Is Idea to Break Up Banks Milibands worst yet?

So Miliband has now come up with his latest anti-business idea and it really is the worst yet.

Firstly, you can't Ignore the fact that if Miliband did look at breaking up the banks it will lead to many years of legal battles as the people whose investments are affected will no doubt sue the government - and before you think "oh well it's just the rich" don't forget that the non-government parts of the banks are about 70% owned by pension funds, so the people affected are anyone with a pension.

There is also the issue that I am with my bank as I like my bank. I had an account I wasn't happy with so I changed my bank, now Miliband wants to decide for me that I should change again. I don't understand how he thinks it will help me as a consumer to remove my personal choice? He wants more competition but surely this is about helping people identify the best account for them, not forcing them to join a different bank regardless of what they want. Additionally if a bank excels themselves by being better than the rest then in a free market they will get more customers but under this system you surely no bank would try and give a better product than their peers as they will be broken up - Labour punishing success again?

Finally, Miliband thinks that this will increase competition but the simple fact is that the government don't increase competition, customers do, there are alternatives to the big banks and if people want to use them, they can. If people don't want to use them again that is up to them. If Labour want to increase competition they need to make it easier to run a bank not try and disable the banks that are already there. But then at the end of the day challenger banks will only come from customers who want to change. If my account is moved to a different bank I will simply close my account and move back again which may cause the bank to hit the government's cap again, I can only forsee a never ending cycle of bank changes for no other reason that Miliband decided that if he weakened the banks (and lost the country millions) then the coalition wouldn't be able to off load the shares labour bought. Once again making the people of the UK suffer for political greed, it's just the Labour way.

Stocks and Shares

I am a big fan of the stock market - to be honest I am a fan of anything that creates such a wide variety of statistics but having read Rich Dad, Poor Dad I have started to realize that I have not been paying enough attention to money producing assets.With that in mind I am going to create a HYP (High Yield Portfolio) which I am going to update on here in case anyone else is interested in my portfolio and wants to start a discussion about it.

My current portfolio contains the following shares.

Barclays
BP
Lloyds Banking Group
Royal Bank of Scotland
Tesco
Vodafone
National Grid

Now those of you that know about dividends will guess that this portfolio wasn't constructed to be a high yield portfolio as I bought all of the Banks during 2009 as I sensed a bargain, experienced investors will also notice that this portfolio is very badly balanced with 3 out of 7 banks over the next few months I am aiming to get this balanced as well as pick up some more High Dividend Payers. I will update when something is interesting but this is where I find myself at the end of the calender year. (Although the divs are calculated as a financial year so divs paid between now and March will be added and final Yield will not be finished until March.) Also I bought National Grid only a few months ago hence have not yet received a Dividend.

*For full disclosure I should say that I do indeed own all of these shares however the volumes are worked out on investing £1,000 in each share (The Purchase price is the price I paid but I didn't buy £1,000 of each - I just don't want to tell the world too much about my finances.)*

Anyway this is the state of my real/modified portfolio that I will be updating around the time I make any real trades.