100's of women just dying to meet you

Amongst today's spam promising immediate gratification was the unsolicited communication below from a number of kind ladies from the former Soviet Union. Pausing only to note the obvious ehthusiasm young Svetlana (third row on the left) has to escape the current Russian heatwave, I have two tips:

• Sales of eye-liner and mascara seem to be very brisk in the Ukraine. Maybe worth investigating a franchise or sales agency for the region.
• If you are on the road in the Ukraine and thinking about stopping for the night in Nikolaev or Mariupol .... just keep driving.

Yana ID 1131429 Kherson, Ukraine age 21 5' 5'' 117 lbs Elena ID 1127271 Odessa, Ukraine age 20 5' 6'' 128 lbs Ekaterina ID 1126379 Kiev, Ukraine age 21 5' 6'' 115 lbs Natalia ID 1132475 Pervomajsk, Ukraine age 19 5' 4'' 99 lbs Julia ID 1132381 Odessa, Ukraine age 19 5' 7'' 123 lbs Ludmila ID 1127321 Odessa, Ukraine age 23 5' 7'' 108 lbs Svetlana ID 1127219 Lugansk, Ukraine age 31 5' 7'' 121 lbs Victoria ID 1133484 Nikolaev, Ukraine age 23 5' 5'' 104 lbs Elena ID 1132597 Odessa, Ukraine age 37 5' 9'' 110 lbs Valeria ID 1131748 Sevastopol, Ukraine age 20 5' 10'' 139 lbs Elena ID 1130988 Illichevsk, Ukraine age 25 5' 6'' 132 lbs Tatiana ID 1128350 Nikolaev, Ukraine age 19 5' 5'' 126 lbs Marina ID 1127989 Nikolaev, Ukraine age 24 5' 6'' 117 lbs Tatiana ID 1127915 Nikolaev, Ukraine age 23 5' 3'' 101 lbs Margarita ID 1127905 Nikolaev, Ukraine age 22 5' 5'' 106 lbs Ekaterina ID 1133136 Odessa, Ukraine age 26 5' 7'' 117 lbs Irina ID 1132630 Nikolaev, Ukraine age 24 5' 7'' 110 lbs Alena ID 1130954 Nikolaev, Ukraine age 30 5' 7'' 130 lbs Julia ID 1130609 Konstantinovka, Ukraine age 24 5' 5'' 132 lbs Tatiana ID 1130563 Kherson, Ukraine age 32 5' 9'' 132 lbs Julia ID 1127785 Odessa, Ukraine age 22 5' 7'' 132 lbs Anna ID 1127063 Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine age 24 5' 5'' 106 lbs Julia ID 1126372 Sumy, Ukraine age 21 5' 3'' 128 lbs Julia ID 1126297 Mariupol, Ukraine age 29 5' 5'' 117 lbs Natalia ID 1125980 Mariupol, Ukraine age 38 5' 8'' 110 lbs Svetlana ID 1125953 Nikolaev, Ukraine age 36 5' 5'' 115 lbs Anna ID 1133749 Mariupol, Ukraine age 19 5' 8'' 137 lbs Galina ID 1132276 Nikolaev, Ukraine age 30 5' 3'' 110 lbs Irina ID 1132200 Nikolaev, Ukraine age 39 5' 10'' 141 lbs Anastasia ID 1130971 Mariupol, Ukraine age 27 5' 6'' 117 lbs Victoria ID 1130827 Mariupol, Ukraine age 41 5' 2'' 132 lbs Tatiana ID 1130686 Simferopol, Ukraine age 29 5' 3'' 110 lbs Maria ID 1126980 Kharkov, Ukraine age 28 5' 3'' 121 lbs Tatiana ID 1126928 Nikolaev, Ukraine age 26 5' 6'' 110 lbs Zinaida ID 1126717 Vinnitsa, Ukraine age 50 5' 6'' 128 lbs

More BBC Bias

This morning the former state (now pro-opposition) broadcaster ran the following on its website:

UK jobs market recovery 'to stall'

The fall in the UK jobless rate will raise recovery hopes

Recovery in the jobs market will "stall" this year as demand for workers in the public sector falls, new research has warned.

According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), a third of employers expect to cut jobs in the next three months.

The public sector employers in particular are planning cuts, with 36% of them looking to lose staff.

The size of the cuts being considered has also increased, the CIPD said.

OK, there may be some truth in the future loss of public sector jobs, but that hasn't happened yet and as the report continued:

Despite the threat of cuts, the CIPD's net employment index, which measures the number of companies planning to hire against the number planning to lose staff, is still in positive territory at +two, down from +five three months ago.

In fact as it turns out this "stalling" (a cessation of growth, rather than a fall in employment) is mere speculation about what might happen.

"The CIPD believes that a rise in unemployment in the next two years remains a distinct possibility as the private sector recovery is offset by the 600,000 public sector job losses the government expects over the next five years."

Which of course meant nothing to the presenter on the Today programme this morning who declared that employment growth had stalled.

And another thing...

I was going to make a post earlier this week about RBS and the FSA, but I had to go and look up the percentage state ownership (84% as it turns out) because it is quite relevant.

Earlier this week the FSA fined Royal Bank of Scotland Group plc (RBS) £5.6 million for not keeping adequate controls to prevent breaches of U.K. money-laundering rules. The Financial Services Authority said between December 2007 and December 2008, RBS units RBS PLC, NatWest, Ulster Bank and Coutts & Co. failed to adequately screen their customers and the payments they made and received against a U.K. sanction list.

"This resulted in an unacceptable risk that RBS could have facilitated transactions involving sanctions targets, including terrorist financing," the FSA said in a statement. Because RBS settled the claim at an early stage, it received a 30% reduction in the fine, the regulator added. RBS says it brought the deficiencies to the FSA's attention. The agency then launched the investigation, which has been disclosed in documents to the bank's shareholders.

"We have taken appropriate action to remedy these issues and continue to enhance our control environment with a view to ensuring a more robust sanctions compliance framework and ultimately that our detection and prevention capabilities are in line with best practice in the market," RBS said.

Wooahh, lets stop right there! What is going on here? At the end of 2008 and thereafter, the tax payer recapitalised RBS and took 84% of the common equity in the RBS group. If it hadn't done so the whole group would havce effectively disappeared, so the money and new management put in by the government is what has kept it going, but the fine relates to the period between 2007 and 2008 mostly under the old management and certainly under procedures set up by the Fred Goodwin orchestra.

So why is the tax payer who put in most of the £5.6 million being asked to pay for the mistakes of the previous management? And they must have been big mistakes to merit a £5.6 million fine if there was no actual money laundering. OK, 16% of that actually reduces the value of shares held by the "old" RBS shareholders, but the £800k the tak payer makes from that is probably more than covered by the FSA and their advisors' costs of the investigation.

And why is it the new management team (who brought the mistakes to the attention of the FSA) being made to pay? The poor procedures happened while RBS was under the supervision of the FSA. If anybody was guilty of lax procedures (apart from the old guard at RBS) it was the FSA who had to be told rather than finding out about the issues themseles, not the new management team, but in the la-la world of UK banking supervision, no one is accountable and everyone makes meaningless gestures at the tax payers' expense.

A wunch of bankers

A commenter asked if I was going to analyse the banks' results. Well I had a quick look at Barclays and HSBC and there is little that I could spot of note in the numbers and RBS and Lloyds hadn't come out at the time I looked so maybe more on those later.

The big news in the UK banking world is that John Varley has piped up extolling the virtues of a universal banking system. Well, "Mandy Rice-Davies" to you, John. According to Mr Varley “Our view is that if you want to see clearly revealed the ability of narrow banks to cope with extreme conditions, you have to look no further than the upheaval now visiting some of the narrow bank communities in mainland Europe”.

Which overlooks the fact that the UK tax payer put the best part of £40 billion into bailing out the one bank whose profile most closely matched that of Barclays, namely RBS, and other not too dissimilar banks such as Citicorp and HBOS were given similar support. If Barclays Capital hadn't built a steady profit stream from tax avoidance to bolster Barclays' Tier 1 capital, they would have gone the same way as RBS.

Of the universal UK banks only HSBC came through the financial crisis with flying colours. HSBC's success probably derives from the fact that when they are dealing with cruddy credits, particularly in their US arm, they take it head on and charge an appropriate margin. Unlike RBS and Barclays and the rest they don't think they can wrap the crap in guarantees and fancy vehicles, top slice and bottom slice the risk according to some physics PhD geek's stochastic model.

As an aside, this reminds me of a true story of a young banker who started out a Slater-Walker, a UK finance house. On his first day they sent him out with the repo man (not a gilt trader, but the man who takes back assets from defaulting customers). As they pulled up outside the gates of the first customer call, the repo man handed the young salesman a sleeping bag. "Are we going to be here overnight?", asked the youn innocent. "No", replied the professional thug, "wrap it round your arm, and hold it up when they set the dogs on you."

Bank reform #1: Before any geek gets to model the "shit-into-shinola" debt repackaging schemes touted by the investment banks, they should spend a week with the repo man.

But back to Barclays, Mr Varley and, indirectly, the Barclays figures. A quick perusal of Barclays income and its sources reveals that, gross income from lending (i.e. net interest) is less than income from fees commisions and every thing else. Which tells us that although Barclays is a substantial bank and would expect to be earning fees and commissions in reality it is making far more from trading on its own account than it is making from lending.

Secondly if we try to determine where Barclays is making its profits, it is less than transparent. Sure enough we see a few hundred million here or there under Retail Banking (UK), or Barclaycard or similar, but the vast wodge of their profit shows up under Barclays Capital. Now we can't really tell what that means. Everybody wants to be an investment banker because they get paid more so everybody tries to move their desks into The Investment Bank, including ostensibly wholesale banking functions such as FX and treasury, but the implication of this is that they are usually given more leeway to trade for their own account.

But even so, Mr Varley is trying to have his cake, eat it and have a slice of ours too. With such a relatively small part of the Barclays operations devoted to serving retail and corporate customers, why should the tax payer be interested in keeping Barclays solvent? Barclays lured a team of gold traders away from JP Morgan last year and paid $98 million last month to buy a Swedish carbon emissions trader. Why should the UK tax payer want to bail out Barclays if either of those entities caused the bank to fail? And why should other traders who are not owned by banks want to see their taxes used to bail out their competitors? Mr Varley has answers to none of those questions.

Like the dealer in a game of three-card Monte, Mr Varley wants you and the UK banking authorities to focus on the fact that he has a branch in every High Street and ATM's throughout the land, and to forget the fact that the UK Treasury is underwriting the losses in the world's biggest casino.

A little statistical analysis

From the oh, so clean European Athletics championship. I added up the medal tallies of each country, scoring 5 for a gold, 3 for a silver and 1 for a bronze, and looked at the totals for men and women in each country. Then I grouped each country according to whether it was located in the former Eastern European bloc, and lo and behold I discovered that 65% of the scores for Eastern bloc countries came from their female athletes (and 35% from their men), whereas for the rest of Europe (and I include Turkey who had imported a lot of East African female champions) the ratio was obviously reversed, but not as extremely (38%:62%).

One might speculate why there should be such a disparity or even why the Russians should have a uniquely talented set of female athletes suited to the combination of speed an endurance required for the 400m.

Stimulating, no?

Rejoice, rejoice

Welfare shake-up ‘will cost Scotland £480m’. Which is £480m more for the rest of us.

Earlier this week, Government figures showed that 76% of those who before would have claimed incapacity benefit were being rejected for its replacement, the Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), or were abandoning claims before completing a strict new medical test.

Eliza Manningham-Buller at the Iraq Inquiry

Is this just wisdom after the event, or is it moral spinelessness that this is only spoken about openly now.

See her testimony here

Don't hold back Jeff

Tell us what you really think:

"It is where a dysfunctional clique took the United Kingdom into an illegal war, dismantled border controls, encouraged unprecedented immigration, debased educational standards, attacked the independence of our best schools and universities, botched devolution, eroded British sovereignty, pumped up a consumer debt bubble, ran our private pension system into the ground, messed up financial regulation and wrecked the country's balance sheet."

"Sir" Jeff Randall in the Telegraph, more here.

A little gem

John Hussman gives his view on the world (scroll down to Misallocated resources):

http://www.hussmanfunds.com/wmc/wmc100712.htm

Rothbury

So. there's a crazed gun-toting maniac cornered by police marksmen. Who turns up with a bottle of beer in one hand and a fried chicken in the other, to see what he can to help, like?

Paul Gascoigne!!

At which point everybody starts asking why the spectacle is dragging on and why they don't just shoot the guy instead of wasting our taxes paying for police time? And you can see where they are coming from, even if you don't agree with the sentiment.

But if they did, I'd always remember him for Italia '90.

Sarko: guilty or not guilty?

Of course he is:

1. Because he's French
2. Because he's a politician
3. Because he's worth it.
   

England's footballers must be worried

Why would anyone pay £100k a week to John Terry, Fat Frank, Rooney or StevieG, when Carlos Kickaball and Gunther Schweinhund can run rings round them? Same goes for the overpaid footballers in the French and Italian teams.

Roman Abramovich could buy the entire Uruguayan team without blinking. For that matter, he could buy most of Uruguay.

Stop shagging your staff and you might spend more time with your kids

'Nice to see your own fans booing you'

Well it's not nice Wayne. But I expect it's because, unlike you,. the fans have paid their own way out to South Africa, and most of them earn a lot less in a year than you earn in a week.

And I daresay that if you and your teammates can't be *rsed to make a go of it, then most of the fans would be happy to take your place show you the meaning of commitment even if they would probably make a hash of it.

World Cup 2010 sponsored by Coke

Can you hear me Brigitte Bardot?

Charles de Gaulle, Jean Paul Gaultier, Edouard Manet, Jean Baptiste Poquelin (Moliere to you pal), Carla Bruni (by adoption). Can you hear me Carla Bruni? Your boys took one hell of a beating. Your boys took one hell of a beating.

I like a seal with a sense of humour

An Act of God?

A six-storey figure of Jesus in Ohio goes up in flames after being struck by lightening.

That didn't take long

Barely are the Tories back in power, than the sex scandals, mostly trivial, but serious for the party of the family, and particularly from the hectoring evangelical wing of the CofE, start to appear.

First out of the blocks is Caroline Nokes from Romsey, disappointing because she has been carrying on for a long time, apparently without any of her constituency noticing, and secondly because I know a lot of people who helped her campaigns in 2005 and 2010.

2 world problems solved for the price of 1 (a continuing series)

The New York Times is reporting that there are $1,000 billion worth of unexploited minerals in Afghanistan, a fact probably understood by the Russians while they were there, but not possible to exploit due to 30 years of war. But there may be a solution to multiple problems.

Consider the following:

• The Chinese need minerals, particularly lithium for battery production.
• The Chinese are good at putting down discontent amongst religious groups, mostly because they have different ideas about "peacekeeping".
• The western powers are sick to the back teeth of being bombed in Afghanistan.
• The Chinese have plenty of cash; the western powers do not.

$250 billion for the keys to Kabul sounds like a fair price.

Robert Green can thank his lucky stars

.... that he wasn't playing for Colombia.

They are prone to be a tad less forgiving. Next season he can expect to hear opposition supporters to shoot once they get the ball in the West Ham half.

(probably) The only former Luton Town player at the World Cup shows his class

As David Coleman would have described Matthew Upson....

You read it here first

David Cameron Announced today that the economy was in a worse state than the government had realised. he should have read the Financial Crimes last year:

THURSDAY, 18 JUNE 2009

Up a creek, no paddle

So this is how it looks this morning.

• Public sector net borrowing was £19.9bn in May, double the level of one year ago.
• The total outstanding government debt has risen to £774.8bn, £150bn more than one year ago, and equal to 54.7% of UK GDP.
• Capital Economics estimated that the total public borrowing was now on course to reach £200bn, or 14% of GDP.
• Corporation tax receipts in May down 27% year on year.
• VAT revenues down 18%.
• Income tax receipts down 11%.

So how bad is that? In a word, appalling. Do the maths. Public sector borrowing is just shy of £20 billion per month in an economy with an annual GDP of £1,416 billion, or £118 billion a month.

Let's say the government share of spending is near as dammit half that figure of £59 billion per month. So £19.9 billion of that £59 billion about 34% is not paid for by taxes but has been stuck on the national credit card.

And that doesn't take into account the growth in unfunded public sector pensions, which is growing at £3 billion per month or the off-balance sheet liabilities that are growing with new PFI projects.

Heavy borrowing, but on a lesser scale, might be understandable in a developing nation with huge capital requirements for investment with a likely future payoff, but in a mid-sized post-industrial nation with limited growth prospects, expiring natural resources and few competitive advantages, it is a sign of impending disaster.

£1 in every 6 that is being spent in this country this year is being funded by extra government borrowing with no particular reason to think it will be repaid. Just think about that the next time you are in the supermarket. One person in 6 shouldn't be there, one car in 6 shouldn't be on the road, one commuter in 6 hasn't really earned their train fare. More importantly, one third of all our doctors, teachers, nurses, policemen are paid for by the thrift of other nations.

2 world problems solved for the price of 1

Allow the Somali pirates to operate freely off the cost of Gaza.

Simples.