How Much Will Financial Services Contract?

Saturday, October 25, 2008

How Much Will Financial Services Contract?

Iain Dale 6:40 PM

2001: Financial services accounted for 5.5% of Britain's GDP
2007: Financial services accounted for 10.1% of Britain's GDP*

In London the proportion doubles to 20% of the capital's GDP If you include professional services linked to the financial services sector the proportion rises to 14%. In London the proportion rises to 33% (double that of New York).

I am not qualified to hazard a guess at how much the financial services sector will contract over the next two years, but would I be wrong in thinking that the 10.1% figure is likely to drop sharply?

Average Household debt in Britain is 173% of disposable income (compared to 106% in 1995)
Average Household debt in the USA is 139% of disposable income.*

Anyone know what the equivalent figure is in France and Germany, or the EU as a whole? The table below indicates it is much lower.

Household debt as a per centage of GDP*

France 56.2%
Germany 70.1%
OECD Average 79.5%
USA 98%
Britain 104.2%

* Source: TIME Magazine 20 October 2008

It's Not Money That Makes Right Wing Blogs Successful

Iain Dale 5:26 PM

Have a read of this letter from the New Statesman this week...

Ben Davies's "Top ten bloggers" ("Politics and the Internet Age" supplement, 20 October) was too kind to the right-wing blogosphere. At present there is a free market in blogging, so it is not surprising that moneyed, right-wing viewpoints are rising to the top. In the longer term, if the internet is to fulfil its possibilities of delivering a free and democratic media, it will be necessary for the state to intervene to support less moneyed viewpoints.

We have a so-called free press where you are free to open and run a mass-circulation newspaper - provided you are a multimillionaire. Hence the right-wing domination of the press. It's the same with the internet. The start-up cost of a blog may be low, but to run a highly influential, mass-circulation blog you need a lot of money.

Jeff Cumberland

Where do I start? Perhaps by looking at the facts, rather than the prejudice Mr Cumberland displays. Here are the Top 20 blogs in the Total Politics Directory.

Guido Fawkes - one man band
Iain Dale - one man band
ConservativeHome - financed by Stephan Shakespeare
Dizzy Thinks - one man band
Devil's Kitchen - one man band
Spectator Coffee House - MSM
Burning our Money - one man band
John Redwood - one man band
Ben Brogan - MSM
EU Referendum - two person band
Tim Worstall - one man band
Archbishop Cranmer - one man band
Mr Eugenides - one man band
Dan Hannan - one man band
Three Line Whip - MSM
Donal Blaney - one man band
Comment Central - MSM
Adam Smith Institute - think tank
Waendel Journal - one man band
Nadine Dorries - one woman band

So if you exclude the MSM blogs, ConservativeHome is the only one to receive financial support - just as LabourHome does. Blogging is not about money. It is about opinion and marketing. The truth is that right of centre people have traditionally been better at marketing their blogs throughout the internet. That is changing though, and not before time.

It is simply not true that "to run a highly influential, mass-circulation blog you need a lot of money." I am not pretending to be poor, but I certainly don't have a lot of money and I don't receive a penny from anyone (apart from a bit of advertising income from MessageSpace). Jeff Cumberland seems to know very little about blogs, but a lot about the politics of envy.