Harper at odds with Gordon Brown at G20 over whether “markets need morals”

BBC News (London) In an address to religious leaders gathered at St Paul's Cathedral about the aims of the G20, Mr Brown said that "markets need morals".

During his passage about families' values he said people did not encourage their children "to seek short-term gratification at the expense of long-term success".

"And our task today is to bring financial markets into proper alignment with the values held by families and business people across the country."

As for Harper, he prefers markets in which investors are sucker punched into buying income trusts (in order to buy him a few hundred thousand pivotal votes in the 2006 election), only to have these investors betrayed at the behest of the purveyors of fee rich financial products like Manulife’s Income Plus or Great West’s life annuities, rationalizing his actions on the completely false and manufactured argument that income trusts cause tax leakage. Harper’s hat trick of deceit and fraud is completed with the issuance of blacked out documents and pronouncements by the Finance Minister that we have to become more financially literate on the one hand, while blind folded on the other?

The integrity of Canada’s financial markets are destroyed. Virtually no one on Bay Street gives a damn, including the TSX, our “market” that is lacking in morals, and dismissive of the need for the market’s integrity. Canadians lose $35 billion of their hard earned savings, a concept as far removed from Ottawa or Bay Street as could be imagined.....i.e. hard earned.