mash

Apparently - according to good old Nick Ferrari on 97.3 this morning - the total cost of all these quangos is £38 billion !! To put it in perspective the saving on child benefits is £1 billion - and what a fuss is being made of that!

You have hit the nail on the head. If the torries win, they will: - inherite a bag of shite with no fiscal room to manoeuvre - things will be bad for a few years - the sheep will complain how ‘life was so much better under labour’ - by the time that they finally manage to put plans in place for recover it will be election time - they will loose the subsequent election as ‘life was so much better under labour’ - labour will win and inherit the plans put in place for recovery by the torries - life will get better and labour will take the credit - labour will then be re-elected That's why labour are so keen to spend their way out of this crisis and don't care what mess they leave behind for the torries to pickup.

still down :angry: click login and nothing happens.... :angry: :angry:

Absolutely sums it up - brilliant !

Police have got my support £33k is not a fair salary when compared to other jobs, for example don't tube drivers earn the same amount ?

well said that man

yet again thanks to this government, the UK looks pathetic. just as with the BMW/Rover fiasco, "please could someone help us out, please buy this company, please, we are so f3cking useless and incompetent, please could you come and rescue us" Yet again thanks to this useless government, what a pathetic sorry state we must seem.

so true. same goes for phones, LCD TV's and iPods...

yep, let's not forget all the other classics : "no more boom and bust..." "solid fundamentals..." "I will not take risks with the economy..." "lowest mortgage rates for years..." classics what a goon..he makes me so angry

"The predicted drop will be caused by a combination of five Bank of England interest rate rises and the turmoil in the banking system which is leading to sharp increases in the cost of borrowing." nothing to do with unsustainable & ridiculously high house prices in the first place then, lets blame paltry low interest rates and the US instead.... FFS

I think the government should pay for all those affected to register for CIFAS Protective Registration Service Details here CIFAS Looks like a sensible thing to do, a family of four would need to cough up around £45 (£11.75 per person)

LOL

yep, he's a complete @rse. He also does a slot on 97.3FM in the morning with Nick Ferrari, absolute puke.

"The U.K. central bank said today it advanced 314 million pounds ($628 million) at 6.75 percent yesterday, the first time it has done so since July 17. A spokeswoman for the central bank, which offers funds at 1 percentage point more than the benchmark rate to institutions that need money outside of its weekly auctions, declined to identify the borrower. The Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site today that Barclays Plc was the borrower. Barclays used the money to cover a shortfall in its account with the central bank, the Journal reported, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter" It's started....

Northern Crock profit increased by £93 million between 2005/06, but with an increase in assets/liabilities (lets call it risks) of £20 billion - up from £80 billion to £100 billion. Profit in 2006 was £470 odd million, so with increasing risks of bad debtors and potentially having to write off £275 million (and I bet it’s more than that) and things could look totally different and that's assuming there isn’t any other skeletons waiting to come out...

I'd go for the NS&I, such as index linked saving certs which are tax free. The country / banking industry has never been in the situation it is now, we are in uncharted waters. The scale of the private and government debt mountain is massive and growing all the time. Low risk = low returns, but to be honest the difference you'd loose between NS&I and the high street rates will not be a life changing amount of money, but loosing your life’s savings could be a life changing event.. Remember pensions - they used to be untouchable, safe as houses, something you could rely on for the future, the companies had to keep the monies separate blah blah - look what's happened there. We are now resigned to the situation that it’s accepted that no ones pension is safe and the same change in attitude may well happen with savings accounts. The £30k protection is meaningless, do we really think there is a massive fund of money actually existing around the institutions ready to bail out their competitors should the worst happen ? Just like the pensions, when it comes to the crunch we will find it’s been raided and companies have been acting irresponsibly. Also when this protection originally came out I bet the debt levels / exposure of financial institutions were nothing compared to today ?

both posts from Luminist spot on.

"act in haste, repent at leisure" why is she in such a rush, give it 12 months and review the situation. The signs are already there that prices ARE coming down in lots of areas. I'm in my 40's with a wife and kids and we have been renting since 98 - we refuse to pay these crazy prices and the money in the bank from our last house is almost paying the rent these days. Pay for her 12 months rent rather than a deposit, it will be money well spent !

"The signal provided by that cut in August 2005 sent people back out into the shops and estate agents, and made them far too relaxed about the natural limits of the economic cycle. It made them think 4.75 was the highest rates needed to go. And in unwittingly sending that message, the lower rate enticed people to borrow amounts that now seem incautious....." so true

thanks for the propertysnake link - brilliant site. I have entered my postcode and it's really satisfying to see real reductions now. We've clearly moved from an era of increases to reductions and this has really helped me keep the faith. Regards

my rent has not gone up in 7 years.....beat that!

excellent find / research, we should keep track of this one.

following extract from an internal business results communication. "Egg Based on current experience, we now expect to report an operating loss in the second half of 2006, similar to the loss reported in the first half of 2006. This is because we continued to be affected by some increasingly difficult issues affecting the whole UK banking sector during the third quarter. Reduced consumer spending and borrowing on cards has impacted our income, as has the significant increase in bad debt charges in line with the rest of the unsecured lending industry. More and more consumers are using individual voluntary arrangements, debt management companies and in some cases bankruptcy to alleviate their debt burden, resulting in the level of non-recovered debt increasing. The same can be said for our Egg personal loan portfolio, with the number of customers employing debt management companies in the last quarter increasing by 40% compared with quarter one. However, we have taken a number of steps to address these shortfalls, including the introduction of risk based pricing across our portfolio and a re-price on our credit cards in September."

so if a rumour was floating about that a particular bank was going down the pan and everyone started to withdraw their money from said bank, it could be interesting.....

Very interesting article time to think about pulling money out of the banks and putting under the matress...I believe the debt problem is going to escalate and not simply continue up in a gentle manner or even diminish as some would predict. As people learn how easy it is to walk away from debts, many banks are going to be left in a dangerous position.