Sir Harold m

Of course bliar deserves a state funeral, he was a unifier , he ******ed everyone over .

You wouldn't even need to regulate fractions, leverage ratios or anything else if you did two things. 1) only allow banking licences to partnership structures so the directors are financially liable 2) abolish the lender of last resort and licence a money broker exchange in order to provide transparent market based funding . You would not need ANY regulation as reckless lending on a systemic basis would be punished by higher market rates instantaneously and directors would make sure ALL financial institutions had a shit load of reserves to back up their liabilities . The government could still in extreme circumstances provide liquidity but at pre determined rates which would be erroneously high and at a charge on reserves and directors own wealth

Gold will always trade close between paper and physical until the end game .

Ill award a prize to anyone who can convince me why there is any real difference for a society whether there is public or private debt . I fail to see what difference it makes , surely it's the size that really matters and also the assets upon which it is founded ( if any)

I'm not sure how true this is but I heard that the bulk of earnings generated by the Ftse constituents is made abroad . Hence further devaluation of the Gbp would in effect translate to higher corporate profits for uk based firms as well as increased nominal share prices . In which case it's logical to suppose Carrneys ( supposed if you believe some opinions) intention to add steroids to merv's plans will really see the Ftse take off . It's a theory anyway

I would venture that half the markets money suggest the market will rise and half the markets money ( or absence thereof) suggests it will fall. Out of this dynamic we can derive a factor which we shall term the market price . Anyone who is 100% certain that it is incorrect will either make or lose money should they back their talk with a decision . So many people forget the simplicities of life

I see austerity is kicking in , looks like they are rationing the meds already

You are correct , I was using an example of someone if my acquaintance whose wife works part time up to about £15k And I think they have about £7k to live off . That's why I was shocked about how rich they weren't through having no housing equity or low accommodation costs . I thought he was just careful driving a five year ford Mondeo on £7k a month then he pointed out that to save for a liveable pension , rent plus savings enough to replace the car every few years and cover emergencies was costing him £2.5k a month .

£100k salary in london is sadly not a great deal of money if you have a family, a wife that doesn't work a mortgage , and if you pay your own way with no benefits and no non contrib pension . Says it all about merv's reign really Say it's £7k a month, you'd probably be looking at £2k a month to rent anything liveable for a family, £1.5k a month into a pension scheme , £0.5k a month to run shite car and travel card . That leaves £3k for food, utilities, savings, holidays , toiletries, hobbies, council tax and spends. Ok a good lifestyle but then you're supposedly in the top 1 or 2% of earners . That's the perspective you need . Your car will be a five year old ford , your holiday wil be Spain for a week or so and you will have nothing to leave your kids , hardly top 1% living is it ? Meanwhile if you work thirty hours a week as a pair if teachers with child friendly hours , you will take home around 5k a month in total with a cast iron pension and thirteen weeks a year off . If you had a house bought before 2003 you'll also be able to retire and move ip north at fifty five and live like a millionaire . Just shows how the disastrous lottery of hpi has ******ed our country because next year the latter will probably strike as part of the 'underpaid' revolt and demand the former pays up more tax because they are broad shouldered . We need a land tax now !

The thing is from a purely selfish perspective any lender advancing a 100% mortgage at high rates over risk free is probably being rational if their job is yo maximise revenue for shareholders, staff, creditors etc . ( obviously this applies only if they've correctly called the bottom ) The system we have simply rewards those who take the best risks and punishes those who take bad ones . Nothing inherently wrong with this at all as long as 1) we allow firms to fail ( including banks) and 2) we accept Taft these failures will be correlated and there will be a systemic knock on effect for a decade until clearance achieved . This system operated fairly well for a long time until governments became obsessed with trying up prevent cyclical events ( well downturns) and people started electing governments purely out of short term vested interest

I'd be interested at E150k no higher

Wow, I didn't know about that rule. Bear in mind that the essr will starve, rob, pillage anyone and anything rather than let its currency fail then I don't think 'rules' will be an issue . It's like Greece and the Goldman Sachs issue, nice smokescreen for the politicos but a child of six could see Greece and Germany were not compatible for currency union without fiscal unity ( ok a clever six) . If a rule gets in the way the ESSR will ignore it , change it, or blame someone else for circumventing it.

I think it is meant to be 5% of the purchase price which is 25% of the deposit they need ( if 20% were usually needed ) Your sentiments are still correct though its just another way of extending 'purchasing power ' to the vast swathes of people who are unable to participate in the demand side due to unaffordability . The same old assumption is that by stretching themselves whilst young they will easily afford to keep up later but for that you need wage or house price inflation ( although the latter has to be infinite and involve them exiting which only works for them not the system as a whole )

If I own twenty billion of asset A and there is a market valuation ( or model valuation ) of twenty billion on date xxx them my accounts read twenty billion . If three days later the market price or the model value cased on market observations drop to ten billion then I've lost ten billion at date xxx plus three. We can all opine or presume that the risks were misunderstood, that the strategy was incorrect and that the market was irrational but you can't say the accounts at xxx were wrong . Unfortunately with rules that say price assets to prevailing exit price in place then valuations are not always prudent . It's a problem with the rules and rule setters not the auditors in such a case . Perversely , any auditor forcing a mark down based on prudent reality ( or correct vision kid future prices ) would be open to legal action for misreporting . The rules about the concept of prudence were ditched in favour of 'fair value' based on prevailing market . In any Ponzi scheme then irrational , ludicrous , (and with hindsight incorrect) valuation of future inflows are Always wrong but if the assets can be dumped to another mug at that time at over optimistic levels then they are theoretically correct . Houses are a great example as are tulips in 1600's. we know they're over valued but if some mug is still willing up overpay then technically they aren't

Yawn yawn . The bubble was caused not by liar loans, by demand, by property porn, by Krusty or by sub prime . All of these things could have occurred and been death with ( not painlessly I admit) by central banks performing their job properly by pricing money correctly . Instead they all colluded to promote 'growth' by ignoring real credit growth ( aka inflation ) and not allowing market forces to operate . The banks knew they had a lender of last resort to furnish them with wholesale money and deposit guarantees which enabled them to expand credit . In their minds the banks acted in the most rational manner possible by extending as much credit as possible into the most advantageous asset class which was property . It may have been immoral the way they acted but banks and brokers who didn't operate thus way were doomed to failure as this ponzi took hold . Excessive borrowers and lender can ONLY partake on their excess if money price and money supply is distorted . Everything else including liar loans are simply inevitable consequences

Agreed, I bought my last two cars outright and it is possibly the worst investment I can ever think I've made. I'm running them for as long as I can until maintenance costs outweigh their utility ( which will not be long) . I will never purchase a car again . If you are looking for a high value car then lease purchase is by far the best option as you can walk away, use only during the warranty period , and in most cases have 100% reliability. Of course if you are intent on ownership then go for the oldest and cheapest possible . Anything in the middle is a mugs game . Cars only offer value if they cost less than a grand or more than thirty

Quite a lot actually if you wander into Blacks or the Army & Navy surplus

If you think about it this is impossible . For a bank to be fully insured against its risk then you would have to pay away all the profit from its leveraging ( hence rendering the leveraging pointless ) The insurer would need to be able to cover all of the leveraged balance sheet of the bank and be preformed to take a lower premium than the bank was earning or else one of them is making a loss . Also, the insurers would have up be uncorrelated to bank failure ( clearly they would not be) You saw the effect of financial insurers with the monolines like mbia , ambac, xl etc it simply can't work . The only back stop for a bank is the printer of that currency . The answer is to have no backstop at all , then people would understand the risk they are taking and the appropriate premium would be demanded

I font hate the Germans at all. Most I've met have been wonderful , this seems to be reflected in their society as a whole. This doesn't excuse the fact that the EU ( like I said I believe is ultimately driven by France) is a monster that will eat itself ( chewing the periphery first) the Germans can't maintain their belief that Greece, Spain etc must make good on their debts to Germany when they were consumed by the previous generation at the behest of willing Germans who artificially devalued the mark (relative to the drachma, peseta etc, ie the Euro) in order to export.

None of what you said proves or even explains anything . This 'wealth' that you mention can only be stolen and hoarded if the debts it relies upon is serviced and remain performing . There is ultimately a balance sheet that CAN NOT be squirrelled away in any kind of haven , the growth in money supply and inflation was not at all obscure , it was 100% predicted and visible by everyone unless they chose to ignore it . The effects of the over leverage could be seen in inflationary property bubbles ( clue as to why a certain website came into existence) Things came up a head in 2007-8 when the music stopped . This do called wealth theft was ad vulnerable to a correction as it ever was . The problem was the central banks had backdropped this leverage with cheap artificial funding for years and their political masters had become addicted to the cheap money driven tax yields . There was NOTHING a deregulated market correction couldn't have cured , instead they chose a distorted , long term correction based on hopes of debt inflation and paid for by the asset less . Please don't fall for the secret, nobody knew, aren't these Masonic chaps so clever bullcrap. We had cheap money , off balance sheet inventories, debt leverage but it was all pretty predictable and observable even to a cretin

Double post

If you consider that to a bad thing . I don't , I see the problem being a lender of last resort and market rigging . No amount of regulation other than prohibition would prevent disaster when the market is distorted. there's nothing inherently immoral with leverage , excessive lending , etc etc just like there's nothing immoral about gambling . What it ought to destroy is your credibility which destroys you if you rely on your credit . Lenders of last resort, deposit guarantees , bail outs , these are all the causes of the problem not deregulation

Not wishing to express an opinion on Germany without any hard evidence I still think people areas sing the main point about the EU. The reason Cypris, Greece, Spain et al. can be bullied by the EU is because they can . This whole German creditor/ rest of eu debtor scenario will come to a head one day when the largest gouger of tomorrow's promises of all (France) runs out if credit . The Germans will then find out that controlling a currency when you have no real military is a pretty unworkable idea. You can't collect debts off a man with hungry kids if he has a gun and you don't .

If he caves he's a poor poker player IMHO . If he gives in to Europe he's political toast, if he stands up to the EU they'll blink as they have every time . Even if they don't then Cyprus is in no worse position tomorrow if they defaulted. It doesn't matter what deal they strike their banks will have no euros left by next week . Better they default and fill their banks with Cypriot pounds