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My time at Shell was a most valuable experience because it taught me to look at the world in a long-term way. Shell takes a 20-year view on events and plans for different scenarios. It makes you see the world as a kind of large matrix.

Vince Cable

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Vince Cable
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: May 9
British Politician
Economist
Politician
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John Vincent Cable
Vincent Cable
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More quotes by Vince Cable

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Banks operate like a man who either wears his trousers round his chest, stifling breathing, as now, or round his ankles, exposing his assets. We want their trousers tied round their middle: steady lending growth particularly to productive British business, especially small scale enterprise.
Vince Cable
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The economy has become seriously unbalanced. Its growth has not been driven by investment or by overcoming Britain's long-standing weaknesses in investment and productivity, particularly skills. Instead, there has been a binge of debt-financed consumer spending.
Vince Cable
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Housing associations have fingered the fact that they cannot use their assets as liquidity due to Bank of England rules unlike their continental equivalents. This has emerged to be one of the main bottlenecks to getting investment going in the U.K. It is a Bank of England issue.
Vince Cable
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I clearly believe a lot more than some of my coalition colleagues - Tories - in redistribution and using the tax system for that purpose. I also believe in the government having an active role in the economy, which is having an industrial strategy. I'm not a believer in laissez-faire.
Vince Cable
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We need a new British business bank with a clean balance sheet and an ability to expand lending rapidly to the manufacturers, exporters and high-growth companies that power our economy. Today I can announce we will have one.
Vince Cable
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The fact that John Prescott is being paid large sums of money to do little or nothing adds to the general malaise surrounding this government and the feeling that ministers are incapable of tackling serious issues.
Vince Cable
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When I was a child we were sufficiently well off for me to be a picky eater and I still cannot eat vegetables cooked in the traditional British manner.
Vince Cable
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On banks, I make no apology for attacking spivs and gamblers who did more harm to the British economy than Bob Crow could achieve in his wildest Trotskyite fantasies, while paying themselves outrageous bonuses underwritten by the taxpayer. There is much public anger about banks and it is well deserved.
Vince Cable
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Well, as I said, you know the issue of Greek debt, they've grasped the principle of debt reduction. I think most people would argue that probably more needs to be done on that front, and they've just begun to take the first steps to accepting that there's going to have to be much closer economic integration in Europe.
Vince Cable
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I'm now happily remarried to a good cook, which encourages me to be lazy. I like to think that I'm a new man, but perhaps I'm not. I offset it by doing the ironing, though. She has a small farm in the New Forest with a herd of cattle, so she serves up a steak and kidney pie made with her own beef.
Vince Cable
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My college, Fitzwilliam, was pretty good but unfashionable and I lived in digs so I was not part of the cloistered 'old college' environment, which frankly was a bit intimidating. But I worked hard and settled in by exploring politics and girls.
Vince Cable
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Britain is no longer one of the world's price setters. It is painful. It is a challenge to us in government to explain all that, and it is a pity that the political class is not preparing the public for it to understand how massive the problem is.
Vince Cable
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The food in the House of Commons is fairly good. The cafe in Portcullis House is really very high quality, and you also have a choice of eating in the more traditional restaurants, the Churchill Room or the Members' Dining Room. I don't often eat in them, though, as I'm usually on the run.
Vince Cable
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I made friends with a boy who was a communist when I was 13 and that broadened my political views, but it also brought me into conflict with my father who was very Right-wing.
Vince Cable
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And humility in politics means accepting that one party doesn't have all the answers recognising that working in partnership is progress not treachery.
Vince Cable
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I know it sounds trite but I wanted to make a difference. Political debates with my father had been fraught because he was uncompromising and explosive but if he taught me one thing it was to air my views.
Vince Cable
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The government increasingly resembles somebody who is trying to give the kiss of life to a corpse.
Vince Cable
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Fundamental renegotiation is very, very unlikely to produce any significant change
Vince Cable
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I fear that the rising personal bankruptcies and repossessions are the first signs of bigger problems to come and personal debt - Gordon Brown's legacy to millions of Britain's families - will hang like a millstone around the neck of the British people for years to come.
Vince Cable
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The degree of leverage now being reversed is on a staggering scale, and the underlying global imbalances – notably between the savers and the spenders – will require long and painful adjustment.
Vince Cable