Maggot_with_halitosis

After one week of capital controls, and the uncertainty that accompanies it, the Greek people will have had enough and will go with the "better the devil you know" option to stay in the Eurozone. They've been suckling at the teat of German largesse for too long. The troika will then proceed to make a point to the other PIGS nations - pour encourager les autres - what happens when you upset Oz the mighty, Oz the powerful, Oz the merciful (hint: think grit in the lube). Sorry, but I just can't see Tsipras' government being the ones to re-adopt the drachma. I really hope I'm wrong, though.

Long time no see UKDS, hope things have been getting better for you in the last few years. I've been posting as THEBIGMAN for several years but haven't visited until today for quite a while. There's a lot of waiting going on... As the old saying goes, "If something doesn't happen soon, then something's gonna happen". A while back, the Arab spring was in full force. Upheaval has now moved closer to Europe - just look at Ukraine. Perhaps Europe is next. It's like early 2007 again; houses are still crazily priced in the UK, propped up as they are by financial repression (QE/ZIRP). Stocks look overpriced, tech stocks in particular (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.). Government bonds are yielding so little as to be not worth the risk and many corporate bonds smell a bit funny. Gold is way down from its ~$1900 highs and veterans of 2008 know it'll take a bashing if there's another market crash. And cash is losing value by the day, Confidence in BitCoin has evaporated following termination of MtGox. Actually, this might well explain the continual absurd price of UK property. My guess is this: Not wanting to sound like a doom-sayer, but eventually, enough of this cheap money will filter through to cause price rises in food and energy. By then, interest rate rises will have little short-term effect (the effects have a notable lag) except to quickly bankrupt the over-leveraged (including governments, which is why it hasn't happened already). Rapidly rising living costs will cause deep public discontent, Ed "Thickie" Milliband will probably get voted in who will probably print money... In my view, holding a variety of stocks that pay dividends in different currencies may help mitigate this risk somewhat. Either way, savers will continue to get shafted at the expense of borrowers.

At the bottom, robots are flipping better burgers. At the top, sophisticated Bayesian inference engines analyse securities and can potentially offer better risk/reward than star fund managers. The future doesn't look too bright for unskilled workers. Or anyone else, for that matter. Significant change is faintly in the air. Bring it on.

I saw the title and immediately thought of this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/2657849.stm ...Ten years later... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-22467155 FFS!

Max Keiser? Seriously? InfoWars? Seriously? Alex Jones? Seriously? Oh, c'mon, you're just taking turns to vigourously pull my wee-wee, right? Right?

No problems there: Those dividends have to be either spent or re-invested. The alternative of sticking it under the mattress loses you spending power through inflation. The problem is that the fantastic profits were just that - fantastic. As in a fantasy. An illusion. Short-term profits at long-term expense, encouraged by a short-term bonus culture. Hence the CDOs, mortgage backed securities, derivatives built on derivatives; opaque products built on toxic debt which would inevitably eventually default. Hence the ramping up of credit to all and sundry: Hence the pound-and-a-half of junk mail through your letterbox every morning offering you new credit cards with pre-completed forms. Hence private equity companies buying huge companies for multiple billions of $/£/€ in leveraged buyouts, where the incurred debts are transferred to the balance sheet of the target company. Hence this parasitic and incredibly hubristic class of financial pirate that declares themselves to be the new "masters of the universe" based on the fact that they're actually running little more than a Ponzi scheme where the name of the game is to sell the indebted asset(s) on to the greater fool before you're rumbled. Hence banks had to stick their fingers into the pie, too; the US repeal of Glass-Steagall made this inevitable. Once one bank starts competing with the hedge funds using customer deposits as collateral, they all do it; since institutional shareholders are the only ones that matter when it comes to voting CEO executive pay rises, such risky plays are rubber-stamped... I suppose there was a bit of profit in the carry trade - borrowing large amounts of yen where you'd have to pay 1% interest, and spend it on some "safe" asset (i.e. government bonds) that yield more than 1%, then simply pocket the difference. Doesn't take a genius to play that sort of game though, and it doesn't last forever, and problems occur when that "safe" high-yielding Icelandic (or Greek, or Spanish, or Italian...) government bond loses most of its value almost overnight. Now, mitigating this risk with some effective strategy - that takes rather more brains that clearly the banks didn't have, although the insurance industry seemed to manage OK without needing massive government bail-outs (except AIG who got a bit too involved in the toxic derivatives business. Go figure). Blame Bliar and Brown, and their light-touch regulation based crony capitalism for the UK exchequer becoming massively over-reliant on financial services in order to pay the bill for 13 years of bribing half-wits to vote Labour. Germany make high-end, high quality products. No surprise they've been a beneficiary of the credit boom of the last 20 years. Who'll they sell their great cars to when everyone else is absolutely skint? And what will the money they've made over the last 20 years buy them now that everything's really expensive? Or did they invest it all in Greek / Spanish / Italian / Icelandic government bonds that are bound to default? Or did they invest it in UK / US government bonds which pay sweet FA and will be made utterly worthless through inflation? Slow lane, fast lane, Penny lane... doesn't matter. The entire world economy is totally fscked for the time being.

kleben Sie es in den Arsch und verpissen!

France'll be next under the spotlight. When it's Britain's turn to be held to account by the bond market, expect the UK debt-to-GDP ratio to "fix" itself "by magic", as illustrated here: http://www.moneyweek...-writeoff-60900 ...at which point, those on fixed incomes will really feel the pinch in order to pay for fifty years worth of bribing the feckless, flipping second homes, refurbishing the duck-ponds, starting futile wars in the middle east and bailing out senior bank executives in exchange for a cushy executive role on the board a few years later. I wonder which side will work out best: The Eurozone or Old Blighty? Most of southern Europe is trying to emotionally blackmail Germany into footing the bill for its ridiculous state largesse. If I was Merkel I'd tell 'em in no uncertain terms: "Nein! Küsst mein Arsch und verpissen!". Bailouts will be a tacit encouragement for indebted contries to get into debt again, and the bond market will probably lend them the cash if they know Germany will pay and pay. If Europe doesn't fracture sooner, it will fracture later. Fer cryin' out loud, Greece shouldn't even have been allowed to convert to the Euro, they blatantly bullshitted about their debt levels. Um, just like several other countries did. So what of Blighty? Well, it looks like printing money and gifting it to the feckless chinless wonders who lost it all in the first place will return us to a new age of serfdom where them upstairs lord it over us honest folk 'oo tried to save 'arf a groat for our old age - and that was when 'arf a groat was a lot of money. No doubt financial repression will get worse; it will be augmented by capital controls and high taxation for the lower and middle classes. Suffice to say that when the police and army don't get paid, there'll be little to hold off the hungry mob from lynching those held responsible, so expect public services to evaporate in order to pay for more jack-booted thugs to keep you in line. Shame. I'd personally quite like to see Ed Balls publicly disembowelled, and other new Labour icons like Brown, Blair, Mandelson, Blears et al forcefully drowned upside-down in a large vat of Westminster faeces. Mind you, Mandelson would probably enjoy that. Either way, be it Europe or Britain (or indeed anywhere else that's overindebted and lacks the political courage to deal with the issue), the outcome is quite clear: The peasants will eventually revolt, the bolsheviks will acquire power, then abuse it in a tyrannical display of pathetic incompetence while the country starves. Hopefully Zimbabwe, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan will, by then, be accepting a small number of immigrants from impoverished western nations, in the name of charity...

"Our Debts Are Not A Burden On Future Generations!" Next time you hear some absolute half-wit spout such utter drivel, consider what is happening in Greece: People are going hungry. The reason is ultimately because their government has, over many years, taken on increasingly absurd levels of debt in order to bribe an increasingly nanny-state-dependent electorate. They cannot devalue their currency (i.e. print money) to welch on their crushing debt because they joined the Euro - hence giving up control of their currency. Thus the increasingly onerous debt burden means there's less left over to feed themselves. "Our Debts Are Not A Burden On Future Generations!" Next time you hear an imbecile state such obviously blatant bullcrap,, consider what happened not-so-long-ago in Zimbabwe. In 2006, before hyperinflation peaked, the Central Bank of Zimbabwe printed money in ever-larger denominations in order to (amongst many other dodgy dealings) buy foreign currencies in order to pay off debts owed to the IMF. By November 2008, prices were doubling every day. An entire generation was condemned to corruption, hoplessness, disease and utter poverty. Maybe Greece has got it cushy after all. But still, if you don't think yesterday's debts became a burden to later Zimbabweans, you obviously drink too much. Also note that these self-important pseudo-intellectual pricks like Krugman or Ed Balls justify their arguments with incomprehensible jargon (endogenous growth vs. exogenous growth theories, full of sound and fury... signifying nothing) and are relatively light on actual facts and figures. How can so many people still believe in getting something for nothing? Are they really that stupid? Are you truly stupid enough to believe such obvious horseshit?

Read: - Ed Miliband in extremely sanctimonious, borderline hypocritical smelly patter shocker Next week: - Large Bear brazenly defecates in private forestry commission backyard shocker - Pope Benedict finally exposed as a Catholic contrary to popular expectation shocker EDIT: corrected

No less a luminary than Terry Smith of Tullett Prebon would appear to be in full agreement with you. http://www.terrysmit...for-growth.html Whilst this book is quite old and many of the exploits have now been outlawed, there's plenty of new dodges going on that distort the accounts, for example: http://www.terrysmithblog.com/straight-talking/accounting-for-growth/page/2/ This post was audited by Arthur Anderson and contains £5 of goodwill and other intangible assets. Please send the money to me c/o HPC...

When bovine Britain votes Labour back in - as they will when Millipede releases a manifesto proposing a massive state expansion to eliminate unemployment, then he'll probably make the UK join the Euro clown show (don't expect a referendum, silly! These guys went to Eton, Harrow or Charterhouse too - so they know better than us oi polloi). At this point the Germans will pull out of the Euro leaving UK with the legal obligation to pay off the outstanding national debt of France, Italy, Spain and Portugal (but not Greece - that wouldn't be fair). 100% Guaranteed

Don't mess with me, nincompoops. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18005296

Giving shareholders the ability to effectively vote down excessive executive pay-rises will fix this. The fact that shareholders - supposedly the owners of the business - have next to no say in the remuneration of the executives is, quite frankly, farcical. No wonder the FTSE's no further up than it was 15 years ago!