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Of course there are different forms of value that are not fungible. Moral or human value as independent of financial value. The point I'm making is that the £1

by simonh 5y ago

Of course there are different forms of value that are not fungible. Moral or human value as independent of financial value. The point I'm making is that the £1m came from somewhere. Now yes sometimes it came from a Mafia sex slave operation or whatever, but those are minuscule edge cases on the scale of say the UK economy. We're talking about the economy in general and what makes on economy more valuable than another one in economic terms.

pjc50 5y ago
> sometimes it came from a Mafia sex slave operation or whatever, but those are minuscule edge cases on the scale of say the UK economy A hundred billion here, a hundred billion there, after a while the money laundering starts to add up: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/uk-losing-fight-money-laundering-it-can-still-win-if-we-want/ https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/uk-losing-fight-money-l... The UK economy offers a unique mix of commercial fairness and predictability, achieved by a comparatively incorruptible commercial court system, with disinterest in where the money actually comes from provided it isn't UK crime. Whereas in China, for good and ill, billionaires are not above the state and can get clobbered when they become politically inconvenient. Such as Jack Ma. (A question nobody is asking in this thread: what's the relative price of a taxi in, say, Lowestoft? What does that say about the regime there?)
- simonh 5y ago
  Stuff like that sucks, absolutely, but again it's not a huge factor to the UK economically. That money passed through, it didn't land in the UK. The impact on us economically was probably in the 10s of millions. Total Russian investment into the UK is only about 1% of all foreign investment, which itself is 20% of GDP. So 0.2% of our economy is linked to Russia at all.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    > The impact on us economically was probably in the 10s of millions That's less than Roman Abramovich paid for one Chelsea player. There's probably been more than £10m of donations to the Tory party alone from oligarchs. Try again with a more realistic figure. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/sep/21/tory-donors-husband-given-8m-by-kremlin-linked-oligarch https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/sep/21/tory-donors...
    - simonh 5y ago
      It depends where the money landed, that's where the big fees would be made, but just shuffling it around, I'd be very surprised if it was more than that. Look, you can bring up minuscule footnotes in Appendix F of what matters to the UK economy as much as you like. Yes these things suck. No they are not even remotely consequential to why a taxi driver in London, or Londoners in general earn what they do or how a modern economy functions. The more time you spend obsessing over incidental edge cases, because they are things you can get enraged about and get a good adrenalin buzz over, the longer you will be mind blastingly uninformed about how the word really works.

by simonh 5y ago

pjc50 5y ago

> sometimes it came from a Mafia sex slave operation or whatever, but those are minuscule edge cases on the scale of say the UK economy A hundred billion here, a hundred billion there, after a while the money laundering starts to add up: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/uk-losing-fight-money-laundering-it-can-still-win-if-we-want/ https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/uk-losing-fight-money-l... The UK economy offers a unique mix of commercial fairness and predictability, achieved by a comparatively incorruptible commercial court system, with disinterest in where the money actually comes from provided it isn't UK crime. Whereas in China, for good and ill, billionaires are not above the state and can get clobbered when they become politically inconvenient. Such as Jack Ma. (A question nobody is asking in this thread: what's the relative price of a taxi in, say, Lowestoft? What does that say about the regime there?)

simonh 5y ago
Stuff like that sucks, absolutely, but again it's not a huge factor to the UK economically. That money passed through, it didn't land in the UK. The impact on us economically was probably in the 10s of millions. Total Russian investment into the UK is only about 1% of all foreign investment, which itself is 20% of GDP. So 0.2% of our economy is linked to Russia at all.
- pjc50 5y ago
  > The impact on us economically was probably in the 10s of millions That's less than Roman Abramovich paid for one Chelsea player. There's probably been more than £10m of donations to the Tory party alone from oligarchs. Try again with a more realistic figure. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/sep/21/tory-donors-husband-given-8m-by-kremlin-linked-oligarch https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/sep/21/tory-donors...
  - simonh 5y ago
    It depends where the money landed, that's where the big fees would be made, but just shuffling it around, I'd be very surprised if it was more than that. Look, you can bring up minuscule footnotes in Appendix F of what matters to the UK economy as much as you like. Yes these things suck. No they are not even remotely consequential to why a taxi driver in London, or Londoners in general earn what they do or how a modern economy functions. The more time you spend obsessing over incidental edge cases, because they are things you can get enraged about and get a good adrenalin buzz over, the longer you will be mind blastingly uninformed about how the word really works.