Money Category
Money in the news and how you are going to pay and pay and pay
More Banking Regulation Will Lead To Bigger Banks
MORE banking regulation will lead to bigger banks. There’s a certain, umm, tension, shall we say, between the various things that people are calling for over the banks.
On the one side everyone seems to agree that we’ve got too few really large banks. We should instead have a lot more but smaller banks so that they’re not too big to fail. Smaller banks, one goes bust, well, shareholders lose their money and the rest of us carry on. If we’ve only a few very large banks then one goes down and the entire financial system collapses into a pile of smoking rubble.
So, more but smaller banks please.
Can’t see anything wrong with that myself.
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Halifax Bank Offers New F*ck Account To Its Idiot Customers
HALIFAX bank would like customer Steve Smith to “fuck off”.“I couldn’t believe the bank has no system for picking up such profanity.”
Posted: 20th, October 2011 | In: Money | Comment (1)
Saving the Euro Could Bankrupt France
THIS saving the euro thing is decidedly difficult you know. The latest news is that if France does what might be necessary to save it, then France itself might go bust.
The U.S. ratings agency said late on Monday it may slap a negative outlook on France’s Aaa rating in the next three months if the costs for helping bail out banks and other euro zone members stretch its budget too much.
The warning, which sent the risk premium on French government bonds shooting up to a euro lifetime high, came as European Union leaders are preparing measures to protect the region’s financial system from a potential Greek debt default.
So here’s what the problem is. So Greece defaults, lots of banks lose money. Boo Hoo. But then maybe Ireland, Portugal will default? Still just Boo Hoo really. But, and here’s the biggie, this then puts pressure on Spain and Italy and if they default then the entire banking system goes down in flames.
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Actress Sues IMDB For Revealing Her Real Age
TO Seattle, where a law suit has been filed against Amazon, owners of the IMDB website, for $1,075,000. The plaintiff is an actress: The alleged crime: the website revealed her true age.
IMDB is owned by Amazon. The complaints runs:
The actress, who uses an Americanized stage name to avoid the “cultural disadvantage” of her real Asian name, says that the credit-card interception is the only way the company could have learned her real age. She says IMDb refuses to remove her birth date from her profile and that she has since lost work because “lesser-known 40-year-old actresses are not in demand in the movie business.”
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Small Frakking Earthquake in Blackpool: Nobody Hurt Looking For Shale Gas
WE’VE a report out today about those two earthquakes that happened in Lancashire a few months back. Seems they really could be linked with that drilling for shale gas around Blackpool:
CONTROVERSIAL gas drilling DID cause Fylde coast earthquakes.
And now energy chiefs have sent a stark warning to shale gas company Cuadrilla Resources – stop the tremors or we will shut you down.
It comes as the company this week held urgent talks with the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) to consider a report into the risk of earthquakes associated with fracking – the process used to extract shale gas from deep beneath the Fylde coast.
The meetings followed the British Geological Survey’s (BGS) conclusion two recent earth tremors felt nearby were most likely to have been caused by fracking.
At which point we’ve an interesting choice to make. There’s lots of gas down there. Lots ‘n’lots of it, enough to power the country for decades. Power the country far more cheaply than building yet more bloody windmills and trying to use solar power in a country famed for rain and cloud cover.
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700 Reasons Why The Pastor’s Wife Should Spit Sperm Into A Cold Glass Jar
SPERM. Just what do you do with it? Well a report by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the fertility watchdog, says there is lack of good quality sperm. In a bid to up the harvest, the £250 donors can claim in expenses for loss of earnings – you cannot be paid – may be increased to between £500 and £700. That is not too shabby.
The pastor’s wife may care to keep a chilled spittoon at the bedside:
Posted: 16th, October 2011 | In: Key Posts, Money | Comment (1)
How to Quit Your Job Like A Boss: Joey Quits And The What Cheer? Brigade
JOEY quits his job in New York, accompanied by the What Cheer? Brigade is from Providence, RI”
Google’s Tax Dodging Ways Explained
A REPORT out of the US about an investigation into Google’s tax dodging ways.
Google reported an effective tax rate of 18.8 percent in the second quarter, less than half the average combined U.S. and state statutory rate of 39.2 percent.
Something’s going on, obviously. What is actually going on is technically complex but can be, at the risk of losing a bit of detail, explained simply enough. There’s essentially two rules you need to understand.
1) An American company only pays the corporate income tax (what we call corporation tax) on profits it takes back into America. If an American company makes profits in, say, Ghana, the profits stay in Ghana or move anywhere in hte world other than the US, then the US doesn’t tax those profits.
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Yes, We Are Trying To Solve the Too Damn High Rents
SHELTER has a report out showing how rents are just too damn high.
In the majority of areas, typical rents from private landlords are over a third of the average take-home pay – the widely accepted measure of affordability.
From 1997 to 2007, rents increased at one and a half times the rate of incomes. Recent research by Shelter has also revealed that 38% of families with children who are renting privately have cut down on buying food to pay their rent.
OK, let’s accept their research as it is: what are we going to do about it?
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Boris Johnson To Privatise London’s Fire Services
BORIS Johnson wants to privatise London’s Fire Services. That’s the story according to Liberal Conspiracy at least, Boris is thinking of privatising the fire controls rooms in London and certainly some of his mukkers have muttered about privatising the whole shebang.
The Mayor of London Boris Johnson is planning to rush through the privatisation of the London Fire Brigade control centre.
It would be the start of privatisation within London’s fire services and open the door to further privatisation.
In 2008, Conservative London Assembly Member Brian Coleman, a key political ally of Boris, also refused to rule out privatising all of London’s fire services.
Coleman is now pushing plans to fully privatise the control centre by March 2012.
Sounds just absolutely appalling, doesn’t it? Letting private companies make money off saving lives, there ought to be a law against this sort of thing.
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Posted: 13th, October 2011 | In: Money | Comment (1)
Property Porn: Photos Of Bill Gates’ Holiday Home
WANT to know what Microsoft boss Bill Gates is getting for the $600,00 a month rent he’s lashing out for his eldest daughter’s home?
The Sun-Sentinel looks at the property in Wellington, Florida, where 15-year-old Jennifer Gates will be an agonist at the Winter Equestrian Festival.
Well, the 1997 home has: 4 acres; eight bedrooms; six bathrooms; 7,352 square feet of living space; a fountain with horse heads made of stone; a pool; lots of chairs and a wine cellar.
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Dave And Angela Dawes Win £102,203, 600.70: Chelsea Fan Might Yet Save Club
HATS off to unmarried lovers Dave and Angela Dawes from Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, who have won £101,203,600.70 on the EuroMillions lottery.
Dave, 47, and Angela Dawes, 43, plan to continue living in their £70-a-week one-bedroom flat; she will continue her volunteer work for the British Heart Foundation; he will continue to work 12-hour shifts as a forklift truck driver for Premier Foods; and she will keep the ring her engagement ring her and not buy a larger stone.
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Posted: 11th, October 2011 | In: Money | Comment (1)
There’s Blood In Your Mobile Phone, And Death
WE’VE another handwringing documentary coming to screens near us this month. Blood in Your Mobile is all about the appalling mining conditions in Congo
Umm, but hang on, haven’t we already had this? The stuff about coltan, the stuff that makes the tantalum which makes the capacitors in our phones? Why, yes, we have in fact already had this. And in fact there’s been a change in the law: makers of electronics, under the Frank Dodd rules, have to certify that their electronics, the 4 capacitors in them, didn’t come from minerals from conflict areas.
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If You Really Want Something to Worry About: China Needs A Recession
OK, so we’re not having much fun at the moment with the Euro, Greece, the eurozone and all that. The US isn’t having a great time of it either. However, they’re rather trivia as compared to what might be happening in China.
They’ve been having 10% 0r so growth for the past three decades: that’s 10% per year mind you. So the economy is about 17 times larger than it was when I were a lad at university: something of a change really.
However, there’s a general rule of thumb that a booming economy covers up a multitude of sins. Hey, so what you made a mistake? The growth is so fast that it’ll come right anyway. It’s only in recessions that you see, as Warren Buffett says “who’s been skinny dipping” rather than wearing trunks. When growth is high or the tide is in you can’t tell.
There’s also another set of economic theories, usually known as “Austrian” that says, roughly, that in every boom there are those swimming without their trunks. And you need to occasional recession to uncover them, get rid of them, purge them from the economy.
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Posted: 10th, October 2011 | In: Money | Comment (1)
Email Of The Day: The Chinese Translator
EMAIL of the Day reaches from Oliver Haiqing Hua, an “Economist, Business Consultant, Report Writer” who is offering his services as a translator:
I am a business consultant as well as avoluminous Chinese writer.
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Posted: 10th, October 2011 | In: Money | Comments (2)
Burying Steve Jobs: The Rotten Apple?
STEVE Jobs has died. After the hagiogrpahy, the pundits assess the legacy:
Mike Daisey in the New York Times:
The Steve Jobs who founded Apple as an anarchic company promoting the message of freedom, whose first projects with Stephen Wozniak were pirate boxes and computers with open schematics, would be taken aback by the future that Apple is forging. Today there is no tech company that looks more like the Big Brother from Apple’s iconic 1984 commercial than Apple itself, a testament to how quickly power can corrupt.
Rude, dismissive, hostile, spiteful: Apple employees—the ones not bound by confidentiality agreements—have had a different story to tell over the years about Jobs and the bullying, manipulation and fear that followed him around Apple. Jobs contributed to global problems, too. Apple’s success has been built literally on the backs of Chinese workers, many of them children and all of them enduring long shifts and the specter of brutal penalties for mistakes. And, for all his talk of enabling individual expression, Jobs imposed paranoid rules that centralized control of who could say what on his devices and in his company…
he internet allowed people around the world to express themselves more freely and more easily. With the App Store, Apple reversed that progress. The iPhone and iPad constitute the most popular platform for handheld computerizing in America, key venues for media and software. But to put anything on the devices, you need Apple’s permission. And the company wields its power aggressively.
In the name of protecting children from the evils of erotica — “freedom from porn” — and adults from one another, Jobs has banned from being installed on his devices gay art, gay travel guides,political cartoons, sexy pictures, Congressional candidate pamphlets, political caricature, Voguefashion spreads, systems invented by the opposition, and other things considered morally suspect.
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Posted: 7th, October 2011 | In: Money | Comments (2)
Stupid, Stupid, Stupid: Greece To Become Centre Of Europe’s Sun Belt
I’M not sure that I’ve actually seen anything quite this stupid for some time:
“Greece could become the showcase of solar development in Europe‘s ‘sun belt’ and that development could become the main driver of Greece’s green economic growth,” said Costas Karayiannis, chief executive of Greece’s only solar energy investment fund, Axeon Navitas. “Germany is the global leader in solar energy and it has a lot less sun than Greece. It makes a lot of sense for it to invest in this type of project here.”
Yes, we know that Greece is bust, yes, we know that the Greek Government has run out of money and yes, we also know that yer average Greek on the Corinth Omnibus hasn’t got any money either.
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Steve Jobs And The Options Grants
SO Steve Jobs is dead: long live Steve Jobs.
There are of course acres of newsprint devoted to him today but for me two little stories stand out.
It was only a couple of months ago that his biological father (Jobs was adopted) was revealed to still be working in a Nevada casino and that the two of them had never met or even talked on the phone as adults. I wonder if they did in these last couple of months?
The second is a minor financial story and given that this is the money column, an annoying little detail it’s worth correcting. It’s about backdated options grants. In his Telegraph obituary:
In 2001 he was granted stock options amounting to 7.5 million Apple shares, allegedly without the required authorisation from the company’s board of directors. Furthermore, the option came with an exercise price of $18.30.
But this price allegedly should have been $21.10, thereby incurring a taxable charge of $20 million that Jobs did not report as income.
There was a little spate of this going on in tech companies at the time and it became a minor scandal. However, it’s almost universally misunderstood.
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Dexia Is Northern Rock
THERE’S a Belgian/French bank out there called Dexia. No, I’d not heard of it until a couple of days ago either. The reason I have heard of it, the reason it’s in the papers, is because it seems to be going bust.
At times during Tuesday’s trading session in Brussels, Dexia shares changed hands for less than €1 and at the close were quoted at €1.008, marking a 22.5pc fall for the day and close to a 60pc drop since the beginning of the year.
The collapse in Dexia’s market value, which currently stands at €1.96bn (£1.68bn), came as François Baroin, France’s finance minister, and Didier Reynders, Belgium’s finance minister, issued a statement saying they would “take all necessary measures for the security of depositors and creditors” and would “guarantee financing raised by Dexia”.
There’s two problems here, the second making the first much worse. The first is that they’ve blown most of the money, the capital of the bank that is, on buying Greek etc government bonds which are now worth 50%, 30%, of what they first paid for them. So the bank is teetering around being bust, having exhausted or nearly so all of its capital reserves.
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Tube Drivers Deserve Their £50k: Blithering Bloody Nonsense
WE’RE told today that Tube drivers deserve their £50,000 a year pay packets because, well, because they deserve them:
But the drivers who take the millions of Londoners and visitors and tourists to their destinations every day are unsung heroes and heroines. They should be recognised as such in their pay packets, which the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union is still in the process of finalising, not least for having to deal with the lurking possibility of a “one under”. That’s what’s so special about those guys.
As the comments in The Guardian point out, you don’t in fact get £50k a year because people die in front of you: ask a few nurses, paramedics or Marines how much they get paid.
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Posted: 4th, October 2011 | In: Key Posts, Money | Comments (6)
The Wall Street Occupation: What Do They Actually Want?
THE usual band of hippies and crusties is trying to occupy Wall Street at the moment. I was wondering what they wanted, you know, is it the usual ban capitalism, Maaan, stuff?
Fortunately, the Guardian has a piece where they detail what it is that they are demanding:
Their message is very clear and simple: get money out of the political process; strive for equality in taxation and equal rights for all regardless of race, gender, social status, sexual preference or age. We must stop poisoning our food, air and water for corporate greed. The people on Wall Street and in the banking industrial complex that destroyed our economy must be investigated and brought to justice under the law for what they have done by stealing people’s homes and savings.
Jobs can and must be created. Family farms must be saved. The oil and gas industry must be divested of its political power and cheap, reliable alternative energy must be made available.
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Richard Desmond’s Health Lottery Drives Prudes Up Walls And Undermines His Editors
RICHARD Desmond’s Health Lottery is on the cover of Richard Desmond’s Daily Star and Daily Express. In both places the wonder is illustrated by a photo of a smiling Simon Cowell:
Cowell’s health lotto frenzy – He snaps up 5,000 tickets – Daily Star
Why I’m backing the New Health Lottery – Daily Express
The Express’s Giles Sheldrick is on message:
SIMON Cowell has a knack for spotting a winner and last night The X Factor creator backed The Health Lottery to transform the lives of millions of people across the country.
Says Cowell:
“I thought it was one of those great ideas that can make a real difference and to show my support I’ve bought 5,000 Health Lottery tickets. Raising £50million in the first year is going to help a huge amount of people and if my numbers come up I will put the money back into the charity.”
The Star’s Nigel Pauly is impressed:
Simon, whose TV talent shows have brought the world chart- toppers Leona Lewis, 26, Susan Boyle, 50, and JLS, is famous for his acid-tongued put-downs of hapless wannabes. But he had nothing but praise for Britain’s newest lottery game.
Five grand for all that publicity and halo polishing is not a shabby investment.
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Women Who Take Their Husband’s Name Earn Less
OF course, this may have something to do with the attitudes of women who take their husband’s name and those who do not. But the choice can affect your job prospects:
Even after controlling for education levels and work hours, a woman who took her husband’s name earns less — €960 compared to €1156.
A study showed:
Despite the fact that other than their name choice the women were identical, the participants overwhelmingly described the woman who had taken her husband’s name as being more caring, more dependent, less intelligent, more emotional and (somewhat) less competent. Not necessarily qualities you would seek in a potential employee.
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Guardian Reveals What It Will Costs You To Poach George Monbiot
WANT to know what George Monbiot earns? The Guardian oput the news on its front page. He published a “registry of interests“. Tim tells us that Monbiot earns £75,000 a year gross or thereabouts.
As opposed to a Toynbee which runs at £116,000 I’m told, or a Rusbridger which is £500,000 plus bonus and pension contributions.
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Posted: 1st, October 2011 | In: Money | Comment (1)
Why Hippy Communes Die Out: The Unequal Societies Just Kill Them Off
WHEN Hippy communities die out… Or rather why eaglitarian societies lose out to unequal ones. The basic problem is that equal societies, being equal, are reasonably happy. So they never go and do anything. Unequal societies have lots of pissed off people who then bugger off elsewhere, thus expanding that society and killing off the more equal ones.
That’s the explanation that these blokes are putting forward at least:
Agent-based simulation results show that in constant environments, unequal access to resources can be demographically destabilizing, resulting in the outward migration and spread of such societies even when population size is relatively small. In variable environments, stratified societies spread more and are also better able to survive resource shortages by sequestering mortality in the lower classes.
Oh and that second point as well: when there’s the hard times in an unequal society the poor die: in an equal one everyone gets weak and thus more likely to get wiped out by the next tribe over.
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