Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Preparing for bad times?

The "talking point" the UK Conservative Party is throwing around these days is that the Labour Government has left Britain economically imperilled by "not putting aside money in the good times to prepare for the bad times".

Given the Conservative Party's only common policy in the last 20 years (apart from Europe being evil) is to cut taxes (or give back money to the voters) they wouldn't have either. To the best of my knowledge there hasn't been any concept floated of some kind of UK savings account.

The closest I've seen to something along these lines is the Sovereign Wealth funds (and similar things like New Zealand's Kiwisaver plan) where having a large investment fund works like an insurance policy for bad times - although Singapore looks a bit like they invested badly buying into failing banks effected by the "credit crunch" just to have them recapitalise a few months later.

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