Brighton teacher points out top banker’s schoolboy error

A retired university teacher from Brighton has given a senior banker a lesson in basic economics.

Trevor Pateman, a former reader at Sussex University, had a letter published in the Financial Times yesterday (Friday 25 May) in response to banker and academic Charles Plosser.

Mr Plosser, the president and chief executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, wrote in the FT a week earlier (Friday 18 May): “Governments can finance expenditure in only three ways: taxation, debt (future taxes) or printing money.”

Mr Pateman’s response came in a letter published under the headline: “Selling the crown jewels also works.”

He wrote: “There is a fourth method: selling assets.

“After 1917, the Bolsheviks financed their besieged state from imperial gold reserves. Mrs Thatcher sold nationalised industries. Greece could sell its islands.

“And if all of Whitehall’s civil servants moved to an office block in Croydon, it would release a great deal of valuable real estate.

“Desperate times require desperate remedies. Selling assets has many times saved families and saved companies. It can also save nations.”

Closer to home, Brighton and Hove City Council is hoping to sell the CD1 number plate on the mayor’s car which it hopes will fetch £150,000.

And the council would no doubt argue that Whitehall’s civil servants could achieve even better value if they relocated to Brighton rather than Croydon.