If you mean 'Iceland' then they aren't making a loss any more, due to a massive cut in public expenditure which will continue for many years. They have a whopping IMF loan to pay off, their currency is in the toilet, they can't get a national loan from anywhere else and they can't print more money without killer inflation and another economic crash - the combination of all of which means they can't find any extra money to spend even if they wanted to so they're stuck only spending what they can afford. Also the government which presided over the economic collapse was voted out in February 2009. The first act of the new government that followed them was to sack the entire board of the Icelandic central bank.

The consequences of financial mismanagement in Iceland are exactly what I was suggesting would happen in any country which massively exceeded it's financial limits and basically don't support the idea that governments have limitless spending in the least. In fact it shows quite well that there are natural brakes on governments massively overspending; the main one of which being that its political suicide. As Brown & Co are probably about to find out too.

Jon

And there was me thinking that our good old local frozen-foods supermarket was in trouble! Damn that Kerry Katona...

Ah the day Russia bought Iceland - I remember it well

I never said there are no consequences to running massive debts. Bottom line is that those debts are unlikely to be repaid, exactly the same thing that happened with Russia in 1990's and also in Latin America.

Another problem is that government will always have income from taxes but it can just as you said cut services. So on paper it is making profit by taking in more than spending but population will suffer. Private company cannot stop selling products but get more money anyway.

So I still haven't heard argument that proves the publicly owned company is better. Maybe 99.99% is it better to have private company rather than publicly owned. Reason is that in publicly owned it is not managers making decisions, it's politicians calling the shots. Lloyds TSB announced 7000 people will have lost their job by the end of the year. Now imagine it was a state owned bank. Would Gordon Brown allow 7000 people to lose jobs? He would have hired another 3000 instead...

Well, that's not quite true now is it. I give you Northern Rock - clickey. State owned and still making job cuts. And LLoyds TSB is also now partially state owned thanks to the huge bailout it got from the government for buying HBOS. It is still a business and can't possibly justify having so many branches (potentially three 'different' ones competing with each other - Lloyds, Halifax and BoS) hence the job cuts.

State ownership is not a guarantee of successful running of services but equally, it has a far greater vested interest in running those services for the benefit of the people they serve rather than a group of shareholders. As an alternative I would suggest that a mutual not for profit organisation along the lines of a building society, i.e. where the customers are the effective owners and have a direct say in how the thing is run. This also removes the layer of abstraction that would be inserted by it being state owned.

The point I believe several people are trying to make about the benefit of having a state or publicly owned company running something like the railway network directly is that their first overriding concern would not be shareholders, rather the passengers or customers of the service. The same argument holds true for other utilities like gas and electricity. Shareholder owned companies only have an interest in things which make sufficient money to cover the costs and generate profits that can then be passed on to the shareholders in dividends. That's why marginal services to isolated communities (in terms of the railways) are doomed unless they are subsidised or forced to provide that service by regulation

In fairness though, the banking industry is beset with it's own brand of idiocy which means neither privatisation nor state ownership are the simple answers.

If we eliminated money and everyone was really excellent to one another, then we'd have no need of lawyers or bankers or greasy sale people.

Every problem in the world basically comes down to individuals being selfish. I really hate selfish people.

And no you can't have a fag - they're MINE!

Watching Question Time. Both Jarvis Cocker and that bloke from the Daily Mail agree with my view. They even said that you would not privatise the Royal Navy!

Maybe they are secret lurkers here... Jarvis?

"Maybe" for NR and "NO" of Lloyds TSB. Situation with NR is that they probably hope to sell the bank on after while so they have to try to keep it in a good shape. I don't know the guy running it right now but I would assume he has plenty of experience form banking sector and it is likely that he knows how to run a bank. Certainly not a your average labour muppet...

When it comes Lloyds TSB I am pretty sure that government does not have a say at how it is ran.

Other than that I entirely agree with your post. I admire your balanced view and with excellent points. There are companies and industries that should be run by government but that is not due to better efficiency. It has to do more with providing society with services that can't be profitable but they are in public interest...

The public interest is profitable in the long run.

A country full of malnourished, uneducated sick people who can't travel or communicate is not profitable.

It's about the long term view. Most companies can't afford to look forward more than a year, so investment suffers and the future is gloomy. It's a case of being to busy fighting the now to worry about the war strategy...

I'm agreeing with you, btw.

call me stupid but what on earth does renationalisation mean?

The nation (government) used to control spending etc... on the train line. It was then sold off to private companies (i.e. privatised). Now the government is getting it back so it is being re-nationalised.

This, therefore, is the re-nationalisation of the train line

HTH

ah ye lol thx

They are not renationalising the trainline. they are taking over the running of the franchise to run passenger trains on a particular route. Hugely different.

I don't know the ins and outs of it but the question was "What does renationalisation mean?". He now knows what renationalisation means.

However, I stand corrected.