SurgeonGeneral
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Posts posted by SurgeonGeneral
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It may be possible to just always get your next prescription a few days before you actually need it - they might not notice. Would work for something like inhalers where there isn't an exact daily amount that you would take. My other suggestion would be to occasionally "lose" your prescription/medication - I'm sure it happens a lot and they can't just tell you "tough" if it's something that you really need. They probably really wont care at all unless it's a controlled drug like valium or whatever (if it is something like that, then I suggest you get the prescription filled and then a day or two later phone the doctor and tell them you had your handbag stolen or whatever and that your medication was in it so you need a new prescription - you probably only want to do this once though). If it is something that is essential but not a controlled substance (things like asthma medication etc) then if you go into a late night chemist and tell them that you've lost your medication then they will give you a replacement for it (but you'll probably have to pay non-NHS prices for it), a non-late night chemist will also work if you are showing symptoms of your disease if it is a potentially life threatening one. I've been asthmatic all of my life and I've lost count of the number of times I've gotten an inhaler without a prescription after I've lost my inhaler or whatever. It should be possible to legitimately stock up on any prescription drugs that don't have a black market value in this way, and if they do have a black market value then it should (surprise-surprise) be possible to get it on the black market.
Thanks for reminding me that it would be a good idea to stock up on these things and that maybe it would be an idea for my asthma to take a "slight turn for the worse" for a while.
Go to an out of hours/primary care centre and say you left them in Greece" put them away from the grandkids who were with us etc."
Do this a couple of times...
Nick
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http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/busi...icle4544357.ece
What can the realistically aim to get? $20bn?
These mofos are being put out of business, slowly and painfully..
Nick
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Oil's dropping a bit (2p off a litre of petrol at the local garage... oooh missus!), but my leccy bill's just gone up 17%. Nothing to write home about.
When it comes to the mortgage rates, look at it like this...
A flat-buying FTB around my neck o' the woods would have had to have mustered up little more than a signature this time last year, plus some hefty repayments. Now, they'll probably have to find a couple of grand stamp duty, and about £20k as a deposit (minimum), plus quite possibly a couple of grand as an arrangement fee... and the repayments themselves with be noticeably higher.
For what it's worth, the important bit of that lot is the deposit. Plucking £20k out of your ass isn't that easy for the vaste bulk of potential FTBs, and probably isn't even necessarily all that simple for a fair few of the general prudent types we have on here.
As others have said, patience is the game now one of patience (okay, it was before, but it's Happy Patience now). For a nice, easy to visualise model of economic growth and shrinkage... picture this...
You walk past an office block on the way home from work every night. When you walk past it at night, about half the lights are on. When things are 'booming', every other week another light comes on. You don't notice it at the time, but if you were to take a couple of photos, years apart, you'd see it had gone from partially lit to a blaze of colour. The same applies to shrinkage. You don't just walk past it one day and it's in darkness, but every few weeks another light fails to come on.
I use the lights-in-office-windows analogy for what I consider to a Bloody Good Reason. Quite simply it illustrates the "collectively fuzzy, individually boolean" nature of economic shrinkage really, really well. When things go tits up (in the normal, Western, cyclical kinda tits up way), not everyone suffers at the same time. Some lose jobs at the start, some lose jobs later on, some just aren't affected at all, so there's never a huge "all the lights go out" moment. What there is is a series of horrible personal "my light's just gone out" moments over a number of years. Whilst the effects of light outage are terrible for the individuals, the general darkening effect is actually pretty slow, and very difficult to spot from one day to the next.
Forget hyperinflation, forget peak oil, forget Israel nuking Iran, forget any of that stuff. It's just not happening right here, right now. What is happening is the bloke a few doors down is sweating on his mortgage reset and cutting back on retail spend, the brickie who's been coining it in is now hunting around for a new job, the 40-somethings over the road who were thinking of MEWing £10k for that Dream Kitchen next year are eyeing up their current kitchen and thinking £20 worth of emulsion instead, and the pensioner at no. 22 has decided to give the Bingo a miss for a bit to save up for the winter's fuel.
Think the little cutbacks don't matter? Think again. The difference between Boom and Bust is a few percent.
bump..
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So why in your opinion is this relevant to the UK, or are you just educating our US freinds?
Who do you think owns most of this toxic crap?
Barclays
HSBC
Pension Funds
Savings/Investment Funds
Why are British Banks flat broke now when, in the UK, we have only just begun?
Many people in this country will lose all of their equity tied up in housing, their savings, and pensions.
Deposits in Banks and Building Societies...
Redundancies in Housing and Finance related sectors...
Get it old chap?
Nick
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Merv must think that the pound us overvalued.....can't explain the rate decisions otherwise
He knows he'll be the fall guy if he puts them up.
No other explanation for recent behaviour. Can't realistically see inflation dropping back to target early next year.
Sleasy Labour politicians are experts at smearing others and avoiding blame.
Nick
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http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/stage-t...-in-california/
Stage Two of the Mortgage Collapse: $500 Billion in Pay Option ARMs Meet the Piper in 2008 with 60 Percent Being in California.
The next stage of the mortgage debacle is only starting to rear its ugly head and all early signs tell us that this is going to be even worse than the subprime mortgage collapse. We need to remember that the subprime mortgage debacle was only one facet of a global debt boom that has taken a stranglehold over the industrialized world. The United Kingdom is now starting to realize that even they are going to face a housing meltdown. Yet there is still a perception out there from pundits and those in the media that this housing meltdown was caused purely by subprime loans, which could not be anything further from the truth.
Many understand that this is a debt bubble and not only a collapse fueled by the subprime market in which low-income people bought overpriced homes. That in fact is a big player in this mess but many who once thought they were “prime” are going to be realizing there is nothing prime about them. Welcome to the even uglier side of things which is only in stage one at the moment. We now enter the Pay Option ARM debacle:
The most ominous sign of the chart at the bottom of the page is the following:
-$500 Billion in total Pay Option ARMs outstanding in the U.S.
-60 Percent of these issued to folks in California
The Pay Option ARM is one of the most poorly construed mortgage product ever to face this planet. It was a pathetic attempt to allow a larger majority of Americans to have a piece of the great American credit ponzi scheme. Many of these loans give you the following pay options on a mortgage:
-Fully Amortizing 30-year payment - you pay both principal and interest on a 30-year schedule
-Fully Amortizing 15-Year Payment - you pay both principal and interest on a 15-year schedule
-Interest-Only payment - covers only the interest portion of the mortgage and does not pay down principal
-Minimum Payment - the most widely picked option in which your payment is set for 12 months at an introductory rate (remember those absurd intro rates?). After that, payment changes are made annually and a payment cap limits how much it can increase or decrease each year.
Just to show you how financially destructive these mortgage products will be let us look at a $500,000 loan with a teaser 1.25% intro rate:
*Source: http://mortgage-x.com
The loan if it were to be paid in 30-years carries a $3,010 monthly principal and interest payment while the intro teaser rate only required the owner to pay $1,666 per month deferring a large amount of the payment to a later date. You may be wondering, “well I’m sure only a handful of people opted to pay the minimum payment right?” Wrong.
“(Businessweek 2006)Now the signs of excess are crystal clear. Up to 80% of all option ARM borrowers make only the minimum payment each month, according to Fitch Ratings. The rest of the money gets added to the balance of the mortgage, a situation known as negative amortization. And once balances grow to a certain amount, the loans automatically reset at far higher payments. Most of these borrowers aren’t paying down their loans; they’re underpaying them up.
Yet the banking system has insulated itself reasonably well from the thousands of personal catastrophes to come. For one thing, banks can sell some of their option ARMs off to Wall Street, where they’re packaged with other, better loans and re-sold in chunks to investors. Some $182 billion of the option ARMs written in 2004 and 2005 and an additional $83 billion this year have been sold, repackaged, rated by debt-rating agencies, and marketed to investors as mortgage-backed securities, says Bear, Stearns & Co. (BSC )Banks also sell an unknown amount of them directly to hedge funds and other big investors with appetites for risk.
The rest of the option ARMs remain on lenders’ books, where for now they’re generating huge phantom profits for some lenders. That’s because, according to generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, banks can count as revenue the highest amount of an option ARM payment — the so-called fully amortized amount — even when borrowers make only the minimum payment. In other words, banks can claim future revenue now, inflating earnings per share.”
And for those of you who say we didn’t see this coming, that paragraph was pulled from a Businessweek article in 2006 title “nightmare mortgages.” Of course, Wall Street is no longer buying this crap so that $500 billion is going to implode and no one is going to stop it. Also, you need to remember that 60 percent of that mortgage portfolio of Pay Option ARMs is here in sunny California making us confront a $300 billion time bomb.
80% only made the minimum payment on these toxic waste products. I’ll draw your attention once again to that new chart recently released by Businessweek. What you’ll notice is that the gray bars are a better indicator of how quickly we will face this implosion since only a small minority were actually paying either the interest only or the 30-year options. California as a state is now down 30 percent in one-year and many niche markets are going to face 40 or even 50 percent drops. This will prove to be a bigger hit on the California housing market as we will see in the upcoming months.
Many of these mortgages now have larger balances! That is the absurdity of these mortgage products. If you really think about it, the minimum payment will actually increase the underlying amount you owe almost assuming your home will appreciate in the Wonderland reality of many homeowners and lenders. Now we have a somewhat cruel fate in which California median prices are crashing while many of these option ARM products have been slowly growing in the past few years. That is why lenders such as WaMu, Wachovia, and Countrywide who specialized in these toxic waste products are down by:
WM: down 84% from 6/14/2007
CFC: down 87% from 6/14/2007
WB: down 65% from 6/14/2007
Why do you think these companies are down so much? Aside from the subprime collapse they have seen nothing in regards to the option ARM debacle that is squarely facing them. $300 billion in mortgages alone in California that are worth so much less! Let us assume that these products are now only worth half of that $300 billion. That means California alone, not even counting the other $200 billion out there is going to hurt many direct lenders or Wall Street firms via writedowns by $150 billion with an almost guarantee given the 30 percent market decline. Let us do a quick market cap calculation of these 3 sample companies:
Marketcap as of 6/14/2008:
WM: $7.02 billion
CFC: $2.82 billion
WB: $38.89 billion
Total: $48.73 billion
Bwahaha! There combined marketcap is only about a third of the losses of pay Option ARMs which one state (California) will be facing! What if we factor that other $200 billion which undoubtedly will be facing losses as well given the nationwide scope of this housing debacle? Of course there are other lenders out there who dished out these toxic products but the above 3 were major players. Now you know why these institutions are off by ridiculous amounts. If you simply do the basic accounting and take the pulse of the market, you know that this has the potential of flooding lenders with a stream of losses for a few more years or until they go under. Take a look at the distress numbers for California last month:
May 2008:
NODs: 41,965
NTS: 9,728
REOs: 20,237
Total for California: 71,930
Nationwide total: 261,255
California makes up 27.5% of all foreclosure filings in May of 2008. Just to give you an idea how bad things are getting in California let us look at the stats for May of 2006:
May 2006:
NODs: 7,794
NTS: 804
REOs: 138
Total for California: 8,736
Nationwide total: 92,746
*Source: Realtytrac
So only two years ago, California made up 9.4% of all nationwide foreclosure filings and now we stand at 27.5%. This is how quickly things are coming apart at the seams and we haven’t even seen the first peak of option ARM recasts which should occur in October through December of this year. If you don’t think that $500 billion is a lot just wait until this summer selling season falls flat on its face for California. Fall and winter are going to be brutal.
Many of these owners are going to be highly tempted to moonwalk away from their mortgages. Does Bank of American really want to assume this option ARM time bomb? They are scheduled to close their deal with Countrywide sometime in the third quarter yet I simply do not see how they avoid astronomical losses on the current mortgage portfolios and REO properties. Unless California suddenly goes into another bubble and prices start going up, we are in for a tough few years and the current California multi-billion dollar budget short fall isn’t pretty either. Keep in mind the California budget which has now been revised to a $17 billion short fall is going to force us to make some hard decisions. Either raise taxes to plug budget gaps or cut spending (aka jobs) and only increase the unemployment numbers and thus depress the economy further.
No matter how you slice it, California housing is going lower and pay Option ARMs will be the next crisis that will send the credit markets stumbling. You can bank on that.
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they are both panic...nothing is selling
Yes, the economy has completely collapsed.
The official data still lag. It happenend in June.
Total collapse of the retail sector.
Whatever it is, this is it.
Nick
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LOL! Yeah that's more like it. I guess it's hard to see straight when you've been hitting the ganja that hard.
I'm more with the "ki", as in "Merv just scored a Ki of finest Colombian marching powder Al, see if the Big G wants to trip over from 10/10 to kick back wid' us. I'll get us some Hos-for real.
And check this gangsta, the inflation and growth rate predictions from our modelling look much more postive now-I call it "ki" adjustment stochastic smoothing regression analysis.
It's where you take some drugs and regress to the level of a four year old."
With the whole world going into recession, who ( and what ) are we going to sell to in order to recover?
How can interest rates be predicted to go down with government borrowing so high?
How can they predict that wage inflation will not occur, or will terminate in such a short period of time?
Nick
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I'm afraid that attitude is akin to jumping off a tall building and, shouting OK SO FAR!!!!! all the way down.
herd mentality on the way up:herd mentality on the way down.
Nick
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Since about 2003, there has been a growing opinion that House prices
were "rising to a new plateau".
Many have believed this, not necessarily because they wanted to, and have
desperately borrowed and bought, anxious that they would permanently
miss out the opportunity to buy into this new elevation of property value.
If the present Crash continues to its fulfillment, we will have seen this theory
thoroughly disproved as prices drop back (they have already gone back to
2004/2005 levels) perhaps as far as to 2002/3 prices - a financial catastrophe
for all those who have piled into the bubble for the past five years.
This dream of a "new plateau" deceived the whole nation into believing we
were entering some kind of utopian economical era.
But the theory went against all that was sensible, all that was historical and
all that was believeable.
Well put. I had to endure the discomfort of mild ridicule from 2002 on, having laughed at the new paradigm/ interest rates in a new all time low permanently arguments.
What I didn't see was how devastating the crash would be.
Nick
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http://uk.biz.yahoo.com/13082008/140/depre...report-due.html
Wednesday August 13, 01:36 AM
'Depressing' Inflation Report Due
By Sky News
But then, the sheeple still believed in miracles as it fed their dream of something for nothing. If Thatcherism failed, it failed to change people's inherent gravitation toward idleness and blame-shifting. We are where we were in the late 1970's, poised to becoming the sick man of Europe only this time its not the Unions and the mindset of "entitlement" but the lust for material possessions and get-rich-schemes. Sadly, we have no Thatcher-like figure to lead a revival in our self-esteem and drive to making things better.
This is the problem. She couldn't change people's minds, poisoned by the co-dependant Socialist illness.
We are back in 1977/78-no doubt about it. Truly, I'm very upset and angry about our political elite.
At 41, as a Hospital Consultant, I'm wising up to these bullsh*tt*rs and will be looking to make moves to leave the UK, make a pile in the Middle East, and look after number one.
Nick
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Many people on here refer in derogatory terms to most people as "sheeple" - implying that they have no intelligence or insight and follow each other in a stupid flock, like sheep.
Given this, why do we then care if these stupid, ignorant "sheeple" take silly advice from Kirsty at al?
Sheep are after all no more than animals led to the slaughter, so why worry about them?
It is what they are there for, surely?
I agree.
It is difficult to decide which is the most nauseatiing aspect of the HPI/HPC phenomenenon:the greed or the stupidity of the people.
IF I go back in, it will be with cash, and I will make a pitiful offer to some poor ******* in distress-safe in the knowledge that if house prices had kept on rising and I couldn't afford to join the party no-one would have cared.
Nick
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They will do nothing. Cuts likely through 09/10
I agree. Too much political risk-of being blamed by HMG and the British Sheeple for collapsing the economy..
Nick
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How many times have I heard that one?? Oh yes, from a smug ex colleague before he relised his mortgage had a £35000 shortfall due to his failed endowment!
How much will this free money be worth if your company goes bust? How long will the public sector gravy train be funded by the taxpayer?
How on earth is your pension a 'Tax Relief' when you will be hit with income tax when you start to withdraw it?!
How many 20-30 year olds have the time and inclination to manage a multi investment portfolio for a retirement that may never happen?!
Like I said, if you want to take the risk, and place your future in the hands of the same charlatans working in a financial industry that caused the current house price/economic cataclysm then claps to you.
I have to say your experience correlates well with mine.
Even if my NHS FS pension scheme is reduced, it will probably be ok.
Much of the financial advice given is not evaluated with regard to the results 20 years later. Mostly, people end up being robbed of their money during their best years.
Nick
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How about accounting rules to be changed in the public sector, currently there is no incentive to save money as if you have any money left at the end of the year you get less the following year, even if you actually need the money.
It's just insane, the govt seeks to make depts etc... spend every single penny to prove that the following year they need more money.
Good job the taxpayer has deep pockets
There is a spendfest at the end of every year to get rid of the money, I can assure you.
Nick
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Yeah- where do we buy shares...
Why is Gordon so ******ING QUIET--
I'd rather know where he was - and sort of (possibly provided its not - no I cant go there) what he is up to..
Testing Stan's Rodeo Ointment . It soothes Sarah's as% after he's turned it inside out working out his frustrations.
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I'm now beginning to think that this Russian/Georgia conflict is part of something bigger. Perhaps the Russians have been persuaded by Britain and America to attack Georgia at this crucial time so as to divert media coverage away from the convergence of forces in the Gulf region.
I think I may be becoming a conspiracy theorist.
Me too. If the Americans ain't screaming right now, assume it's a done deal.
Let's each sort our own problems out??
Nick
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It's down enough to freak the sh1t out of most people...
Why aren't more people panicking?
Nick
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They would be ecstatic if you put that - LOTS of ticks in their diversity boxes. What they really, really don't want is White able-bodied Christian male.
...with a job
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http://www.dqnews.com/Charts/Monthly-Chart...rts/ZIPSFC.aspx
this is for the bay area. I have family there looking to move but the better area simple arent falling very fast, maybe 10%. If you dont have any idea of the areas, you can look at the average prices and the % fall.
In LA:
Los Angeles Selected Areas
Westside 49 $1,325,000 $899,000 47.39%
West LA 123 $730,000 $759,000 -3.82%
Downtown LA/Central City 220 $627,500 $715,000 -12.24%
South LA 134 $340,000 $449,000 -24.28%
North East LA 83 $355,000 $482,500 -26.42%
http://www.dqnews.com/Charts/Monthly-Chart...rts/ZIPCAR.aspx
Again poorer areas falling faster. Across CA its the inland cities falling fast 25%+, like merced, Sacramento, inland empire (loads of new builds). The established areas holding up better.
Im not saying it wont happen. Just hasnt happened yet. In fact not that much availability in the better areas either (relative to the lesser areas). Rents are edging up too.
I hear there are a few bargains to be had in Compton, G.
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I gotta go to work now. but a thing just occured to me...
A lot of the money supply has been tied up in houses
houses are losing monetary exchange value
This means that a lot of the "potential" exchange value stored by banks in the from of mrtgages, is also losing value.
CBs are "printing" money to replace all of this lost potential exchange value on the banks balance sheets
so....
The total amount of "money" remains the same. It has simply been transferred from bricks and mortar back into "money" in the banks vaults
This effectively measn that the CBs are ensuring that all of the lendors are getting their mortgages paid back to them early
The problem is....
While much of that money was tied up in houses, it was not available to inflate the money supply in an immediate sense
Now that it is being released as "cash" in the banks, what they hell are they going to do with it?
I think i might be talking ********
Off to work......
I don't think we need to theorise, just observe.
Asset deflation (houses,stocks,bonds).
Consumer hyperinflation.
=Armageddon for personal finances.
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Who was taught by Socrates.
He most notably smoked 40 filterless fags a day and was one of the fittest players in the world.
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They are stoking up a one day rally so they can buy short ahead of a truly frightening week of Q2 bank results in the US.... starting domani.
Agreed...
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Agreed, it doesn't add up.
First, South Warwickshire still has 11+ so if small class size, selective schools is what you're after then Stratford has two Grammar Schools with "good" reputations.
Second, Stratford is expensive for housing but Evesham, where she is looking to buy, is 15 miles down the road, a perfectly pleasant but hardly expensive country town and much cheaper: £420k for a town house is difficult to imagine, as can be seen from this detached house in Evesham at £40k less.
I live in the area, and you are right.
This woman is b*llsh*tting, and could have downsized before and secured her children's future if she hadn't been so greedy or stupid.
Nick
A Storm Is Coming
in House prices and the economy
Posted
Stock up on pain killers, Aspirin ( but preferably Ibuprofen as Aspirin is particularly harmful to the stomach causing ulcers )and Paracetamol.
Get some antibiotics. Cephalosporins are cheap, broad spectrum and safe.
Nick