Gordon Brown rules out Olympic boycott

... because the Dalai Lama is against it.

What a loser! The Dalai Lama has a gun to the head of his people. Brown is under no such threat but is keen to appease the authoritarian Chinese. Well I have no such scruples, and I can confirm right now that I will not allow myself to be considered for selection for this year's Olympics. I am sorry if anybody feels let down, but we have to make a stand.

From the FSA review of its own behaviour on Northern Rock

Summary for the proles here.

Para 31 id interesting: "Our understanding is that, during the review period, the FSA’s approach to liquidity reflected a presumption that, in the event of a crisis like that experienced in August 2007, general market liquidity provided by the Bank of England would be increased and, in extremis, liquidity would be provided for systemically important institutions."

It seems that the FSA assumed that liquidity risk was not a risk because the Bank of England would step in and provide liquidity. It was a shame that nobody told the Bank of England. perhaps the Prime Minister should have told them when he split the responsiblity for bank supervision. Then again, perhaps the FSA should have asked the Bank of England what they would do, before they made any assumptions.

Watchdog admits failure

.. but would like to keep his job, if its al the same to you.

OK It was a bit of a story

Look how quickly they handled that. One weekend and it is gone, probelm solved, bad assets find a new owner, and as for the staff and directors - who knows? The good ones will keep their jobs, the bad ones will find their own level. Free markets are great.

Look and learn, Mr Brown.

Bear Sterns looking exposed

Allegedly. Reproduced here because its a great headline, even if it isn't much of a story.

National Rock

'Nuff said.. it just gets worse.

A taxing problem: should the rich pay for cheese?

New Labour certainly keep their promises. Before they were elected, they promised to reform the loophole that enables the super-rich to avoid paying tax, by claiming "non-domicile tax status". And now, 11 years later, they're still promising to do it.
This ruse involves living in Britain while not being an official resident, and is one of the main ways in which the richest 54 billionaires in the country have paid on average 1 and a half per cent tax. Now the Government has said they can carry on doing that, except that after seven years they'll have to pay £30,000 a year to keep claiming this status. So now there's a campaign to stop this. For example, The Times tells us these talented types will leave the country, taking their "ingenuity and enterprising energy."
Because presumably someone like Roman Abramovich will say, "Now instead of a billion pounds I'm only going to take home £999,999,970. Well it's hardly worth the bother, I'm going back to Russia." Maybe some billionaires won't notice the full scale of the attack until they receive their first wage packet after the law starts. They'll open the envelope on a Friday afternoon and squeal, "Oh no – there's hardly anything left."
Then Mrs. Abramovich will scream: "How am I going to manage with 30 grand missing? I was going to buy a leopard in the morning, now I'll have to wait until Tuesday. I can't go on struggling like this."
You can defend any amount of greed or barbarity on these grounds. You could have said, "The proposals to restrict Roman emperors from selecting slaves at random to be subjected to sexual depravity for their amusement, will force these talented tyrants to leave Rome, taking their ingenuity and fiddling skills to Persia." Maybe we should make armed robbery legal, so that armed robbers are attracted to the country, where they'll provide a crucial boost to the stocking industry.
The genius of this argument is it says that to let the richest people in the country not pay tax is good for the economy. In effect it's saying the less we take from them, the richer we are. If these people who defend this approach got a job as a salesman they'd boast, "Today was fantastic. I sold a two-year-old Mercedes for a pound, a four-bedroom detached house for nothing and an original Rembrandt as a swap with a dishcloth. The trick is not to ask them to pay anything as that ensures they come back."
Our tax laws have become so soft that last year the International Monetary Fund put us in the same category as Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. Along with Ireland, we're the only country that allows the wealthy to live here and pay no tax through this system, and apparently we should be proud of this. So we're bragging, "We're so soft they come to rob us. Isn't that wonderful? They don't rob France or Italy, just us. But we mustn't upset them or they might go somewhere else and rob them instead."
So maybe we should go further in enticing the world's rich, and let them off VAT as well. And think how many would come if they didn't have to pay for car tax or a TV license. And we could bring in a rule that if you earn over a million pounds a year you don't have to pay for cheese.
The other argument always used to defend low tax rates for the rich is that stricter rates would somehow hit the poor, as in the sort of articles about inheritance tax that say the worst victims are somehow fishermen in the Orkneys who live in a canoe. And they're trying that with the non-domicile status rule, so there was a letter in the Daily Telegraph from a woman lamenting that although she's not at all rich, the change would force her to leave the country.
And you expect it to continue, "I claimed non-domicile status after arriving here from Cyprus, simply in order to fulfil my late husband's wishes of providing a palace full of billiard tables for his beloved poodles. If this vindictive law is passed, I'm afraid I will have no choice but to fire the little treasures off into space."
It wouldn't be so bad if the people opposed to the proposed change were honest, and said, "I feel very strongly that this is a counter-productive measure because I want to keep all my money, even though I've got more than I could ever spend because I want it and I don't care about your health service because I own my own intensive care unit so that money's mine."
Which is why non-domicile tax status is one of those modern phrases, like the names given to various disorders ascribed to unruly kids, that makes you think "Oh that's what they call it now is it? Why can't they stick with its simple old-fashioned name, of being a selfish, greedy bastard?"

Small adjustment to the balance sheet

According to the Times the government is adding £75 billion of Northern Rock exposure to the National Debt.

That is approximately 21 Kerviels (the new international standard for unexpected losses which has supplanted the Leeson).

And in other news, it looks as though SocGen will have to pay tax on Kerviel's 2007 profits, according to Forbes.

Government Picks Up £2bn Metronet Bill

The Government will have to cover a £1.7bn bill to cover the loans made to the failed Tube maintenance operator Metronet. Metronet collapsed last summer and was placed into administration leaving its five shareholders with a total of £350 million in losses.
Under the terms of the deal, the Government effectively provided a guarantee against 95% of Metronet’s lending. The terms of the guarantee are enforceable six months after any administration order is made and it was exercised on Tuesday of this week.
Finance for the scheme was provided by RBS, European Investment Bank. Ambac and FSA were among the bondholders for the scheme.
The Government has also set aside £300 million to cover the cost of the administration with Ernst and Young estimating costs to March 31st at £180 million.

So what happened to "risk transfer to the private sector"? And how did the Government get away with recording their guarantee as an off-balance sheet liability? A liability that wasn't there suddenly turns into a £1.7 guarantee, with the government then undertaking to fund the administration costs - currently £180 million.

There is a precedent. It was called Enron. Jeff Skilling is serving at least 20 years in prison, Ken Lay faced 45 years but died before sentancing.

What happens in the UK? SFA.

The battle for Northern Rock is a two horse race

According to the BBC. Trouble is one comes from a dodgy horse dealer, and the other one has got no oats.

FSA failed over Northern Rock

In other news, Pope is a Catholic. More here.

So how much is Gordon borrowing?

These are the figures for new issues from the Debt Management office in £'millions. Figure £25 illion repayments and the net looks pretty bad. Add in a few tens of billions for PFI and £55 billion of contingent liabilities for Morthern Rock, and the country is pretty much bust.

1998	5,945
1999	9,800
2000	6,000
2001	8,975
2002	18,300
2003	47,150
2004	44,500
2005	44,775
2006	61,025
2007	62,075

Boom or bust?

Since Labour has been in power, the FTSE has risen from 4445 to (at one point yesterday) 5390, that is 21.26% growth in 10.7 years, or an average of 1.8% per annum.

Do they really think we are that stupid?

My unerring sense of financial impropriety was triggered when I read the story here in the FT and the story here in the Telegraph.

The Telegraph article says that the Treasury will get a repayment of £25 billion, but in return the Treasury will have to give a guarantee in favour of an SPV to support a bond issue for ... £25 billion. And they think that is good value for tax payers? At best it replaces one amount at risk with the same amount in a different form. In practice the government, or tax payer, is probably worse off, because rather than being repaid as soon as the credit markets allowed Northern Rock to resume borrowing, now the government will be on the hook until the bonds are repaid.

Worse than that, it looks as from the rather garbled DT report, that the government's security will be limited to the mortgage assets in the SPV rather than the entirety of the assets of Northern Rock. Presumably any purchaser of Northern Rock will get the company without any obligation to counter-indemnify the government for losses on the SPV.

But doesn't this look a little like state aid? Read this EU press release, which says that any loans or guarantees can only be given for a period of six months. How do the government think they will get round that? To avoid giving long term state aid to the bank, their "solution" must be to separate the SPV from the "bad" bank. That would seem to confirm the assumptions above about limiting recourse to the rest of NR's assets.

It also looks as though they have been consulting heavily with their accounting/ reporting/ advisers on a suitable presentation to pull the wool over the EU's eyes. No doubt the financial advisers will be heavily rewarded, and the government will announce that there is no support to Northern Rock, and the support to the SPV isw off balance sheet because .... they say it is. The track record of the government in taking assets of the balance sheet has been unexemplary, so why stop now?

So the government proposes to blackmail the current shareholders into virtually giving away their shares to Branson or Olivant, one of whom will walk away with the free lunch of a derisked portfolio and a gurantee for their depositors, while the government will be taking the risk on £25 billion of mortgages.

Financial numbskull gets job at top bank

The problem with http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/politics/threelinewhip/jan08/blairfinancialdoofus.htm this story is that banks require a certain amount of accountability and this man has none.  

For the last 25 years he has pretended to be a socialist, then he triples his salary by turning up at a Wall Street bank.

It could be hasta la vista for Brown as judgement day approaches

To see the whole article, please go to:
http://www.thebusiness.co.uk/the-magazine/columns/397216/it-could-be-hasta-la-vista-for-brown-as-judgement-day-approaches.thtml

HERE is my festive advice to anybody who wants to understand how the credit crunch will affect Gordon Brown next year: as soon as you can catch a break from playing secret santa, run out to the video store and grab a DVD of Terminator III.
Besides the thoroughly enjoyable pyrotechnics and action scenes, the film, the last starring Arnold Schwarzenegger before he became governor of California, has a simple, typically religious message: judgment day is inevitable.
For years, Brown piled on higher taxes and red tape, gradually eroded Britain’s competitiveness and presided over an increasingly unhealthy and unbalanced economy. For almost as long, few noticed and even fewer cared. But 2008 will be the year in which Brown is finally faced with the consequences of his actions: the public, long anaesthetised by the house price and credit boom, is finally coming to its senses now that the good days are ending.
Brown’s record has long had much to be desired. All the main English-speaking economies have grown faster than Britain since 1997, including America, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia and Canada. Others that have expanded at a better rate than Britain include Luxembourg, Greece, Iceland, Spain and Finland – as well, of course, as all the emerging economic giants, led by China and India.
Britain’s productivity growth has slowed; the trade deficit has exploded, with the current account only kept afloat by dividend and interest payments from overseas; the Exchequer has accumulated vast debts, mostly off balance sheet, at a time when it should have been enjoying a surplus, and faces an explosion in the budget deficit to up to £50bn ($102bn, E69bn) in 2008-09; entrepreneurship and business creation rates lag those of many other countries; savings have collapsed; the markets expect inflation to be a percentage point higher than any other G7 country; and Britain is facing a long-term pensions crisis.
The list of woes goes on and on. Even Britain’s supposedly robust job-creation record is misleading: of the 2.7m or so jobs created over the past decade, up to 1.5m have gone to immigrants and between 700,000 and 1m are public sector jobs, depending on definitions (though the two categories overlap). Few new jobs have been created in the private sector for British-born workers, which helps to explain why the number of adults on out-of-work benefits – the most accurate measure of unemployment – has only fallen from 5.7m to 5.2m.
So why did so few people understand how unimpressive Britain’s economic performance has been, at least until the past few weeks, when his ratings started to plunge in opinion polls?
Surging house prices, cheap and easy mortgages and the credit-based retail boom served as a powerful opiate; as long as their wealth and spending keep on rising, voters can be remarkably forgiving.
At the same time, an inflow of foreign money and unprecedented levels of immigration helped to camouflage the long-term wounds inflicted by Brown’s misguided policies. Without these factors, the economy would have performed appallingly; but most important of all, they made an average economic performance feel like a great one.
There is another reason why so many failed to see just how poor Brown’s stewardship of the economy has really been. The establishment – in business, the media, culture and politics – is almost entirely based in London and its surroundings. Our great city’s astonishing prosperity, its emergence as a preeminent global centre for finance, sky-high wages, cultural vibrancy and cosmopolitanism all combined to convince the commentariat that Britain must be doing better than anyone else.
The reality is that London’s performance has indeed been outstanding: had its rate of growth been that of the UK as a whole, Britain could fairly have been deemed to have undergone an economic miracle. But for the most part, London’s success had nothing to do with Brown; in fact, on balance, he has hindered rather than helped its performance. The use of the City as a milch cow to fund a massive UK-wide increase in state spending – on top of appalling schools, massive crime and welfare problems, and crumbling infrastructure – have all meant that London has performed well below its potential.
While the economy could just about cope with Brown’s tax and spend policies and obsession with regulating all that moves when it was being lifted by a global financial tide, the damage caused will become unbearable next year. April’s hike in capital gains tax and corporation tax for small companies, as well as the crackdown on non-domiciled wealthy foreigners, come at the worst possible time.
Like in Schwarzenegger’s film, it will prove impossible for Brown to put off judgment day forever. The credit crunch, the crisis in the City and the ending of the house price boom mean that the public is now starting to look at Brown’s record in a very different way. Citi estimates 1.7m households will face large increases (worth more than one percentage point) in their mortgage rates in 2008, as previous fixed rate mortgages expire and discount periods on variable rate loans end. With a reduced supply of mortgage credit, spreads between fixed mortgage rates and swap rates have spiked in recent months and are likely to stay wide. As a result, lower Bank rates are unlikely to produce much, if any, near term drop in fixed mortgage rates.
Brown is not to blame for the credit crunch or the cyclical element of the current slowdown; but the hit to their finances and declining house prices mean voters will look at his overall performance in a far more dispassionate light in 2008. Unfortunately for the Prime Minister, there will be no Arnold Schwarzenegger to rescue him from their wrath.

Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year

Merry Christmas & A Happy New Year This card is made from 100% recycled pixels. No trees have been felled in its manufacture or delivery.

NEWBORN BABY FOUND IN STABLE

WOODWORKER FROM NAZARETH AND UNDER-AGE MOTHER ARRESTED

BETHLEHEM, JUDEA -In the early morning hours, the Social Services Hotline received a call from a worried neighbour who had discovered a young family living in a stable. On their arrival, the Social Services Emergency team, together with police officers, found a new-born baby, clothed only in strips of cotton and lying in a feeding trough, and its 14 year old mother, Mary D. from Nazareth.

During the arrest of the mother and infant, a man, later named as Joseph D., also from Nazareth, attempted to hold the Social Service staff back. Joseph, helped by local shepherds and three still unidentified immigrants, tried to keep the girl and her infant from being taken away, but were removed by the police.

The police also arrested the three immigrants, who described themselves as "wise men" from a Eastern country. The Home Office and Customs & Excise have asked the public for any information about the origins of the three men, whose immigration status is unclear.

A police spokesman said that the men carried no form of identification, but had gold with them, and certain other high value substances. They also resisted arrest and claimed that God had told them to return home immediately and avoid all contact with officials from any governmental departments. The substances have been sent for further inspection.

The present location of the infant has not been made public. A Social Services spokeswoman informed a press conference, "The father is middle-aged and the mother is under age. We are currently in contact with Nazareth Council Offices to find out what the relationship is between the two of them."

Mary is in Bethlehem Regional Hospital under medical and psychiatric observation. She will be charged with neglect. Her condition will be of great interest to psychiatrists in view of the fact that she claims to still be a virgin intacta and that the infant was from God.

In an official statement the Head of the Psychiatric Department said, "It isn't my job to tell people what to believe, but when their belief leads to the endangerment of a new-born child, as in this case, then such people must be viewed as dangerous. And the fact that drugs were found makes the situation even worse."

On questioning, the shepherds found in the stable said they had been instructed to go there by a tall man dressed in a white nightshirt and with wings on his back. A speaker for the Drug Squad said, "That is probably the most idiotic thing that I've ever heard but we get a lot of this at this time of year."

Grim data undermine Brown's claims

From the Times

Official figures are showing a very different economic picture from the one painted by the Prime Minister and the Chancellor
Gary Duncan, Economics Editor

Claims by Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling this week that the economy is fundamentally sound and well placed to ride out worsening world conditions were badly undermined yesterday by a spate of bleak official figures.
City economists lined up to sound warnings that the latest grim economic news suggested that Britain's economy is badly exposed to a global downturn and “dangerously unbalanced”.
In a double blow to an increasingly embattled Chancellor, the slew of worrying data showed the Government's finances in the red to a record extent last month, and the country as a whole living far beyond its means, with another record-breaking deficit on the balance of payments.
“The latest flurry of UK data painted a distinctly ugly picture of a dangerously unbalanced economy, supporting our view that the coming slowdown will be a prolonged and potentially painful period of adjustment,” said Jonathan Loynes, of Capital Economics.
The biggest shock in yesterday's figures came as balance of payments data showed that the current account — the broadest measure of the country's international financial position — was in deficit by a huge £20 billion in the third quarter (Q3), the highest figure since records began in 1955.
The vast total marked a ballooning of the deficit from £13.7 billion in the previous quarter, and saw it swell to a massive 5.7 per cent of national income.
As a proportion of GDP, this left Britain's balance of payments as deep in the red as that of the United States.
The percentage deficit matched records set in the 1980s boom.
Earlier quarters' current account deficits were also revised up, with the overall total for 2006 now put at 3.9 per cent of GDP, against previous estimates of a more modest 2.5 per cent.
The pound's overall value on its trade-weighted index tumbled to its lowest level for a year and a half, and shed more than two cents against the dollar, as economists said that the situation looked unsustainable and left Britain exposed to a difficult rebalancing of the economy.
Analysts cautioned that a further slide in the pound, fuelling inflationary pressures, could hinder the Bank of England's ability to fend off a downturn with aggressive cuts in interest rates.
The severe deterioration in the balance of payments was driven by a combination of a record £22.6 billion trade deficit in Q3, with an abrupt shift in Britain's investment income from abroad. In the past, Britain has raked in far more on income from its direct investments in companies and projects abroad than it has paid out to foreigners investing in the UK, but the position has now worsened markedly.
The nation's surplus on direct investment income in Q3 fell to £4.9 billion, from £7.5 billion in Q2, while £23 billion was wiped off a revised surplus for the past 18 months.
Economists pinned the blame on a boom in foreign direct investment and takeovers in the UK, meaning the country must pay out more overseas on income on the assets that have been bought up.
In a further headache for the Chancellor, yesterday's poor data on the public finances sparked renewed warnings that government borrowing could surge well above £40 billion for the present financial year, against a £38 billion Treasury forecast, and reach annual totals as high as £50 billion in future years.
November saw monthly public borrowing in the red by a record £11.2 billion, compared with £9.2 billion in the same month last year, as government spending rose faster than implied by Treasury plans, and despite strong tax revenues.
For the eight months of the financial year so far, borrowing has reached £36.2 billion, up from £26 billion in the same period last year, and also a record.
Economists said Mr Darling could be forced to impose tougher curbs on spending if the credit crisis hits tax revenues from City institutions.
“The Chancellor is likely to be playing Scrooge for some years in order to get this uncomfortably high budget deficit back under control,” John Hawksworth, of PricewaterhouseCoopers, said.
Other GDP figures yesterday showed that while GDP growth remained strong in Q3, at an upgraded 3.3 per cent annual pace, this was driven by resilient consumer spending that seemed to come at the expense of households dipping into savings.
The savings ratio, a key gauge of what people are putting aside from pay, fell from 4 per cent to 3.4 per cent in the quarter.

stanislav,a young Polish plumber said...

A Christmas thought from abroad.


A film is released shortly, I am Legend. Stanislav won’t see it; avoids special effects, Hollywood homo-erotic shit like the fucking plague. The original book, however, written in the late fifties/early sixties, by Richard Mathieson, who went on to write a lot of Star Trek, was a great vampire romp, a lifetime before the delectably violent Buffy -and that prat off the Gold Blend advert - tickled the fancy of a global, literary, Goth-fancying audience.

In the original, the hero, the world’s last surviving non-vampire, Robert Neville, is taunted nightly by blood-guzzlers outside his fortified home, anxious to dine on him, calling Come Out Neville, Come Out Neville.

Our country will continue to fester until those in positions of influence take up the cry Come Out Gordon, Come Out Gordon. Matthew Parris, for instance, in yesterday’s Murdoch-Times comes, eventually, to the conclusion, long arrived at by plumbers, that the prime minister of the UK is profoundly mentally ill, but stops short of pointing out, as he should, the problems of a closet gay fearful of being outed by colleagues and what that means for the proper conduct of his duties. Brown’s position means that we are misgoverned by a knowing privy council of Brownite co-conspirators, organised crime families, like the dismal, lacklustre Alexanders and Ballses, in on what is really an open secret.

And everything's fucked. The schools are fucked, the hospitals are fucked, the army's fucked the navy's fucked, the airforce is fucked, the farms are fucked, the jails are fucked, the banks are fucked, the BBC is fucked, the roads are fucked; morality and decency and civility are fucked; patriotism is fucked, freedom is fucked. And at the top of this mountain of fuckery sits a great, gibbering nancy, stuttering about his fucking vaah-lewes, pretending to be a heterosexual.

We are misinformed by toadying, cowardly, lazy ponces, like the revolting Maguire and White; the smirking, up his own arse Jock Neill, the hustling Marrs and Warks and the ever so fretful people’s tribune, Paxman, who, memorably, slithered around, as fast as his scales would carry him, to apologise to the repellent Mandelson for Parris having stated the obvious about him.

Homosexuality isn't noncing and shouldn’t matter, and probably, to the majority, doesn’t. Dishonesty, though, and spin and fraudulence and masquerade and secrecy and loathsome, spurious, hypocritical, filial piety, however, are their own relentless torture; and Brown, and through him the whole country, are on the rack. Matthew should have formally outed Gordon, as he did Mandelson. Half-truths butter no parsnips. Brown is mad, why is he mad, Matthew ?

it is arguable that Brown's sexuality is of no concern to the world at large and few would condemn him for it. It is the towering, impudent falseness of the man which so rankles and which is quite clearly tearing him apart. His whole existence is a confection; HE defeated the would-be car bombers, HE defeated the floods, HE defeated the foot and mouth outbreak although none of these events were anything to do with him; on the other hand, as chancellor for ten years HE is not responsible for any financial catastrophe which flows from his decisions, HE didn't know, HE wasn't told. As chancellor and effectively domestic prime minister, HE, imprudently, did not give a thought to where millions of pounds of Labour money was coming from, as though his mad father sent it down from Heaven. Brown, at an age when most are grandfathers, suddenly decides, as the premiership looms, to wed and become a normal young parent. This aberrant, contradictory behaviour is deeply offensive to an observer; God knows the impact it has on Jihad-busting, floods-beating, cattle plague-curing, all around Superman Brown, sitting behind his curtains, gnashing at his fingernails.

A recent plumber’s comment was that if Brown had any real friends they would have him sectioned under the mental health act; poor stuttering, twitching, paranoid, droning, nail-biting, snot-eating, cowardly, bullying, delusional Gordon, though, swims friendless, in toxic, muddy waters. Like Hitler, in the bunker, none of his gutless generals, all anxious, still, for advancement even amid the ruins, has the courage to tell Gordon the truth - that he should have come out on John Smith’s death and trusted the people; instead, darker, viler creatures like Mandelson and Campbell and Blair and Kinnock, all now filthy rich, played him for a fool, granting him his Clever-Boyhood dream only as it turned nightmare and they were glad to be shot of it. Let him as he is doing, take the blame, all of it. Must the country be utterly ruined by this man’s fitful delusions, by his ghastly, sermonising father’s Presbyterian voice in his head, by his infantile foot-stamping, his insistence that black is white, day is night; Gordon says it, so it must be so ?

Shifty war criminals like Straw, tacky necromancers like Balls and Alexander; braying, flatulent nincompoops like Benn and Harman, dodgy chancers like Alan Dirty Hospitals Johnson, floundering clowns like Milliband and Darling and egregious, cack-handed spluttering imbeciles like Jowell, Purnell, Blears and Cooper and the utterly obnoxious and useless spiv, Hain, care only for their own grubby survival and not a fig for the country. Honourable members like these will have, before all else, ensured their own financial futures whilst wrecking ours and will cling on, discredited, in power, regardless of the harm they do; they will stick, unpleasantly, malodorously, like shit to a blanket.

Matthew Parris pleads winningly that he really does, hand on heart, believe the prime minister of the United Kingdom to be mad; yet offers only symptoms, no diagnosis, no remedy, no, shall we say, straight talking.

What ails Gordon Brown and paralyses him requires that straight talking and not Emperor's New Clothes collusion; the poor man has none around to tell him. The people, then, in kindly, non-judgmental voice, should take up the cry: Come Out Gordon, in the name of God, before you beggar us all and destroy yourself, Come Out Gordon, Come Out Gordon, Come Out Gordon............

 

Her word in court against Santa's

She doesn’t have a chance:

http://www.newstimes.com/latestnews/ci_7749222

Move over Mervyn

The Government is sidelining the Bank of England by asking Goldman Sachs to find a solution to the Northern Rock problem.  What is the Bank of England for, and why does the tax payer have pay salaries to Bank of England and fees to Goldman Sachs?

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/dec/17/northernrock.banking

England appoint a foreign manager

Perhaps they will see sense and get an experienced foreign manager to run the country.

Divorce is costing the Earth

From the New Scientist:

COULD a rising tide of divorce be helping to kill the planet? It looks that way from a 12-country analysis of the environmental impact of broken marriage.

When couples split, they and their families move into separate properties, so collectively occupy more space, burn more energy and consume more water than they did as a family unit. "Divorced households are smaller than married households but consume more land, water and energy per person than married households," says Jianguo Liu of Michigan State University, East Lansing.

In the US, for example, 2.37 trillion litres of water, 38 million rooms and 734 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity would have been saved in 2005 alone if no one had got divorced. Divorced households spent 46 per cent more on electricity and 56 per cent more water per person than if they'd stayed married. Following a split, US households consumed 42 to 61 per cent more resources per person than while married.

The problem is likely to get worse, Liu warns. Between 1970 and 2000, the proportion of US households headed by divorcees soared from 5 to 15 per cent. Divorces are also steadily increasing in China (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0707267104).

Some choice quotes from PMQ's

“We can do it because we run a successful economy; it is not the failed economy that we inherited from the Conservatives.” – Gordon Brown, Prime Minister in Cloud Cuckoo Land, 5 December 2007

 

“ The hon. Gentleman should make up his mind whether he wants Northern Rock to be rescued or not. The important thing, for the stability of the economy, the security of mortgage holders and the company’s shareholders, is that it be rescued.“ – Gordon Brown, not giving a damn about the interests of tax payers, 5 December 2007

 

Iran not the nuclear threat that we thought

... says the US government. Poor old Gordon Brown. Nothing seems to go right for him. Just when he needed a good war to boost his poll ratings.

57% think Gordon Brown is tainted by sleaze

Only 57? What about the rest?

Bouncier than a rubber ball

"I am announcing today that I will be standing down as HMRC chairman as a result of a substantial operational failure in the department. The chancellor will be making a statement to parliament later today." Paul Gray, Nov 20th 2007.

Mr Gray is now working in the Cabinet Office on "Civil Service Skills"

The pips are beginning to squeak

Morgan Stanley's take on the British economy, as reported by HM Telegraph is here.

The US bank said that the British Government squandered the chance to discipline public spending during the fat years and had allowed excesses to proliferate "across the system".

The UK budget deficit is now near 3pc at the top of the cycle (one of the worst in the OECD club), while household spending has reached 97pc of disposable income - matching the level last seen at the peak of the 1988 credit boom.

"As our Prime Minister has been so fond of telling us, the UK economy has enjoyed a record 15 years of economic growth," said the report. "However, instead of using this golden period to bolster savings and prepare for leaner times ahead, the public sector is in deficit."

Morgan Stanley concluded that both Mr Brown and British households had bet that the economic cycle would never turn against them, a bet they are likely to lose.....