Serious stuff and a bit of silly!

There's a lot I don't understand about the world of finance but I think that selling debts is just about the strangest thing I have ever come across. If someone had told me when I was a kid that you could sell debts, I would never have believed them. Of course, I understand that the people who buy the de to hope to make a lot more money by calling in those debts but the very idea of buying and selling debts still seems very odd.

And now the government is selling the student loan book, which is presumably a list of all the (ex)students and the amount of money they owe. They are trying to assure those who have outstanding student debts, almost all ex-students these days, that this will not make any difference to the way their debts are eventually collected. But surely if someone thinks it is in their interest to buy these debts, they must have a plan to recoup the money. The kind of people who speculate on this kind of thing don't do it out of some kind of altruistic desire to put money in government coffers. 

Mind you, the government seems dead set on raising money in all sorts of ways at present. Hospitals are having to set up systems so that they can charge foreigners who don't qualify for free medical treatment if they fall ill in this country. Granted, we should do something about so-called NHS tourism but I remain unconvinced that equipping each hospital with credit and card readers is necessarily the answer.

And after watching news reports about waiting times in A&E departments, I have decided that we must do all we can to remain as healthy as possible for as long as possible in the vain hope that if we can only hang on long enough things might get better. Fat chance!

As it is, the Institute of Fiscal Studies predicts that the UK government is on course to impose steep cuts in public spending from April and increase taxes by the end of the decade to their highest level as a share of national income since 1986-87 to combat the UK’s persistent budget deficit. So it looks as though austerity is going to be around for a bit longer!

Okay! That's enough serious stuff. Here's a link to a number of European countries taking the you-know-what of President Trump and America First. I particularly like the Netherlands' offering!