Coalition: Offshore critic Vince Cable takes top business post
Wednesday 12th May 2010, 2:59PM BST.
The new British Prime Minister David Cameron (left) with the new Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg on the steps of 10 Downing Street. Picture: Lewis Whyld/PA Wire
FINANCE industry leaders were this morning waiting to see who would fill the key positions in David Cameron’s new cabinet and what the effect of a coalition government on Jersey could be.
Vince Cable – a long-standing critic of offshore banking centres – has been given responsibility for business and banks at the Treasury under Conservative George Osborne.
The Liberal Democrat MP’s role was confirmed just hours after the Tory leader was asked by the Queen at Buckingham Palace to form a new government following the resignation of Gordon Brown.
It is not clear yet what path the Treasury will follow or whether the Lib Dem influence will have a negative effect on places like Jersey.
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Vince, I love you. Do your stuff!
Cash bonuses at £2000 and not a penny more. Those naughty, naughty bankers….
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Quick Inform the other industries in the Island that they may have to make up the sortfall on GDP when the baks all leave or are forced to re-locate or comply completly with the UK Treasury.
Oh feck! there are none left.
Oh well at least the choce in over priced flats and condos will increase once all the followers of the fast buck have left.
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We’re all doomed !!!!!
1. Derchas , have you a problem with your keyboard ?
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Vince may spout some anti offshore views, and I don’t doubt he is passionate about them, but now he’s in government he’s going to have to drop all that ‘rhetoric’ and live up to the fact that the finance sector is the most important industry of the UK economy.
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Don’t worry were a well regulated, highly respected, world class offshore finance centre according to our Ministers so beat that Vince.
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I sense the sphincters tightening as we speak..old Vince is not easily fobbed off…but Hey, if we’re squeeky clean ..no probs.
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Looks like the bubble is finally going to burst, which is amazing given the amount of p***cks who’ve been running it up to now!
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Hold on
Labour is socialist and Gordon has being pecking away at what Jersey provides to the wealthly with IHT tax rules, etc. (to give to the poor) The Conservatives recognise the rich are important in generating jobs and capitalisim is good for the poor and not bad.
I think the change is positive and the Lib-Dems are the minority partner in the coalition.
Lets have some positive vibes!
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Well according to the IMF we are better regulated than the UK and according to Michael Foot (the man tasked by Gordon Brown with looking at the islands) we are a net benefit to the UK so I suspect that Vince will quietly shelve his views.
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I propose a new industry for Jersey : the growth of marihuana. It is an industry that is bound to be successful, will make loads of money, will provide a lot of jobs, … Tourism will increase again! Can’t go wrong !
For those that worry, I am against drugs myself, so I am obviously being ironic and sarcastic here. But in case you didn’t get the point : it counters the excuse that – if an industry provides a lot of work and makes good money – we should try to keep it at all costs. And that is exactly what the finance industry has been saying !
Now, I do NOT advocate the finance industry’s departure ! But they have to start taking an ethical stand – and that goes a LOT beyond supporting charities and organising a marathon !
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Well put Pure Jersey. Exactly, now with the Conservatives in power, Jersey is now looking much safer from the Lefties of Gordie. truthseeker, the most right-wing of all bloggers here must be happy: he/she wants to also put a cap on immigration, so will be head over heeels with this result! Forget the Lib / Dems, not a chance. In fact as the numbers go, the Tories can pass legislation with the Lib/Dems by gaining support of other independents quite easily (eg. Ulster unionists).
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Yes well in my view Vince has the interests of the world at heart, and as I’m sure Stuart Syvret would agree, he is not in the pocket of a few multi-billionaires holed up in Jersey or even worse living the life of Riley and expecting the island to sanitise their accounts.
Good luck to him I say – I’m all for fairer, accountable and transparent banking arrangement,after all it seems to be the sovereign states that have carry the liability and to bail the failing banks out of their mismanagement. Surely that has to stop, and Vince Cable is one of the few politicians who has made his stance crystal clear.
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#7 Pure Jersey
Oh yes let the rich carry on making even more money because of course they will look after the middle classes and the poor!
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The ConDemNation is being run by the Cons, that’s pretty much for sure. There is every chance that the Dems have agreed to support the Tories for the first 3 years (presumably allowing them the latter 2 to fight towards the next election) and for their support the LibDems have been given the illusion of power. For those of you that love the finance industry, rest assured, the LibDems now have their work cut out for them trying not to lose the 7 million that voted for them. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a party so successfully anger Scotland and England in one swift move, but Nick Clegg has actually managed it.
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I love it!
This should annoy the finance industry nicely.
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No. 13 Leah – you’re right. Nick Clegg appears to be a turncoat but perhaps his unison with the tories will strengthen the UK among other nations.
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Under represented – please ponder
Since known history began (thats about 7,000 years) there has always being the rich and privileged. I am gratefull that in todays society the poor and disadvantaged have the opportunity to prosper. Furthermore ALL our jobs are provided by the rich in one way or another. There is always the bigger picture.
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With Ken Clarke as Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary is brilliant. He appreciates the importance of the offshore centres to the City, and Jersey in particular. Cabel will be kept in line. Wonderful news – the future is bright for Jersey Finance!
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#16 Pure Jersey – exactly correct!!! Through education, the poor and disadvantaged have the opportunity (this is the key word) to prosper. Too many just want handouts without anything in return!!!
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Mike R, another one of those offshore accountants who doesn’t fully appreciate the damage the tax havens have helped facilitate by being used for the basket case structures of the originate and distribute model with their inbuilt peverse incentives. If offshore finance centres have helped by keeping on shore tax rates down, then that positive is dwarfed by the damage we helped cause in the last bubble period by administering and giving succour to structures that resulted in a huge misallocation of capital to unproductive areas of the world economy. We were truly at the far end of the type of vehicles that Minsky postulated were set up during an economic cycle. Admittedly not thought up offshore but certainly we played our part in the worst economic collapse since the great depression. Osborne and Cable will probably regulate from on-shore (by clamping down on certain investment banking operations) the structures of the “shadow banking industry” over here since the JFSC has no stomach to bring in capital adequacy rules over here for those vehicles.
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Tom
That went way over my head. I’m not being facetious but what does that mean in laymans terms.
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Hello poor people!!!
Your time is coming!
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(21)
It means their days are numbered
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He’s coming to get you! he’s coming to get you! Happy days eh? housing apartheid? dodgy reciprocal agreements, transparency issues, nominee accounts, bearer bonds, corporate directors? c’mon Jersey the game is up!!
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Its a pantomime pushmi-pullyu government.
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Truth is 0-10 has not worked….like the COM a Failure…I predict there will have to be 10% corporation tax before long.
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23 – their days are not numbered. The Tories key fund raisers are offshore, and have off shore connections (read their list of benefactors). We are safer for the next five years t least than we ever have been
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#16 Only till May 1st 2015, from then on in he can wave goodbye to leading a party.
#19 I’ll assume you’re generalising. The elitist mentality will always ensure that education alone is not enough. The majority of people (save for sport and the arts) still have a ceiling on their level of financial success. Thankfully there is no similar ceiling on their social success/happiness.
The elite can only be elite by keeping others down. If they were really that good then open and fair competition simply wouldn’t worry them. Still, I guess they never get to know the joy of succeeding purely on their own merit.
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Free at Last (10) I propose a new industry for Jersey : the growth of marihuana.
Dear Free at Last, Why marihuana? Why not smoke some of the laundered drug money held in your respected financial institutions?
Yes, I too am being ironic, the finance industry is a legitimate employer and Terry Le Sueur has done much to clean up the act. That said there is still a smutty undertone to parts of the Jersey finance industry. We cannot rest on our laurels.
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jersey’s finance industry is safe – whether you like it or not.
the plain fact is that most major economies have their own offshore hubs – usa has the virgin islands, the dutch have the caribbean antilles etc – so no-one is going to take unilateral action and gift more business to the other. as for a unified approach – that will happen when hell freezes over, and even then, you will just find other murkier regimes willing to prostitute themselves as providers of tax shelters instead.
much better to retain a thriving co-operative well regulated industry in your backyard. even if you find the concept of the rich being able to mitigate their taxation down to obscenely small amounts, that is as it was, is and always will be. even the soviets found that wealth was too corrupting to control.
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A lot of people seem to be relying on an argument along the lines of the next five years will be much like the last five, ten or even twenty years.
Generally this is true and that is why human experience grows with age but we do become increasingly hidebound and less able to deal with radical change.
Things may be much as they were but on the other hand the banking crisis, the rise of China and India as major industrial and in due course financial powers has the potential to change the very rules of the game.
Look at the change in how the world was run from 1914 to 1954.
Britain was arguably the greatest world power with a huge empire in 1914 and Europe was the cockpit of world power. The two world wars and radical change in the world resulted in the loss of physical empires and the rise of the USA and USSR as the premier powers.
Britain and Europe were eclipsed and I would argue still struggle to find a role in the world.
We will see if the world changes, if it does and the tide of history runs against the Jersey finance industry then there will not be much anyone can do except leave the island.
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“the rise of China and India as major industrial and in due course financial powers has the potential to change the very rules of the game”
One of the reasons why we should be thankful that JFL have had the foresight to concentrate their efforts in those regions.
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It really does not matter what Jersey Finance does.
The future of Jersey as a finance centre is tied inextricably to the future of the City of London.
London is the most important European exchange and one of the premier world exchanges.
If London sinks as a finance centre then Jersey will go with it.
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Over reaction from some. As one very senior offshore person said to me recently, the authorities have been trying to put these centres out of business for the past 30 years.
We’re still here.
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Yup Ben our legal and trust “professionals” will always adapt. Funny how when the all-crimes money laundering laws made helping clients evade tax a crime over here, trust companies suddenly ditched loads of their long standing clients. Happy to keep them up to the point they were forced not to do so. We have lots of wonderful salesmen (with all the connotations that go with that noun) in our finance industry over here who will be able to address some spurious new needs. To paraphrase Lord Adair Turner of the FSA, we really deal in the more socially useless aspects of the financial system. Given how the offshore finance centres helped facilitate the financial engineering schemes which were the root cause of the worst downturn since the Great Depression, perhaps we should be closed down.
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