Some people like to gamble. That's fair enough, as long as they're in control of their spending, not depriving family members of food money, not going into impossible debt, not having to turn to crime to support their habit. Actually, maybe I should go back on my assertion that it's fair enough.
However, many people don't like to gamble. They simply want to earn money and buy stuff for a fair price. But society doesn't seem to respect those people very much at the moment.
Energy prices, pension payments, mortgages -- they're all a bit of a gamble right now. You put in your stake and hope for the best. That woman over there got a great deal, that man waited another day and ended up paying twice as much for the same thing! Sucker!
Gambling is fine (within the limits badly explored in the first paragraph) as long as it's for fun (!) or fripperies or a new pair of shoes. But when it's for something that's vital -- like electricity or retirement income -- is it really something whose value should depend on the roll of the dice? A situation over which you have no control will have a potentially catastrophic life-changing impact -- does that sound like a sensible way to run anything at all?
Take pensions (as many scam artists are now doing). You pay money into the scheme every month and, when you retire, depending on how the stock market has been feeling recently, you may be either comfortable or a bit scared. (Never mind that the person managing the fund has done very nicely regardless of performance -- that's a complaint for another day.)
Pensions used to be a promise to continue paying a percentage of your final salary -- the risk was on the company, not on the individual. But we're all free marketeers now -- so we have to have the risk, not the company. (Was anyone consulted on this one?)
In France (apparently -- I've done minimal research), everyone's pensions are paid by the government (yes, out of taxation!), based on their earnings over their working life. Higher taxes, I hear you say. How awful, I hear you say. Yes -- but the British version is that what we don't pay in taxes, we instead pay to financial institutions in the hope of getting a decent pension out of them, but with no assurance of that. How does the extra tax compare to the pension contributions? Would you rather pay a bank a chunk of money in order to receive a pension of some (unknown) value? Or pay a bit more tax in return for confidence that your pension will be life-supporting?
Not that you have the choice. In Britain, you must gamble. (And the house always wins, as the cliche goes. No, not your house.)
Speaking of houses... Mortgage payments are linked to what the 'markets' think of the government, via 'confidence', inflation and whatever the Bank of England decides to set as the interest rate. In other words, it's a crap shoot. There is absolutely no link between the percentage cost of your loan and anything you have any control over whatsoever. Phyllis might buy a house this week and get a mortgage rate of 4.5% while Stanley might buy a house next week and get a mortgage rate of 6.3%. Why? Who does this serve?
In olden days, building societies would take deposits from some people, pay them interest on lending the money to the building society, then lend it out to others at a higher rate. And in that margin was their profit. If they didn't pay enough to investors, they wouldn't have the money to lend out. If they charged too much to borrowers, they wouldn't sell very many loans so their profit would drop. Simple but effective.
And what do we have now? Banks make money out of thin air when it's borrowed, pay a pittance to savers because they don't need their money and hike the interest rates on loans when the Bank of England tells them to jump. Because someone's shorted the pound or some other thing that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with your house, life or mortgage.
I realise that an economist with a good understanding of modern monetary theory could explain why the state of the gilt markets has a direct effect on the required interest rate on domestic mortgages.
Clearly, if you stand far enough away from the misery, you can say that the damage to individuals is irrelevant compared to the 'greater good' of the country, economy, party donors, whatever.
But it's very hard to stomach that some people must pay their banks more money for no reason other than that the Chancellor of the Exchequer made a series of very bad mistakes and some traders decided to enrich themselves as a result.
