Curious Snippets from a Cynical Optimist
Musings about business, politics and the world by a raving libertarian.
Musings about business, politics and the world by a raving libertarian.
Under the European Arrest Warrant system (EAW), EU members including the UK now extradite citizens of other member states back to where they came from with few questions asked. The idea is to simplify criminal proceedings within the EU, the presumption being that, from one European human rights-bound state to another, suspected criminals will surely receive humane treatment and a fair trial on their return...
...Less predictable, however, has been Poland's use of the EAW to request a breathtaking number of extraditions for cases described by judges and lawyers alike as trivial. By "trivial", they mean allegations of theft relating to wardrobe doors, a pedal bike, or a dessert. Each case requires specialist extradition agents from Scotland Yard, extradition solicitors, barristers, interpreters and precious court time before one of only five judges in the country able to hear extradition cases. The Metropolitan Police have had to start chartering regular planes back to Poland just to cope.
The explanation for this seemingly bizarre use of state time and resources lies in the Polish system of "compulsory prosecution" or zasada legalizmu. All allegations of crime in Poland must be investigated, and once reasonable suspicion has been established, all offences must be prosecuted. Investigation requires the presence of the suspect and, if the suspect has made his way to the UK, extradition is required.
Whoever thought up the EAW is a genius. Must have been done by committee!
That is Corbett, in case I inadvertently caused any confusion!
Every so often I remember the little weasel still exists and meander over to his blog to remind myself of why I hate him. Well today I was in for a treat...
We have this gem of a post, charmingly titled "Hannan's Plans To Destroy The Welfare State". Blimey, I thought, what has poor Dan done to deserve this?...
"An end to the government monopolies in education and healthcare." This would leave us all paying for healthcare and education, which is too bad if you’re poor I suppose!
Oh dear. Failing to understand the difference between capitalism and markets, aren't we? Just blame those fucking Swedish bourgeoisie with their education 'vouchers'.
"More referendums." More and important issues to be decided, on low turnouts, with superficial soundbites rather than detailed scrutiny by our elected representatives
Oh, yes. In that case let us dispense with elections completely. If the people cannot be trusted to vote on a single issue, how the hell can they be trusted to return representatives by having to weigh up the whole spectrum of issues? Certainly a conundrum.
"Power back from Brussels in order to disperse it at home. You can't democratise Britain while 84% of our laws come from a super quango, the European Commission." Just nonsense. Only 10% (House of Commons library figures) of legislation originates from the EU, where it is anyway not decided on by the European Commission but by ministers (including British ministers) in the Council and directly elected MEPs in the Parliament. These are on subjects where we have decided it is advantageous to have a common approach, such as common rules for the common market instead of a myriad of separate national rules generating red tape
Only 10%? Huh. I think you'll find, Dickie, that that figure refers narrowly to statutory instruments only. It does not include regulations, which apply automatically across the Union, nor binding court decisions.
A House of Commons report said "The discrepancy between the figures for S.I.s given in the reply and the figures for the number of directives adopted over the same period is because there is no direct correlation between the number of EC legislative instruments adopted and the number of S.I.s needed to implement them"
This same report quotes Denis MacShane (then Europe Minister) saying “It would entail disproportionate cost to research and compile the number of legislative instruments enacted each year in the UK directly implementing EU legislation. The picture is complicated.”
The former German President Roman Herzog is on the record in Die Welt Am Sonntag newspaper in Germany as saying 84% of German legislation originates in Brussels.
As for a "myriad" of national rules, the EU actually helps the independence argument. British companies would only have to change their products and services once to trade within the EU, rather than 26 times as before, but all those companies who trade within the UK only would not have to put up with burdensome EU regulation. So yes, let's have a single market, but let us in Britain not be a part of it.
Then Dickie goes on, with more neck than a Giraffe, to talk about UKIP interfering in the Irish referendum. Corbett beats his chest and proudly proclaims:
"It is both amusing and astonishing hypocrisy that UKIP, which frequently makes shrill accusations about "Brussels meddling with Britain", meddled in a referendum campaign in another country"
Er, yes Richard. And that is the joy of political union - Irish politics becomes British politics. We don't want to interfere in Irish politics, but all the while were in this EU together we must must make each others business our own.
Honestly. What a prize turnip! Here he is again on Youtube trying to gloss over the fact that MEPs just voted to officially recognise the EU flag and anthem, despite it being dropped from the Lisbon treaty, an argument used extensively by the UK government to proclaim the treaty was not constitutional.
To paraphrase Mr Wadsworth - Denis Sewell, You Rock!
The Daily Politics seems to have caught on to the Community Reinvestment Act, although no mention by name.
Bob Spink (Castle Point, UKIP) | Hansard source
To ask the Secretary of State for Transport what regulations govern the bearing of representations of (a) the EU flag and (b) the Union flag on motor vehicle licence plates.
And the answer...
Jim Fitzpatrick (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Transport; Poplar & Canning Town, Labour) | Hansard source
The Road Vehicles (Display of Registration Marks) Regulations 2001 permit the voluntary display of the GB Euro symbol on number plates. These Regulations would not permit without amendment the Union Flag or other national identifiers.
Geoff fucking Hitler-Hoon is an egregious dickfuck of the highest order...
Transport Secretary Geoff Hoon has said the government is prepared to go "quite a long way" with civil liberties to "stop terrorists killing people".
What do I say to him and the rest of the Stasi in our cabinet...
Researchers examining coroners' reports from Sussex between 1485 and 1688 found 30 per cent of deaths were a result of injury involving travelling on land.
Accidents included falling into ditches and being hit by a horse and cart.
The study found 413 of around 1,000 adult inquests involved unintentional injuries, with 124 from land travel.
Of those, eight died when falling from horses and carts, while 43 were the result of falling from farm wagons.
Despite centuries of advances in road safety, the research indicates the proportion of road travel accidents has stayed consistent.
Figures from the World Health Organisation show that a quarter of injury deaths in 2000 were as a result of road crashes
So road accidents accounted for 30% of deaths in the middle of the last millennium, but 25% now. A 5% improvement?!!
Can we get rid of those ghastly average speed cameras now? Motorways are the safest roads after all.
Chris Dillow brings my attention to an interesting paper which suggests levels of risk taking are in the genes.
Differences in attitudes towards risk are partly genetic in origin, according this new paper.
Researchers have found that differences in two genes that regulate dopamine and serotonin activity in the brain - the DRD4 and 5-HTTLPR genes - significantly affect the proportions of wealth people invest in risky assets in laboratory experiments
Now this is quite interesting. However, the paper mentions both risk and 'pathological gambling'. The two are very different.
I don't know of a single successful Entrepreneur who is a gambler by nature. That would be horrendously fucking stupid. No, Entrepreneurs are risk takers, but calculated risk takers.
I am not a big gambler. At most I might buy a lottery ticket when there is a rollover, but it has been a good 6 months since I did that. I am tempted by spread betting, but that is not a gamble - gambling implies chance. Entrepreneurs, and other risk takers, make informed decisions and explicitly work to minimise their exposure.
So is this paper referring to gambling or risk? It seems confused.
It seems rather apt that I plug one of my favourite web co's at this time.
While banks are falling faster than a whore's knickers, I am doing very nicely over at Zopa.
Zopa is an online lending exchange, where you can borrow from, or lend to, real people on the other side of the transaction. No bank in the middle to cream off a margin, but therefore less/no security and higher risk.
If you lend, you can lend a minimum of £10 chunks, meaning lending more than £50 will spread your risk among the maximum of 50 borrowers. Likewise as a borrower your loan is made up of loans from multiple lenders.
Lenders can set the interest rates at which they are willing to lend to different credit rated borrowers, and in turn each borrower's loan reflects an average interest rate of the 10's or 100's of individual loans than comprise that whole loan.
I have been using the service to lend since last June. Despite some long term, low rate, lending in the first few months while i learnt how the system worked, my average return after Zopa fees is currently 8.47%. Recent lending has been in the 11-13.5% bracket, slowly dragging my average up.
Zopa lacks a secondary market at present to allow lenders to liquidate their loan book, but since each month both a portion of the principal and interest is paid back, the outstanding loans diminish rapidly, and keeping the market liquid. This rapid return means, for better or worse, that the turnover of lending is greater and your lending more closely reflects changing market rate trends.
In the 16 months I have been lending at Zopa I have had just 1 late payment, and as yet no defaults. This has left me with about £9.65 outstanding, and which Zopa will be chasing up on my behalf, but since only the top credit rated individuals are allowed on the site, the default rate is very low.
To whom it may concern,
As Her Majesty's Government has taken to recapitalising private companies, if HMG has any change left over from her £50bn package, I have a business which is under capitalised and could use a few pennies. I don't mind reigning in executive bonuses, nor having a government representative on the board.
Where can such companies apply to join the list? And what are the qualifications? The management have not been reckless, and the company is not highly geared, but we could address this deficiency if required.
Vindico
As the clock chimes with the cuckoo of Polly's latest missive, us bloggers are given new impetus. I am currently suffering from blogging fatigue and general lack of hours in the day to muster up the bile and anger to blog, but for this I'll make an exception.
As the all-conquering prime minister arrived at Canary Wharf to address the City, the great glass towers of finance had stopped shaking in fear and all eyes were on the electronic ticker, watching every share rise up, up, up. How did it feel to be proclaimed saviour of the world? Wellington at Waterloo, Churchill on VE day?
*/shudder
Remember when Warren Buffet, George Soros and Felix Rohatyn, the world's canniest investors, warned against derivatives as "hydrogen bombs"? Greenspan defended them against all scrutiny, calling them "an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk". As yesterday's Herald Tribune recalls, he claimed financial institutions were now "less vulnerable to shocks from underlying risk factors" because the whole financial system "has become more resilient".
Well, this would be true if the clever financial instruments were transparent. If banks could have known clearly the inherent risk in each instrument they purchased, they might have been less inclined to take on such dubious ones. As I have said previously, if a mortgage provider knows they can offload the entire risk of lending to 'sub-prime' borrowers, they will still do it because they can make their cut.
The problem is not the instruments per se but their opaque nature.
The trouble for Brown is that ... they will, for example, point to his adulatory Mansion House speech to the City last year, laced with hyperbole that must make him blush now: "I congratulate you on these remarkable achievements, an era that history will record as the beginning of a new golden age for the City of London ... I believe it will be said of this age, the first decades of the 21st century, that out of the greatest restructuring of the global economy, perhaps even greater than the industrial revolution, a new world order was created."
Truly the foresight of a monocular fuckhead!
Yes indeed it was a new world order. It began with Margaret Thatcher's big bang deregulation and now it has nearly brought the world's economy crashing to destruction.
Come now Polly. Surely you are not blaming this on Thatcher, more than 20 years after the big bang, and not much less time since she left office? Oh, you are?
It was a new world order of ballooning borrowing beyond the wildest imaginings of any previous era. Under Brown's stewardship, British citizens were allowed to over-borrow more than anyone in the world, more even than Americans,
Even the Americans? Blimey? What the fuck does that comparison have to do with anything? Maybe Brown ought to have set a broader mandate for the Bank of England, charging them with a wider duty than merely inflation control, to stem asset bubbles and excessive borrowing? Maybe Brown should have changed rules on capital adequacy ratios? Hindsight is wonderful isn't it Polly. What would you have done in his shoes?
But because there can always be redemption, he can recover from that ill-judged infatuation with airy financial constructs built on under-taxed greed
Wow. Thatcher and the rich attacked in the space of two paragraphs. I should have guessed our "low" (!) tax regime would have come in to it somehow. In fact, I bet Philip Green is personally responsible, hey Polly?
Brown needs a severe committee of those economists who were right when he was wrong - people to frighten the City, not to soothe its frightened feathers. Appoint the Richard Murphys, Will Huttons and Larry Elliotts not as City tsars but as City Savonarolas to flush out tax avoidance and evasion, to close down tax havens, to appoint honest non-executives to company boardrooms and institute a regime built on public trust
The pain in my head is unbearable. I would take any torture over this. Waterboarding please?
In a chastened City, it's time to abolish bonuses altogether, not just this year
Excellent idea? How to prevent such a problem in the future: drive financial services over seas and drive the city of London into the ground. Genius.
He, the eurosceptic who shunned the public signing of the Lisbon treaty, must be first to call for EU harmonisation of a minimum corporation tax to stop the race to the bottom started by Ireland to steal companies from each other. He who under-taxed the top must be first to say the richest 1% must pay towards easing hardship in this crisis.
Oh get fucked you sour old bitch. Firstly, we live in a global economy which extends beyond Europe (yes Polly, there are other countries besides your beloved Sweden) so a minimum corporation tax rate wont capture the truly global corporations very well.
Secondly, the richest 1% would need to be taxed at one almighty rate to raise anywhere enough cash to make any meaningful difference whatsoever, and why should they have to bail out everybody else anyway?
If you hate this country so much Polly then why don't you just leave? Please leave? For God sake, please?
My posting has been light recently due to both time pressures and a general apathy for the current news agenda. But just when you think you have a few more days of quite blogging, here come the sad brigade again...
Comedian Harry Enfield's BBC show has been labelled "disgraceful and distasteful" by members of the Philippine community in the UK.
A petition has been launched condemning the Harry And Paul show for a sketch in which one man urges another to "mount" a Filipina maid
The sketch, first broadcast on 26 September, was the part of a series in which a family from the south of England treats a northern man like a pet dog.
"Our chums up the road wanted to see if they could mate their Filipino maid with our northerner," said Enfield's character as the maid danced provocatively in his garden.
After the performance failed to have the desired effect, Enfield shouted: "Come on, Clyde, mount her."
The sketch is funny precisely because it plays on exaggerated stereotypes, particularly of the southern family where the sketch parodies the thin thread of prejudice against 'other' people of lower standing, which common culture suggests Southerners posses. It is also funny because it portrays the Northerner and maid as pets, in a clearly surreal and thus amusing manner. The sketch is here...
If anyone is upset at the 'stereotypes racial discrimination', or 'abuse of human rights', then I take it they are also upset at the oppression of northerners in the sketch, the attitude of the postman, and the outrageous slander of Southerners? I suspect this is not of concern because it is plainly ridiculous, and does nothing of the sort.
Presumably the show's opening credits are also offensive as they invoke images of a soviet past, which glorified weapons and totalitarianism? No? Anybody?
A petition organised by the Philippine Foundation called for the "re-education" of the BBC.
It said: "This particular sketch is completely disgraceful, distasteful and a great example of gutter humour."
It accused the BBC and the show of "inciting stereotyped racial discrimination, vulgarity and violation of the maid's human rights".
The sketch was "tantamount to racism and [the] worst sexual abuse and exploitation of the hapless young Filipina domestic worker employee," it added.
Note the word 'maid' is clearly insulting and so the tautological 'domestic worker employee' is used. The Philippine Foundation better watch out for the Queen's English Society opening a can of whoop ass!
The petition had received 328 signatures by midday on Tuesday
328 sad, sad, oh so very sad, sad, people.
If you feel so inclined please go and sign my counter-petition here.
Ofgem...told power companies they needed to deliver the benefits of competition to all
Ok, so we know what they're trying to say, but it is still amusing. Surely the market is either competitive or not. If not then the government needs to step in, if it is then there should be no problem!
Why do Labour politicians (and Lib-Dem, and Tory) grab firmly the wrong end of the stick? Enter stage right: Mary Honeyball MEP*...
1) Why do you think legislation can solve every problem? If discrimination still exists it is by definition a prejudice. Prejudices can only be dissolved over time, naturally, and legislation does nothing but possibly paper over the cracks.
2) Believing in equality, as UKIP does, does not mean default support for legislation, on grounds of (1).
3) I have never met any employer who would discriminate against a women. If an employer chose to employ a man of lesser ability over a woman of greater ability, it would only be himself/the company who who stand to lose. However, I have met some dappy women, and equally dappy men, whom I would rather pay not to employ for fear of the damage to my business they would wreak! I have met several women who I would employ in a heartbeat, and pay over the odds to get.
4) Might, just might, there be a teeny weeny bias towards certain jobs, by women? I.e. Might it be that woman, on the whole, prefer certain occupations which cause them to be statistically worse off? In my experience women outweigh men in the field of marketing, and do a better job, but might marketing attract lower salaries, for example?
5) Also in general, women tend to place a higher priority on family than men. Thus if men are more driven, ambitious, etc, then this may be reflected in particular job functions and pay levels.
The test of equality is if a woman, with the right attributes, does not face any barrier not faced by a man in the same position. Looking at national statistics, for example, which show trends, has no relevance whatsoever and may be reflecting underlying causes which have nothing to do with discrimination and everything to do with natural preferences and career choices.
Introducing yet more legislation which places employers in an impossible position of judging a candidates suitability, not on grounds of ability for the job, but rather by way of tick boxes to prevent possible legal action by an aggrieved candidate, is distorting and damaging.
There have been dramatic advances in equality in the UK in recent decades. This trend will continue with or without legislation. UKIP opposes equality legislation, because of these unintended distorting and damaging affects, not because of the underlying sentiment. If you perhaps tried to realise that not everything can or should be measured, or legislated against, and instead realise that some things just are (it's called life), you could do us all a favour. By all means set up/work with charities or other organisations to help women, but why the hell should you enforce ridiculous legislation, not just on the UK, but on the whole of Europe as well?
* It's worth pointing out that she has disabled comments on this video. Clearly she is attempting to communicate better with people!
Hat tip to Freedom & Whisky
Google "Community Reinvestment Act" and do a bit of digging. Wikipedia entry here. It tells us...
The Community Reinvestment Act (or CRA, Pub.L. 95-128, title VIII, 91 Stat. 1147, 12 U.S.C. § 2901 et seq.) is a United States federal law that requires banks and savings and loan associations to offer credit throughout their entire market area and prohibits them from targeting only wealthier neighborhoods with their services,
And...
The CRA was passed by the 95th United States Congress and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in 1977 as a result of national grassroots pressure for affordable housing,
And...
The CRA mandates that each banking institution be evaluated to determine if it has met the credit needs of its entire community. That record is taken into account when the federal government considers an institution's application for deposit facilities, including mergers and acquisitions
And...
The bill encouraged mortgage lending through two government sponsored enterprises ("GSEs"). The Federal National Mortgage Association, commonly known as Fannie Mae, enables mortgage companies, savings and loans, commercial banks, credit unions, and state and local housing finance agencies to lend to home buyers. The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, commonly known as Freddie Mac, buys mortgages on the secondary market and sell them as mortgage-backed securities on the open market.
And...
In early 1993 President Bill Clinton ordered new regulations for the CRA which would increase access to mortgage credit for inner city and distressed rural communities.[6] The new rules January 31, 1995 and featured: requiring strictly numerical assessments to get a satisfactory CRA rating; using federal home-loan data broken down by neighborhood, income group, and race; encouraging community groups to complain when banks were not loaning enough to specified neighborhood, income group, and race; allowing community groups that marketed loans to target to groups to collect a fee from the banks.[4][7]
The new rules, during a time when many banks were merging and needed to pass the CRA review process to do so, substantially increased the number and aggregate amount of loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers for home loans, some of which were "risky mortgages."
And...
Related rule changes gave Fannie and Freddie extraordinary leverage, allowing them to hold just 2.5% of capital to back their investments, vs. 10% for banks
And...
In 2003, the Bush Administration recommended that a new Department of the Treasury agency should supervise the primary agents guaranteeing subprime loans,
How very interesting indeed. This video goes a little further, and I don't agree with its conspiratorial style, but the underlying point seems to be sound. An Act of Congress encouraged/mandated that loans be made to low income groups who were a credit risk, and had a good chance of default. Oops! When will people learn that government intervention helps nobody in the long run?!!
Truly excellent news for people who own homes in rural areas... "Rural housing shortage 'worsens'"
But this is very odd indeed...
They warned communities faced an uncertain future unless the lack of affordable housing was addressed.
The government said it was "determined" to help people gain home ownership.
The two campaigning groups have produced a charter outlining how the supply of affordable housing could be increased, including building homes in every village and rural town where need has been identified
1) Well, they could just sit back, watch the arse fall out the economy and watch as millions of homes become 'affordable'.
2) 'Affordable' is a ridiculous objective. What does it mean? The only solution is to increase supply, since demand is deemed to be static. Relaxing planning laws would help, but then do we want loads of houses built all over the place? And why do we think everyone has a right to own a home?
From Dickie's blog...
It was also a great pleasure to see the moving tribute to my colleagues Gary Titley and Glenys Kinnock recieved following their announcement they would be stepping down at the next European elections
It wasn't a big fucking round of applause was it?
Watching the news is almost exciting at the moment. It is riveting viewing, as the drama of the 'financial crisis', as the BBC have sweetly named it, unfolds. Watching history being made is very interesting indeed.
My view is that the recession we are now in (stats don't reflect it yet, but I have no doubt we are) will be sharper, deeper and longer than many people are predicting. I am no economist, with reams of economic data to compute, but I do understand confidence and self reinforcing spirals. But as the shit hits the fan, various commentators are naively opining on solutions to prevent such an event in the future. I do not pretend to be an economics genius, so please put me straight, but my thoughts are as follows.
It is clear that the problem we have was created by financial institutions who partook in reckless lending to those not worthy of credit. Now it seems to me that in a normal course of events, a bank would recognise the problem it was creating for itself and amend its practices to avert a major crisis. However, perverse incentives, geared towards short term gain, seemed to overpower and intoxicate rational management.
Collateralized Debt Obligations, and other financial instruments appear to have caused a major problem. Banks were incentivised to lend recklessly because they knew, having pulled the pin on the grenade, they could pass the parcel before it exploded, not a problem when your only concern is this quarter's bonus! The money-go-round of CDOs, chopped up and re-packaged time and time again, left credit rating agencies hopelessly uninformed as to the location and nature of risk, and so warning flags were never taken out the box. Even now, the lack of information as to where the toxic debt is located has caused banks to stop lending to one another.
While some people now talk of the end of capitalism as we know it, call for transaction taxes to introduce stability, more regulation, or other such proposals, it seems to me the fundamental problem is the lack of symmetric information in the market. If the banks buying CDOs knew the details of their composition, and could adequately assess the risk, then surely the warning flags would have entered the field of vision far sooner. Thus the solution would appear to be suitable audit trails, logged and easily computable, to correct the market failure.
The bigger problem comes in the form of bail outs. When something this huge happens, nobody can afford to let the whole house of cards come falling down. The issue is no longer moral hazard, but the wholesale socialisation of losses resulting from this need. Allowing complacent shareholders to have their value wiped out, and allowing banks to fail, is just not an option when the entire system is diseased.
So what is the solution? Transaction taxes such as a Tobin tax would cause liquidity to dry up and raise the cost of capital, and also fail to adequately cover derivatives.
There would seem to be a few areas where the market failed spectacularly and could be improved...
1. Transparency - improved regulation could mandate audit trail for complex financial instruments to improve information symmetry in the market.
2. Short selling - Despite the noises from various business leaders and economists I cannot for the life of me work out what is wrong with short selling. It is not a win-win process for all parties involved, for a speculator to gain a shareholder must necessarily lose.
Further, it is a voluntary transaction between two parties and so morally should not be frustrated. However, while individually not a problem, on aggregate short selling does appear to exacerbate market movements by flooding the market with 'sells' and driving the share price down.
Therefore it may perhaps be sensible to limit the portion of a shareholding the shareholder can 'lend' to short sellers, to say perhaps 10% of their entire shareholding. This way a maximum of 10% could be shorted - in normal circumstances that should be more than enough capacity for legitimate short selling - but if there was a sudden market movement, as with HBOS, the limiter would act as a brake and prevent the share price being hammered into the ground and destabilising a sound business. Yes? No? Thoughts?
3. Capital Adequacy Ratios - There is some talk of moving to a system of counter-cyclical capital adequacy ratios to help stabilise credit booms. This seems perfectly sensible as far as I can see. Anybody have more analysis on this?
4. Collateralized Debt Obligations - As I have said above, the opaqueness of these instruments hid the underlying risk. At one point a judge in the USA was contemplating ruling that one bank, the mortgage issuer, may not have claim over the property and that in fact the ownership was divided proportionally among the subsequent fractional indirect holders (i.e. the splitting and re-packaging money-go-round diluted ownership and claim on the asset (the house)). The judge eventually did not rule this way.
So if this were indeed made the case, and in effect meant banks had to retain the liabilities of their own lending, would this contain toxic debt within the bank that created it and so eliminate the perverse incentives caused by CDOs? Would it not cause rationality to return to management, as liabilities were internalised? The bank could still issue a bond or other financial instrument to other banks to raise the capital for the loan, but the liabilities would be transparent and immovable, and reflected in inter-bank lending rates.
Anyway, just a few thoughts I wanted to share. Hopefully some of you knowledgeable folks out there can throw in your two pence worth.
The two most senior figures in the Church of England have condemned the practices of some financial traders.
Writing in the Spectator, Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams attacked "paper transactions with no concrete outcome beyond profit for traders".
When such trading went badly, it caused "real and crippling damage", he said.
In an earlier speech, the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, called share traders who cashed in on falling prices "bank robbers and asset strippers".
These two high flying economists....oh...wait...no they're not. They're fucking God botherers. Why have the BBC even bothered reporting this? No doubt a belief in miracles might be fortunate at the current time, but why don't these people just mind their own fucking business and stop thinking they have any kind of importance whatsoever.
It might be worth remembering that these two gentlemen also believe in the existence of a divine being, manipulate and brainwash impressionable people, line the pockets of the church by dipping into the wallets of their followers, and generally perpetuate their existence by exploiting ignorance and fear. Quite how any credence can be given to the thoughts of these men is a mystery to me.
If I started dressing like a 10th century transvestite, wearing weird shaped hats, and believed fairies made the kettle boil, and started spouting forth my opinions on the economic situation, you might quite reasonably question the validity of my views. So if the BBC feel fit to report the views of these two men, perhaps they might like to ask David Icke what he thinks.
Just sayin, is all.
In an email bulletin from Open Europe I see this...
It is reported that MEPs will this week investigate Irish press reports that the anti-Lisbon Treaty group Libertas received US funding for its campaign. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, joint leader of the Greens/EFA group in the Parliament, issued a statement which said, "We are awaiting confirmation of reports in the media regarding funding of Libertas' campaign for a no vote to the Lisbon treaty in Ireland. If proved true, this would clearly show that there are forces in the United States willing to pay people to destabilise a strong and autonomous Europe. If this can happen for the treaty vote, it raises grave concerns for interference in next year's European elections." The move is backed by European Parliament President Hans-Gert Poettering.
Cohn-Bendit is quoted in the Irish Independent as saying "There is now a direct link between the Irish referendum, the US military and the Pentagon. I call on the authorities to probe the matter".
In an 18 September article, the Irish Examiner said that Libertas founder Declan Ganley had contracts worth over 200m euros with the US military, which the paper suggested was opposed to the strengthened EU military capability foreseen under Lisbon.
So it's perfectly ok for the EU to throw taxpayers cash at winning a referendum by manipulating the debate, but when the USA does this it is very bad. Again, for clarity - Brussels throws taxpayers money at manipulating the Irish referendum; the USA does the same. One is bad and one is good.
War is peace. Security is freedom.
This is really rather amusing. The Taxpayers' Alliance has released a 'Gordon Brown Calculator'. Enjoy! (Speakers on for maximum enjoyment).
Ok, so putting aside the fact that the Government has just waived perfectly good and sound competition rules to make this deal happen (presumably firms will wait until future crises to make takeovers, judging the likelihood of Government cave in to be highly probable), the numbers are quite interesting.
Lloyds TSB has unveiled details of its £12.2bn takeover of HBOS, a deal it described as a "unique opportunity".
The deal values shares in Halifax Bank of Scotland - the UK's biggest mortgage lender - at 232p each, and could lead to cost savings of £1bn a year.
Lloyds confirmed jobs would be lost as a result, but played down claims that up to 40,000 staff faced the axe
So £1bn savings; About 1,000 branches to close; and a large number of job losses.
Assuming each branch costs, what?, £100,000pa to keep open (rent, rates, maintenance, heating, lighting, etc), that equates to about £100m.
£900m for 40,000 people equates to £22,500 per employee cost (sounds a bit low, once HR, Employers NIC, Pensions, Health & Safety, and God knows what other nonsense ads to the cost of employing people are all taken into account). But let's take the 40,000 people figure.
This is one giant productivity gain. Lloyds and HBOS have a combined workforce of 142,000, so delivering the same service with 40,000 less people and £1bn less costs (That's about 0.06% of GDP in savings?) must be statistically significant and so reflected in the next productivity stats?
Or have I got my numbers horrendously wrong?
The EU has noticed that some of us little proles are getting restless. Apparently we don't much care for some of the legislation that spews out of the temple of righteousness across the way. Some of us even don't care for the whole damn project!
So, in a brainwave worthy of a dunces cap, the commission are descending from their ivory towers to mingle with the people (not actually touching/breathing the same air, just through the personal medium of national newspapers!).
The Sun newspaper is holding a competition (ooh exciting!) to find the single most irksome EU regulation to "improve" to make all our lives better. And since I've always enjoyed pissing into the wind I have made my submission, and suggest you may like to do likewise.
Of course, the whole concept rather admits the lack of democratic accountability in the first place, but hey.
All worthy contenders of course but there's one much more important.
This one.Yes, the European Communities Act 1972.
Repeal that one and we'll be free of all their crazed rules, not just one or other of them.
In the first box, "European Communities Act 1972".
Second box "Because it is the reason the UK is a member of the EU" or something like that perhaps.
Third box: "If we leave the EU by repealing this Act then we are free of all their barmy bureacrats' rules, not just one." or something like that again.
So go on. Join in the fun. For fun you may even like to scale down your ambition and propose relaxing the rules on the curvature of cucumbers, but I'll leave the choice to you. Just think of the possibilities.
The EU is engaging in another bout of self love...
The governing board of a new European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) has held its inaugural meeting in the Hungarian capital Budapest.
The European Union is providing initial funding of more than 300m euros (£238m) for the institute, aimed at generating more European technological advances.
Stop wasting my fucking money you horrible little fucks.
"Until now, higher education has notoriously been the absent member of innovation partnerships," the European Commission says.
The EIT is to involve universities in new public-private partnerships called "Knowledge and Innovation Communities" (KICs), to create new commercial opportunities by bringing researchers and business entrepreneurs together.
Er, actually we don't do too badly here in the UK.
Speaking at the EIT's opening ceremony in Budapest, he said the institute would "focus on its mission without any political or bureaucratic interference" and "to do this, we have handed it an unprecedented level of autonomy".
Like what? Made it a private company? How is the set up 'unprecedented'?
The EIT is not modelled on the successful Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, a senior European Commission official told the BBC News website on Monday.
"It is a very European answer to the challenges Europe faces, with a unique structure,"...
What? Shite?
Which is one up on the Conservative party!
The Lib-Dems have gone all chalk and gowns...
Plans to scrap the national curriculum are due to be detailed at the Liberal Democrat party's annual conference....Mr Laws will tell the conference in Bournemouth that the 635 pages of the national curriculum should be shredded, and replaced by 21 pages that appear to work in countries such as Sweden
Good. A*.
party leader Nick Clegg...might send his children to private schools because of concerns over secondary schooling.
"I am a father before a politician," he told the paper... "I am not holding my children's future and education hostage to a game of political football."
Good. A*.
And Mr Laws will explain how some of the £20bn the party says it will identify in savings will be spent on a pupil premium.
The premium will follow poorer children, in the first instance those who are eligible for free school meals, and will be paid directly to the school.
The party says it will cost £2.5bn, and will raise the funding of a million children to levels found in private education.
Ok, moving in the right direction. B.
Quite why this is a good idea for some children and not all children is the question. Might they go the whole hog and advocate vouchers within a free market in education? I guess that would be too Liberal for them!
Also the nonsense about trying to match private school spending is just a silly distraction. What difference will it make? They still get educated in the same schools. Why not give every child a voucher and spread the £2.5bn proportionally? Or am I missing something?
Then the BBC throws in a Law and Order policy just to confuse things...
Meanwhile, Lib Dem home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne is expected to say he wants more underperforming police officers to lose their jobs, and renew his call for an end to the "job for life" culture in the police force.
The party wants mainly elected police authorities to exert pressure on chief constables to dismiss officers who are not up to their tasks
B+. Good start, but could be improved by directly electing police chiefs for real accountability. Impressively, for which the Libs must get credit, they have managed to explain the policies in a reasonably straightforward manner, instead of trying to wrap them up in fluffy left-liberal mumbo bollocks. Tax cuts and policy clarity - what next? Less nannying?
Are you watching this Dave? This is what political parties do - come up with policies.
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