Money Category
Money in the news and how you are going to pay and pay and pay
Scotland Pays For Chinese Panda Bears With Fishy Salmon And Turning A Blind Eye To Norway’s Nobel Woes
SCOTLAND gets those Chinese panda bears on hire for ten years, and China gets lots of Scottish salmon.
In October, the BBC reported that Scottish salmon suits Chinese tastes:
China has leapt into top spot in the Far East for Scottish salmon exports – just six months after it allowed seafood to be sent directly from Scotland for the first time. Data from HM Revenue and Customs revealed 2,347 tonnes of salmon were exported to the world’s most populous nation in the first half of 2011.
The Far East total for the period was 3,036 tonnes, worth £16m.
China is now the fifth largest export destination for Scottish salmon.
In January, the Scottish and Chinese governments reached an agreement to allow seafood exports directly from Scotland. The announcement was made when First Minister Alex Salmond met Vice-Premier Li during a visit to Scotland…
Rural Affairs Secretary Richard Lochhead hailed the figures as “a huge vote of confidence” in Scottish salmon and another boost for Scottish food exports.
He said: “If this is what can be achieved in the first six months, then the sky could be the limit for exports to China”…
Scottish Development International chief executive Anne MacColl said the announcement was “a true reflection” of Scotland’s reputation as a world-leading producer of high-quality seafood produce.
It’s a true reflection of something.
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Posted: 7th, December 2011 | In: Key Posts, Money | Comments (2)
New Economics Foundation: Loons on the Loose
THE new economics foundation (they’re so green and hip that they think there’s a shortage of capital letters) has decided that British banking is broken and that we really ought to all go and adopt the German system.
Local banking works. The experience of other countries that have thriving local banking sectors, including the US, Germany and Switzerland, has demonstrated that smaller, locally focused institutions are the ones that provide economic resilience.
Germany in particular provides an excellent case study of a different way of doing things. Once considered plodding and underperforming compared with swashbuckling British banks led by the likes of Fred Goodwin, the humble German savings banks, or sparkassen, have been quietly showing their mettle since the financial crisis began.
There are 430 of these banks, each of which is focused on serving its local area. They are public interest institutions with explicit social as well as economic objectives. They are prudently managed, but also will back new business ventures and stay with customers for the long term. Lending decisions are not made by computers, or sent to some remote regional office. Your branch manager has the authority to back his or her judgment.
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Occupier Wall Street Protestor Gets Job On Wall Street
THANKS to her participation in Occupy Wall Street, Tracy Postert scored a job on… Wall Street.
Having tried her luck with such signs as “Reagan sucks” and “I’ll vote after the revolution“, she opted for “Ph.D. Biomedical Scientist seeking full time employment – Ask me for my resume.”
Wayne Kaufman, chief market analyst for John Thomas Financial Brokerage, spotted it and gave her a chance.
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BBC Offers One Lucky Viewer £18m Licence Fee Rebate
THE BBC is paying back slices of its licence fee:
Ever wondered where it all goes? Well they are giving me a Christmas bonus out of it!!
ATTN: RECIPIENT,
THE BBC FINANCE DEPARTMENT HAVE PAID YOUR FUNDS OF £18,000,000.00 (EIGHTEEN MILLION POUNDS STERLING) TO YOU WITH YOUR REFERENCE NO: 90542282 TO COLLECT YOUR FUNDS AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.YOU NEED TO CONFIRM YOUR INFORMATION BELOW SO THAT WE CAN ABLE TO SEND YOUR FUNDS TO YOU IN YOUR COUNTRY:
FULL NAME:
CONTACT ADDRESS:
GENDER :
OCCUPATION:
PHONE NO:
COUNTRY:YOU WILL CONTACT THE BBC FINANCE DEPARTMENT UK THROUGH OUR EMAIL ADDRESS:(bbcdepartmentfinance@yahoo.cn) TO COLLECT YOUR FUNDS AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.
WE NEED YOUR URGENT REPLY TO RECEIVE YOUR FUNDS TODAY.
YOUR FAITHFULLY,
DR HELEN COLE
MANAGING DIRECTOR
BBC FINANCE DEPARTMENT
UNITED KINGDOM
0845 838 1815 (UK Local Rate)
+44 7024084948(From Outside UK)
The lads from the Room 419 graphics department are waiting::
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodies: The Buma/Stemra Model For European Pirates
QUIS Custodiet Ipsos Custodies. Or to translate that into modern English, how do we make sure that the people we ask to make sure that bastards don’t steal from us aren’t bastards who steal from us?
Oh, sure, we can appoint all sorts of technocrats, bureaucrats, have politicians, even have independent organisations to monitor things for us. But what happens when they turn out to be breaching their own monitoring?
A board member of rights management company Buma/Stemra which represents composers and music publishers has stepped down amid allegations of corruption, the Volkskrant writes on Thursday.
Broadcaster Powned recorded a conversation between Jochem Gerritsand and the lawyer of composer Melchior Rietveldt who claims the organisation owes him at least €1m in lost copyright fees.Rietveldt wrote a piece of music for an anti-piracy ad which was widely distributed without his knowledge. In spite of numerous requests he was never paid for the reproduction of his music.
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The Robin Hood Tax: It Won’t Work You know
SO we get, hot off the presses, the report from the House of Lords Committee looking into the Robin Hood Tax (or financial transactions tax, Tobin tax, call it what you will):
A European tax on financial transactions could cost Britain’s economy up to 20 times the amount it raises, a committee of lawmakers said on Friday.
Britain has said a transaction tax, dubbed a Tobin Tax after the U.S. economist who devised it in the 1970s, would only work globally and the EU plans are “deeply confused.”
Britain is fiercely opposed to the proposed financial transaction tax (FTT), which the European Union said could raise 57 billion euros (49 billion pounds) a year if implemented across the bloc.
“The FTT is likely to induce a loss in GDP between five and 20 times larger than the revenues raised from the tax,” according to an economic sub-committee of the House of Lords, the upper chamber of the parliament.
And that’s only one of the reasons why it won’t work: others being that banks won’t pay it, workers and consumers will, there’s no point at all in having it unless it’s global, it’ll raise volatility in the markets, not reduce it and so on.
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Coupon Crazy: Saving With Groupon And Others Doesn’t Add Up
ARE we going Groupon Coupon Crazy? Yes yes yes, we all know you can save money by using coupons when you go shopping. And yes yes yes, we all know that it’s the sort of thing that started out in the US and has only recently started to become common in the UK.
However, economists just love pointing out something about these sorts of activities. Yes, you’re saving money: but how much is it costing you to save money?
Like the bank customer cashing in a jar of pennies at lunchtime, Judith thinks nothing of handing a cashier coupons printed from the online money-saving forums that she trawls daily for cut-price deals on non-perishables to feed to her brood. But, then, she is Britain’s most accomplished penny-pincher…….The forums are a step ahead. It does mean I spend a fair bit of time every day on line – but I’m not a big television person anyway.”
The question is, how much time?
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Posted: 1st, December 2011 | In: Money | Comments (2)
GCHQ Recruits 35 Phone Hackers On Twitter And Facebook: Can You Crack Milly Dowler’s Phone?
THE News of The World may be dead, but you spooks and spies can still get work at MI6. GCHQ is recruiting 35 new code-breakers on the “Can You Crack It?” web page.
Crack the code and win the right to be trained up to snoop on members of the public, and have your mysterious death swept under the carpet and your name and reputation muddied.
Says a GCHQ spokesman:
“Code cracking skills are vital to secure the very best talent and to support the GCHQ mission in its fight against cyber threats. Our target audience is not typically attracted to traditional advertising methods and may be unaware that we are recruiting for these kinds of roles.”
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Posted: 1st, December 2011 | In: Money | Comment (1)
Booze Taxes Have to be Reduced Or The Bootleggers Get The Money
DO booze taxes have to be reduced? Well, of course they do; hardened topers like myself insist they must be.
However, there is a more serious point here as well. The reason we tax booze so heavily isn’t, as some might think, to make everyone healthy by keeping them off the sauce. It’s actually because demand has a very low elasticity.
That’s the economists’ posh way of saying that when you put the price up people still buy it. Because, you know, living in modern Britain will drive anyone and everyone to drink. So it’s absolutely the opposite that is true: we don’t tax booze a lot to stop people drinking it but because even when we do tax it people still drink. That means we can get tonnes of money out of taxing booze: and getting tonnes of money is the point of taxing things at all.
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1%er Doesn’t Make Much Of The Working Classes, Unsurprisingly: A Banker Speaks
OCCUPY Everywhere (it feels like ‘everywhere’ at the minute) continues, there’s not been too many words coming from the bankers. It seems they’ve been reluctant to speak.
That is, until now. One of the 1%ers has been caught on camera, looking at the protests and, unsurprisingly, he’s rather sniffy about it all.
He effectively tells the cameraman that no-one “great” ever came from the 99%, which is met with a couple of cheeky answers from the person filming events.
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You Want to Know What’s Happening In the Eurozone….Yes, I Knew You Did
DO you want to know what’s happening in the EuroZone? Well, if you really want to know what’s happening over in Euroland then you should read this book:
A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960
Milton Friedman & Anna Jacobson Schwartz
Admittedly at near 900 pages including charts and references it is pretty hard going. But if you really want to understand, that’s where you need to go.
As and when you read it though you’ll need to remember a point. When Friedman starts talking about what the Federal Reserve did in the US before and during the Great Depression, he’s actually listing the whole set of things that they got wrong. When he says they made an error here then that’s exactly what the European Central Bank has been doing. Like, for example, raising interest rates because of the risk of inflation. We have a risk of deflation, of a depression, in front of us, not a risk of dangerous inflation.
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419 Scammers Cannot Do Photoshop: Brilliant Gallery The Nigerian Con Gone Wrong
THE Nigerian 419 scammers cannot do Photoshop. You’d think that being the Commander of the Imperial Forces of his Excellency etc… the Nigerian contact sitting on vast pile of cash would be able to hire a decent web designer. It turns out they like to do it themselves. People wise to the scam invite the scammers to pose for photos. These snaps will prove that they are persons of fine repute, elevated jobs and impeccable dress sense. Want to see some of the results
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Posted: 29th, November 2011 | In: Key Posts, Money | Comment
If An NGO Goes Bust Without Government Money Is It Really An N- GO? Environmental Protection UK It Not Independent
THE definition of NGO is Non-Governmental Organisation. Supposedly those nice people outside politics with ideas about how to make the world a better place who campaign to make the world a better place.
Which makes this slightly odd:
The UK’s oldest environmental NGO has been forced to close after government cuts to local authority budgets drastically reduced its income.
Formed as the Coal Smoke Abatement Society at the end of the nineteenth century, Environmental Protection UK provided expert analysis on air quality and, more recently, contaminated land and waste issues. But over the past two years, the Brighton-based charity has faced severe financial challenges due to the coalition’s cuts to local authorities, which purchase its products and services.
If an NGO cannot survive without government money is it in fact a non-governmental anything at all?
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Posted: 28th, November 2011 | In: Money | Comment (1)
Kate Middleton To Join Public Sector Strike: Official Royal TUC Strike Fridge Magnets Raise Millions
PUBLIC Sector strikes are coming on Wednesday. And the big question is: will anyone who works notice? The right-wring press warn of queues at Heathrow Airport, pupils learning nothing in school and the country’s borders being porous. Again we ask: will anyone notice the difference?
Well, one difference is that the Guardian’s website is expected to be busier than usual and more people will watching Neighbours. Also, people on their way to work will be able to see the striking public sector workers and ask them what it is they do.
Francis Maude and Danny Alexander say the strikes will pose a “significant hit to the economy at a very challenging time”. It’s a warning that talks up the importance of the strikers’ jobs.
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Posted: 28th, November 2011 | In: Key Posts, Money | Comment (1)
So Where Are All The Bond Vigilantes? Doubling Rates For the Italians
WHERE are all the Bond vigilantes? Not buying Italian debt is the short answer.
Italy paid a record 6.5 percent to borrow money over six months Friday and its longer-term funding costs soared far above levels seen as sustainable for public finances, raising the pressure on Rome’s new emergency government.
The auction yield on the six-month paper almost doubled compared to a month earlier, capping a week in which a German bond auction came close to failing and the leaders of Germany, France and Italy failed to make progress on crisis resolution measures.
Well, OK, OK, they managed to sell them so there were buyers: but with bonds, the fewer buyers there are the higher the interest rate you’ve got to offer to attract them. That’s what is happening here.
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Posted: 25th, November 2011 | In: Money | Comments (2)
That One About Politicians and Their Lips Moving Again: Chris Huhne’s Green Shirts
TODAY’S edition of politicians are not like you and me comes from Chris Huhne:
Households currently pay £89 a year on their bills for the green energy drive, but this will increase every year to reach £280 by 2020, according to the Government’s Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC).
The ‘taxes’ will provide almost £8billion a year towards the £200billion cost of vast wind farms, nuclear power stations, a new pylon network, and to put up solar panels.
But in a bizarre statement, energy and climate change secretary Chris Huhne told the House of Commons that his policies mean consumers will actually be better off.
He said: ‘By 2020, we expect household bills to be 7 per cent – or £94 – lower than they would otherwise be without our policies.
‘Britain’s homes will be cheaper to heat and light than if we did nothing.’
The big lie here is that he’s talking, with certainty, about what prices are going to be in 9 years’ time. This simply is not possible, it’s a gross effrontery for anyone, politician or not, to stand up and try us anything in that level of detail for that far in the future.
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Nurse! The Greenies Need Their Pills Again!
THERE really are some loons out there in the environmental movement. I think we all share the aim, a cleaner, greener, better world for us and our children? Good, yes, I thought so. What worries though is that the actual methods proposed, how we get from here to there, are all too often entirely insane. Take this for example:
Shale gas exploration also supports fewer jobs than renewable energy generation – hundreds of thousands of jobs could be created in offshore wind, solar power and other green energy, but drilling shale gas wells requires minimal manpower.
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Posted: 23rd, November 2011 | In: Money | Comment (1)
Some of Our Money The Politicians Aren’t Going To Get: The Party Funding Game
ALL most amusing over the financing of political parties.
Here were the basic positions going into the whole let’s talk about reforming it process.
Tories: we get lots of money from rich donors in great big wads. So we don’t want to stop that, not unless Labour also stops getting great big wads of money from the unions.
Labour: we get lots of money from unions in great big wads. So we don’t want to stop that, not unless the Tories also stop getting great big wads of money from rich donors.
Lib Dems: we don’t get rich donors or union support so instead we should be given taxpayer money. You know, a few quid for everyone who voted or us.
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Dear God the Tories Can Be Stupid Sometimes: Cameron Wants A UK Fannie Mae And Freddie Mac
THE latest brainfart from David Cameroan and Number 10: the government’s housing strategy, to be launched on Monday, will also include:
• A new scheme, running to hundreds of millions of pounds, to underwrite a small percentage of mortgages for “new-build” homes. The scheme is designed to reduce the size of a deposit, particularly for first-time buyers, by shifting the “loan-to-value” ratio. Banks are currently demanding deposits of up to 20% of the value of a property from first-time buyers.
If the housing market suffered a severe downturn, the taxpayer could ultimately be responsible for a part of the loss under the scheme. But homebuyers would first lose their deposits and the loss to the taxpayer would be shared with the bank.
This has been tried before. By the Americans: remember them? The people who had the most enormous, gigantic, housing bust just a couple of years back? The one that crippled all the banks? That’s the ones, sure you remember them.
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How the New Europe Really Works: Germany Calling The Shots
THIS is just a lovely little story telling us all how the New Europe, the much improved and extra special wonderful Europe, really works.
THE GOVERNMENT has complained to the European Commission over the release in Germany of a document disclosing confidential details about new taxes to be introduced in Ireland over the next two years.
In a deeply embarrassing development the document – identifying austerity measures of €3.8 billion in next month’s budget and €3.5 billion in budget 2013 – was made public after being shown to the finance committee of the German Bundestag yesterday.
The document, seen by The Irish Times , confirms the Government plans to raise VAT by 2 percentage points to 23 per cent, which would generate €670 million. Next month’s budget would also contain a €100 a year household charge, yielding €160 million, it says.
Doesn’t sound like all that much really, does it? Except this is the German Parliament reading the Irish budget. Well, OK, it still doesn’t sound like all that much really. Anyone can read anyone else’s budget can’t they? Most governments do actually print them and allow people to do so.
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Posted: 18th, November 2011 | In: Key Posts, Money | Comments (4)
Yes, It’s Getting Worse! How The National Debt Works To Make France Go Bust In 10 Years
THIS eurozone thing again: yup, it’s just getting worser and worser.
Spain and France faced sharply higher borrowing costs on Thursday, struggling with bond auctions that highlighted the threat of larger euro zone economies succumbing to the debt crisis that began in Greece and is now threatening Italy.
What you need to remember about all of this: when we say “higher borrowing costs” here we don’t mean that the country has to cough up more on all its debt…….ah, no, let’s start more simply.
When a government wants to spend more (read, give more goodies to people so they’ll get elected) money than it collects in taxes it issues a bond. This is an IOU saying that we’ll pay you back in 1 month, 10 years, 30 years, promise, and in the meantime we’ll give you some interest. That interest rate they have to pay to convince people to lend them the money is the borrowing cost or the yield.
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Just So You Know, Yes, The BMA Are Damned Liars: Smoking In Your Car Is Fine
AS Dizraeli pointed out there’s lies, damned lies and statistics. However, it is in fact possible to people to come out of the other side of statistics and start shouting damned lies at us: pretending they are statistics.
There is now strong evidence that smoking in vehicles exposes non-smokers to high levels of second hand smoke which is known to be damaging to heath, the BMA said.
Because of the small enclosed space inside a car, smoking creates 23 times more toxins than found in a smoky bar, it was claimed.
Now when I say that this is a damned lie I’m not talking about people playing with statistics or anything. I mean that it’s a flat out, untrue, known to be untrue, statement.
It’s also a damned lie that they’re waving around to try and ban anyone from smoking in their own cars.
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Posted: 16th, November 2011 | In: Key Posts, Money | Comment
What’s Really Wrong In The Eurozone: The ECB-Triggered Depression Looms
HOW we got here is something that we can all argue over. Workshy Greeks, idiot politicians, bankers’ greed, whatever, knock yourself out with your favourite explanation. However, where we are is easier to explain.
We’re just before a Depression. Yup, one just as bad as the one 80 years ago. And yup, for exactly the same reason.
No, that’s not workshy Greeks, bankers’ greed but it is idiot politicians and central bankers. What turned the 1929 Crash into the 30s Depression was the way that the money supply was allowed to contract. It just didn’t have to happen at all.
What’s happening now over in the eurozone?
Greek banks are insolvent, it’s true, if you mark their sovereign debt exposure to market. But to a first approximation, no other banks are. Mark French banks’ holdings of Italian sovereign debt down by say 10%, and they’re still fine; their capital drops, of course, as it would with any write-down, but certainly to nowhere near zero.
What is true is that Europe is in the middle of a textbook liquidity crisis. Banks are not lending to each other — and the ECB isn’t stepping in to solve the problem. This is a serious structural issue with the way that the European monetary system was constructed: the ECB is tasked only with guarding inflation, and not with ensuring the health of the banking system. Individual national central banks are meant to do that. But they can’t print money — only the ECB can. So when there’s a liquidity crisis, no one’s able to step in and solve it.
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Posted: 15th, November 2011 | In: Money | Comment (1)
Sign This Treaty or the Treaty Gets It: Merkel Makes Demands
I’M not really all that sure that our EuroMasters have quite got this idea of blackmail quite right yet:
Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, has warned Mr Cameron that unless he accepts unconditional changes to the Lisbon Treaty a split will take place, leaving Britain isolated and in a voting minority within the EU.
“She explicitly told Cameron that if there was no treaty change at the level of the 27 EU members then others will peel off, which is not what she wants,” a senior EU diplomat told The Daily Telegraph.
So let’s try and run through that one, shall we?
We have two options here. The first is that Britain signs up to anything that everyone else wants. No regard to national interests, what we might want to get out of it, just sign here and we’ll tell you what you’ve signed later.
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Does The SEC Let Warren Buffet Win In A Two-Tier Stock Market? We aRe The 99.99999999%
WARREN Buffet bought $10.7bn of IBM stock though his Berkshire Hathaway fund without making the markets notice. How?
The WSJ’s Deal Journal gets an idea:
Check out the footnote to Buffett’s latest disclosures of his investment holdings released by the SEC:
“Confidential information has been omitted from the Form 13F and filed separately with the Commission.”
In other words, Buffett got permission from the SEC to keep some of his stock holdings secret. This isn’t unusual for Buffett. Most big investors have to publicly reveal their stock investments every three months.
Problem is, when other investors get wind that Buffett is buying a stock, the price tends to zoom up — meaning the price goes up for Buffett to buy more. So Buffett periodically asks the SEC to keep some of his stockholdings a secret.
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