Perhaps it isn’t clear in the guest post, but my concern about financial services is twofold.

First, there is only so much you can do. You can increase the quantity of money handled, but sooner or later you’ll plateau out.

So it doesn’t really give you a long-term strategy. Most of the money handled by the Maltese financial services industry ends up financing stuff overseas. It gives you a kind of lopsided economic cycle.

Secondly, and this is by far the greater worry, it has been designed for rich people only. There are very few financial mechanisms for bottom-up creation of wealth. It is something that should have been built into the system right from the start (it’s just a matter of legal bills with these things).

The countries that are doing well in the most balanced manner are the ones where capital flows around, including and especially in small quantities.

I’m a student of history, and I can’t help looking back at the commenda system. Forget the Great Siege. This is what saved Europe.

I was referring to emigration as government policy. It was the only solution to overpopulation and an unsustainable economy.

And it still is. Isn’t that what we’re told whenever we complain about lack of jobs, countryside, leisure activities, culture or variety? “Itlaq minn Malta jekk trid. Issa ghandek passaport Ewropew.”

You’re very wrong about one thing, Chris. The idea that the Nationalist government made no difference to economic life in Malta and that ‘the people’ did it for themselves is one of the main reasons we are in this mess right now.

People actually thought it would make no difference who was in government because THEY were running the country and making the economy move.

But the massive growth in GDP in Malta since 1987 has been ENTIRELY the result of Nationalist policy on everything from economic liberalisation to financial legislation to – this is the clincher, doubling GDP since the start of membership in 2004 – EU membership.

Equally, the utterly disastrous state of the Maltese economy that you and I, being contemporaries, remember only too well in the 1970s and 1980s was entirely the result of catastrophic government policies. Malta was on the cusp of the right sort of growth in 1970 and then tragedy struck, sending the country into a 16-year nosedive.

When you and I left school in the early 1980s, unemployment was so high it had to be disguised by false ruses like labour corps and the retention of thousands of drydocks workers on the public payroll when they had nothing to do. And none of us could get a job.

Oh come on. Paranoid much?

Let’s not make Muscat cleverer and more powerful then he really is. And let’s not give the government, any government, more credit than is due.

The Nationalists are a bunch of lawyers who were clever enough to let most people get on with life, whilst they enjoyed their bit on side quietly.

But let us not turn them into economic geniuses thwarted by an evil Opposition leader.

Stop this Burmarrad thing. It hurts people you know.

http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20150519/local/alternative-sites-should-be-considered-for-university-education.568872

I would add that Muscat knows his marketing tactics especially how and which buttons to press. Second, underlying this mess is a systematic divide and rule. The North and South, the Positives and the Negatives, us and them.

Come Muscat and he is trying hard to push the ‘good economy’ image and the feel-good factor. But in fact, what he has managed to do is put Malta in the corrupt-countries map.

Not only because of his passport scheme and close interactions with corrupt dictators and businessmen, but mainly due to his crying crying out loud and continuously ‘corruption’ at the previous government.

But foreign investers do not care about who is in government. They care only about whether the systems in a country are corrupt.

Investors just read ‘Corruption in Malta’ and no serious investors want to invest in a corrupt country.

Muscat has killed the goose that laid the golden egg.