If so, then you're asking too much. I can't suspend my disbelief for long enough to accept that unlikely chain of circumstances.
A lot of what you've written has been about what
you know, thanks to your friend, and what
you have done with your money, thanks to your wisdom, or cleverness, or foresight, or whatever. But that's completely irrelevant, because it has nothing to do with what councils have done wrt Iceland. So go ahead and feel wise, or clever, or visionary, and when you've got over yourself, see if you can reply to the central point.
Your accusations of bullsh*t have turned round and smacked you in the face softy, as you have demonstrated you havn't got a clue...
I beg to differ. Oh I can understand your glee at thinking that you've caught me out, but glee isn't enough to make you right ellal. If I've misunderstood the point of you quoting the BBC report, then please set me straight. If I've made an error of understanding, then I will accept and acknowledge it, and also apologise, but so you've simply attacked me while at the same time aligning with my original point. I can't think of a better description of that approach than "bullsh*t".
