Killer_penguin

Why to take mortgage in a currency in which your wages or pension is paid? It is much better to play the FX and take mortgagee in foreign currency to buy a house, which is denominated in different currency. I mean people do not know the risk involved in taking loans not in the currency they earn to buy a property in even different currency, this is a basic error with high risk of exchange rates working against you. But then again if they would have worked for her and CHF with EUR would have fallen against GBP she would not have been complaining. But hey there is no free lunch...

I feel it is over the top complaint from the businessman, he should have asked more questions when entering into the agreement. I mean you don't sign anything if you don't know what will happen if one or another event occurs. It is very easy to make basic calculations and see the potential impact. Another issue is that the journalist does not understand the principle of swaps, which are used to hedge against rise of interest rates. As businessman agreed to hedg his exposure to rise in interest rates and pay fixed rate so it's quite obvious that if interest rates fall he will need to pay more to the bank but if interest rates rise he will benefit and will get money from his bank. He basically wants to benefit when interest rates fall but minimize exposure of raise in interest rates. You can't have win-win situation but If he would have wanted to benefit from any favorable movement in interest rates, he should have used options instead of swaps. Maybe the whole problem is to do with the lack of knowledge of the businessman or unwillingness to consult his accountant.

I cannot see QE3 until announced until October or November and only providing that economic data is pretty bad. But probably once QE3 comes and if it comes it will be in a different shape than QE2, Fed may decide to buy different type of assets to limit the inflationary impact on commodities.

UK has bigger financial services sector in which a lot of accountants are employed. So it is natural that number will be higher in Germany also in UK accountancy is quite popular sector but although many people finishing accounting, they may not actually be working as accountants. In general I do agree that big 4 are non value adding entities in economy much like rating agencies. Many of employees in BIG 4 are nothing more as box tickers without any idea on what they are actually doing but with huge EGO.