Letters / Wake up and smell the coffee
Your article on market fluctuations due to Covid, artificial energy price hikes and now Tory austerity – decade two – made for interesting reading and poses questions.
£80 million, the sum the Charitable Trust stood at in the late 70s, would now be worth £796 million if it had been invested to keep pace with inflation, not even to be profitable, if a strategy of maintaining the capital fund – like the Norwegians did and do with their sovereign fund – was followed by SICCT precursor to SCT.
Have SCT learned all the lessons of the Profligate (?) Period in the 1980s/90s?
Have SIC learned the same lessons re reserve fund , which we constantly hear is going to run out if we/ the SIC (us in local government) keep spending the way we do? (I do not believe this ‘threat’ of the money running out is at all correct if, we start investing in things which are long term sustainability, economically, socially and environmentally).
Those who live by the sword, die by it. In this case the vagaries of a ‘busted flush’ economic system/ideology that is naturally filled with booms and busts.
I argued back in 1988, aged 27, that the SIC and SICCT should abandon the then financial fund mangers Rothschild’s (Rothschild’s fir God sake) stock market approach (still going on today) and pursue a policy of ethical financial management, lower short-term growth, but higher long-term and more stable and sustainable fiscal growth.
I couldn’t even get a seconder from within my alleged socialist colleagues group of four. I am not saying I told you so, but go go figure!
The definition of insanity, according to Einstein, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
Liz Truss’ plan fell flat on its face, because she and the Tory Party are operating in an increasingly failing, blinkered, closed economic model.
There are many ways, new and better ways of running an economy.
Will the SIC and Charitable Trust wake up and smell the coffee and invest locally in the long-term sustainability of Shetland, rather than invest in the vagaries of a global economic system that sees our money invested globally in still some very dodgy companies and institutions?
James J Paton
Lerwick
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