Everyone tells me that this is good and this was bad, and this shouldn't have been done and yada yada yada.

Now to be quite honest, when it comes to the market, financial matters et al, I haven't got a clue.

Without wishing to insult people, in all honesty, I doubt that many on here have either, and that a lot of people are frankly a) kidding themselves that they do know, or b) are frankly delusional.

Sadly, I believe this also applies to the Great and the Good who lead us all.

Also, the same thing can be seen to be both good and bad depending on where you stand. To an exporter and an importer, a strong pound is a very different thing, and so it goes.

The anology I came up with is this. You know those little tables for toddlers to play with? There are lots of holes in the top, all with pegs in, and they hammer the pegs down, turn the little table over and hammer them down again. Remember those?

Well, to me the economy is a giant version of this. All the pegs come in different colours, sizes, shapes and diameters.

One person looks at the table and says 'The tall blue pegs, the green round ones and all the yellows are up. This is good.'

Then someone else comes along and points out that the red pegs are low, the brown and black ones are in the middle, and that is very, very bad.

This is part of why I don't read newspapers, and don't watch the news any more.

This, I think, is a somewhat simplified view of economics

Very well said, Bil. I still read them, and I get more and more disappointed along the way. I read about Goldman Sachs this morning and how one villain working for them sold financial nonsense packets to investors when he didn’t even know what he was selling, and the banks who bought them didn’t know what they were buying.

What is the point of ordinary people like us reading about things like that?

I can’t answer that, I’m not clever enough, but I know if we had another revolution I would be quite pleased to release the guillotine handle when we put those idiots heads on the block.

(The villain was a Frenchman).

Exactly. Do you understand it all? I have a horrible feeling that an awful lot of the financial success stories are more based in luck than knowledge.

I have a feeling that if the job of executing bent politicians and the like were up for grabs, we would have one hell of a job fighting to get to the head of the queue.

nice pun.

In all honesty, I wasn't thinking of anything so quick. Maybe feeding them into a giant blender feet first, or buried up to the neck in an ant hill.

Well, I’m going to put my head on the block and say that we’re all affected by word association when we write in reply to anything. I watched the second of the televised leader’s debate last night and couldn’t get the word ‘liar’ out of my mind after Cameron accused Brown of lying in Labour’s election leaflets.

All three of them were lying, constantly; every politician lies, they would never be elected if they told the truth, the best we can hope for is that the leader who told the least lies is elected.

This morning’s polls were another revelation, all of them with different results and I suspect that the people polled told lies, it’s infectious.

I told my wife a blatant lie this very morning. I said I was going to the cashpoint and would not have a chocolate doughnut with my coffee. I had two. If I said that I would be voting for any of the three ‘leaders’, I would be telling an outright lie.

Head on the block? Hell no. As far as I am concerned 'politician' is just a synonym for 'Liar'.

Remember 'Yes Minister'? They showed how a poll can be manipulated by the way the questions were asked.

Bil, I dont understand how you can vote/support liars, (I remember reading on another thread that you will still support Labour).

I personally would prefer a Labour /Libdem coalition with Gordon as Prime Minister as he was considered to be one of the best Chancellors' of the exchequer ever. After all politics is not a beauty or charisma contest. It should be about helping those who need help, in jobs, housing, health and education and forget about wars and giving all our spare cash to corrupt third world countries. A few, 'Help Britain's Poor', pop concerts would be welcome.

Do you mean the same chancellor who took away pension benefits and sold of the gold cheap The poor have got poorer and the rich richer under his watch!

Fact is that the parties are closer than ever with regard to class wars,....upper class twits and the hard done-by, so-called working man,is all much of a fallacy these days.
I have been amongst politicians,union leaders and the rest,.. even been to national conferences,...none of my business really,...just as a guest,...all expenses paid.
The first ones who throw their so called working man principles out of the window are the Labour Party and Union leaders once they get their greedy snouts in the trough.
I have watched them at first hand living like Lords,chucking Union funds around like confetti,indulging in every luxurious whim and fancy that comes their way regardless of expense and the fact its the poor so-called working man who is footing the bill.
They may all be liars and hypocrites,but these guys are by far the biggest hypocrites of all.
Yet because of tradition and this working man fallacy,the Labour Party could probably put a Donkey up as M.P. in my native North East and it would still get voted in.

As is always the case. Politics is and has always been about the middle classes.... the chattering classes rarely understand it and the upper classes hardly give a crap.

Or a monkey in one town