French president says Peugeot layoffs are unacceptable

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

DING DING DING! Spot on.

It's obvious that property needs to be less profitable, while production needs to be more profitable. I do not claim to have a miracle recipe on how to accomplish that, of course. I do know I'm very skeptical of solutions which smells of ideological blindness though, like solutions that focus entirely on tax raises or entirely on tax cuts.

Actually, business just needs to be more profitable for the same effort. The second is an important point.

Property taxes in the UK are basically out of date, they don't scale up so that for your really huge mansions you're still just paying the same as a Georgian townhouse - that's not a question "increasing" taxes, just removing the cliff drop at the extreme end.

Beyond that, you could tax people for leaving arable land fallow for more than two years, punatively, that would at least encourage either use or development rather than fields being bought up and then sold when they become valuable as real estate for a housing estate.

Proper town planning is a part of this too, by which I mean not just tacking bits on willy nilly and hollowing out the centre of a town while all the wealthy people move to the suburbs.

[HoreTore]

Repackaging the debt was not of itself the problem, it was the credit rating it was given that was the problem. Was it the banks or the credit agencies that awarded them the AAA ratings?

The credit agencies...

Norway has a sort of banking service called "Exportfinans"(export finance), which is a semi-government controlled agency/company which gives credit to exporting companies. A year or two ago, it had some problems with its funding, causing its credit to dry up, The government solved it by basically putting the oil fund up as safety for the company.

How did the credit agencies react to that move? They downgraded it. Apparently, the trillion dollar oil fund isn't very credit-worthy. It was at that time the last bit of confidence I had for credit agencies evaporated. They are completely clueless.

Actually, business just needs to be more profitable for the same effort. The second is an important point.

Property taxes in the UK are basically out of date, they don't scale up so that for your really huge mansions you're still just paying the same as a Georgian townhouse - that's not a question "increasing" taxes, just removing the cliff drop at the extreme end.

Beyond that, you could tax people for leaving arable land fallow for more than two years, punatively, that would at least encourage either use or development rather than fields being bought up and then sold when they become valuable as real estate for a housing estate.

Proper town planning is a part of this too, by which I mean not just tacking bits on willy nilly and hollowing out the centre of a town while all the wealthy people move to the suburbs.

All good ideas.

[Fragony]

Rating agency's are private company's with their own clients, the effects of the nervousness on the markets they can create is a little bit too big for our own good. As it is now they can make or break what is perfectly fine or absolutely rotten. Friend of mine called it the lemming-constance which I thought was pretty accurate.

Problem with the modern world is that we no longer plan ahead, nownownow.

[HoreTore]

Problem with the modern world is that we no longer plan ahead, nownownow.

This is as accurate as one can get it.

[Fragony]

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