nayth

£3bn loss for around 30m UK tax payers is £100 each... so around £1k each and every tax payer has subsidised the equity holders. Question for me is why they decided to pay such a high price for the shares. Surely they could have just as quickly structured a deal where they paid almost nothing, but with an option for the equity holders to buy back if it turned out to be worth anything. What other option would they have had than losing all the equity.

Most Fibre was laid pre Virgin. Many early cable companies borrowed and ran out of cash putting in infrastructure and went bankrupt. Investors lost their shirts. (Take note: having a grip on future technology is no guarantee of a good investment now. *cough* Tesla *cough*) This put the brakes on for a couple of decades! Build restarted in earnest a couple of years ago.

Yes, I think there was an episode of Tomorrow's World in the 90s where they showed how this sort of thing was being developed. It may have been an update from an episode in a previous decade, or was it just part of every episode? It's no wonder the series doesn't run now, we are almost living in the future already! Still, there'll be a lot of shit and piss to clean up during 20 years of investing in technology.

Still waiting for a robot to come and do the cleaning too

They do bear a striking resemblance!... I suppose everyone deserves a second chance, right? Or maybe it was just a platform to launch a blogging career. There's no such thing as bad publicity and all that! ?

Yes, their lower standards of human rights probably are a strength in that respect. I dare say there are parallels with the Victorians. (What your town is in the way of this new reservoir/train line/motorway?... How inconvenient!) Not sure it's something to aspire to though, and I think the reference to crisis is in their finances, which could well be linked to the infrastructure spending if the numbers haven't added up. But it's a good point that that there are strengths and weaknesses, which sometimes get lost in the narrative. I suppose that's what makes it difficult to see what the future holds.

It's also going up shaprly - It does look to precede an expected rate rise, so will be interesting to see where it goes in the near future

USD Libor presumably doesn't affect us too much, what's happening to the GBP Libor?

I'm sure some people would call them worse than that. Which gives me an idea, are there other derogatory terms we can think of for different approaches to managing your capital. Someone who keeps: Large amounts of gold outside the banking system - gold bug Large amounts of cash outside the banking system - paper bug / cash Large amounts of equities in single stocks Large amounts of equities in funds Large amounts of bonds Large amounts of equities with borrowed money A diverse mix of different assets etc.

I'm sure some people would call them worse than that. Which gives me an idea, are there other derogatory terms we can think of for different approaches to managing your capital. Someone who keeps: Large amounts of gold outside the banking system - gold bug Large amounts of cash outside the banking system - paper bug / cash Large amounts of equities in single stocks Large amounts of equities in funds Large amounts of bonds Large amounts of equities with borrowed money A diverse mix of different assets etc.

You haven’t been challenging an organisation, you have been insulting individuals who have studied hard, work hard and make a difference to people’s lives on a daily basis. Not just nurses, also midwives, physios, radiographers, speech and language therapists, dieticians, pharmacists, biomedical scientists and many other staff on the same pay system.

+1 I gather it is also possible to influence the value of a property on Zoopla by recording any work done. I suspect this will be removed from price change calculations, but will be included in the estimated total price. This could easily be manipulated by an owner for an individual property. Equally work done but not recorded would not be taken in to account. So there are a few reasons that individual valuations should be taken with a pinch of salt.

I read it that the ETF provider charges a fee to the party borrowing the securities, 37.5% of which is kept by them and the remaining 62.5% is added to the ETF fund itself (i.e. those holding the fund). It isn't explicit about what happens to dividends while the securities are loaned. It is normal for the borrower to pay these the lender, and you would hope the fund gets 100% of this (or else the fee would have to be higher to make the activity generate a positive return), but it would be nice to see that in writing. It also doesn't explicitly say who bears the default risk, but I assume from the other figures they quoted, it is the fund rather than them. (seems like a one way bet for them!) Clearly this activity isn't available for small investors, so it seems fair when they say it is a way of reducing the costs of owning funds, but a third on loan does appear high!

Easily said with hindsight, and can take time to work through. I would speculate a lot of these were kicked off last year around or soon after the base rate rise in November.

I would say it was very cheap in real terms.

Yes, though UK housing is grossly overvalued because the cost of money is so low - But you knew that already!

If you got 1.4% you have got an amazing deal - with such a small balance, it wouldn't make sense for you to pay the fee to get the absolute lowest rate, better to get the fee saver. I'm remortgaging with them over 5year toos and the lowest I've seen that in the last year or so has been 1.84%.

I would agree, though not sure it would be such a big dent - I think the latest scheme revalues earnings at CPI plus 1.5% for active members, and the accrual rate was adjusted to 54ths rather than 60ths. Also, this was only done in 2015, so the majority of liabilities will not be on revalued career average for a long time yet.

It is the US, so to correlate with UK housing would be premature! One could also draw the conclusion that a drop in conception rates is not just an indicator, but the cause!... perhaps not

For the first two years, perhaps. Don't forget they may have had to pay a high fee to get that rate, and £772 per month will take almost 27 years to pay the capital on the 50% mortgage alone. In two years they'll have to remortgage or move on to a higher variable rate, and in five years they'll have to start paying the 40% help to buy loan with interest. Overall it may still be favourable compared to renting, but they'll be paying significantly more than £386 per month!

small time landlords, obviously

Hi Fence, This is interesting stuff - I have been wondering how dividends and differing yield across stocks / indices is taken in to account in this sort of analysis (or why it isn't)? Have you given any thought to this before?

back to 'normal' then?