Huguenot

Great one CS ;-).... "My only hope regarding this economic situation is that it'll force us all to really examine the money in our pockets and how we spend it, ie actually purchasing things based on their 'value' and not their 'price'." It does raise a few obvious questions: Why should you care about other people buying expensive goods, it's their money? Why do you think that your idea of value is the right one? Why do you want to force other people to follow you? I remember a debate over my sixteenth birthday present with my Dad, who wanted to buy me three polyester ties instead of the single silk tie I had chose for the same price. A disagreement about 'value', I reckon. Life is about more than functionality. It's populated with symbols of self-expression, of culture, of beauty, of shared ambitions and most particularly of education and achievement. I suspect therein lies the problem with ED's arts and crafts shops. Disruptive kids at school try to ruin the educational process for all, because these idle wasters realise that they'll only have a power base if everyone is as f*cked up as they are. Most often they fail, and end up at the bottom of the pile, with limited choices and a reservoir of resentment to rival the Hoover Dam. I wonder whether people who resent the arts and crafts shops do so because they remind them of the wasted indolence of their youth, their failed strategies to achieve a kakistocracy. A government of the shittest. These impoverished misanthropes despise the people who shop in trinket emporia because they worked hard, gained qualifications, cultivated their careers, respected the system and came out on top. Knick-knack browsers earned the right to buy products that didn't just work, but were aesthetically rewarding and improved their environment. For those left behind by their own design, it must feel like everyone is rubbing their noses in it. It must be equally galling to discover that, as it happens, life's hard working winners don't care. The winners believe that the antisocial tendencies displayed by these retail-luddites is just another manifestation of gambo spitting in the classroom. It achieved nothing then, and it'll achieve nothing now. I hope ED's arts and crafts shops survive any recession, because life deserves to be about more than just the daily grind. A lot of the stuff I find in them doesn't appeal personally, but some does, and that's good enough for me. Without such variety the whole three score and ten would be such a waste of time.

Neologism #3,277: Fisknacious. [fisk - ney - shuhs] - adjective Showing latent tendency to fisk; inclined to fisk readily; fisksome Origin - 2009 EDF, HAL2009, demonstrating tendency to pedantry reflected in fictional sociopathic CPU of similar name ;-)

So what is a more palatable solution...? I'd like to see: *an increase in cash reserves compared with loan exposure *a reduction in repayment periods for credit (ensuring the real economic environment for repayment schedules is more transparent) *bonus payments for senior financial executives vested in shares over decades not months (exposing them to the long term impact of short term decisions, encouraging them to remain with one firm rather than more opportunistic behaviour) *broader bonus terms based on holistic business success rather than divisional targets (meaning executives are exposed to the destruction certain strategies can wreak in other market areas) *restrictions on derivative products that make speculative investments now, based on projected market conditions in the future

Sorry, on re-reading, you were referring to wage deflation as a threat to repayment schedules? Well, yes and no. From a bank-centric point of view, the banks are only required to make profit over and above costs. If costs are dropping through deflation, then service fees such as interest can drop accordingly. This is preferable to bankruptcy - the natural consequence of excessive repayment defaults. Tragically this only applies if the employees of the banks suffer the long term consequences of their decisions. It doesn't work if one annual bonus is enough to keep them in gold slippers for life.

Offtopication: Can you believe her daughter and mates? Complaining about where she bought the flat???? When I finished my A-levels, that was it. No more money. Nothing. My Dad bought me a PC once as a 26th birthday present. Apart from that, nowt. Ontopication: Where do we get this 'banking is theft' thing from? Is it the same place as 'property is theft'?

Lol! I'm praying for devaluation. My cash holdings were/are in sterling. Last summer when I was otherwise diverted UK:$SG was 1:2.8, now it's 1:2.24. So I'm already 20% down on my capital when I wasn't watching. A 4% correction would mean I'm only 15% down. Yay. Bring it on. If you're talking about wage deflation in the sense of salary cuts, I'm not impacted directly as I'm self-employed and effectively paid on dividend. I already suffer wage-deflation if the business slows. Regarding wage-deflation in the greater marketplace, well really it's the same thing as cutting spending power through inflation or currency management. At least wage-deflation is transparent. My view is that there is a mismatch between 'western' individual spending power (the top 20% of the world's population) and their contribution to global wealth generation. In other words I think western peeps are getting rich off the backs of developing world workers. I would like to see an correction in the spending power of individuals across the world to see wages come more into line with contribution. If that means wage-deflation in the UK and inflation in China and India, well, we saw it coming didn't we?

Okay, so I've bored myself now with watching this sanctimonious twaddle. It appears to make several key assertions that challenge wealth creation as debt: * Interest is amoral and a sin * Money supply exceeds existing value * It only works alongside growth * The natural endpoint is that the banks own everything and we are slaves * That this is a massive conspiracy against the people by an illuminati * That banks should be nationalised and interest should be outlawed * That money supply should be tied to existing value I have no tolerance for religious arguments about usury. The facilitation of all services is necessary for any investment, these services may be the acquisition of goods or labour, or the provision of money to pay advance fees (before value is extracted). Interest is merely the bank's 'service' fee for providing the service. Interest also provides a useful check on the system, as it discourages excessive borrowing, and encourages efficiency. Money supply is supposed to exceed existing value, as it's predicated on future repayment - i.e. not the sum total of our value now, but our future value when we have reaped the rewards of our investment. FRB does not only work alongside growth. This is incorrect. FRB is only profitable if the banking system continues to issue new loans. However, FRB doesn't cease to work if the supply of new loans dries up, as the repayment of previous loans continues. Not much fun for the bankers though. The 'enslavement' of the population is only theoretically possible if the average joe on the street takes out more in loans than they are capable of repaying based on future earnings. If this happened on a large scale, FRB would fail without the repayments and the banks would close. This is effectively what happened last year. It didn't result in enslavement, it resulted in nationalisation. See 'Credit Crunch' for more details - it's a natural correction of poor banking practices. The illuminati consipracy is childish. Quoting drunk old men out of context is propoganda. Nationalised banks are unlikely to be able to differentiate between poor and efficient loans, because the shareholder (the voter) is the same individual who is requesting the loan. It would result in the starvation of funds for necessary but unpopular projects, as money was siphoned off to popular but pointless projects. Outlawing interest may be popular by ending what is considered to be a tax by the wealthy elite, but the reality is that it also removes natural checks and balances from our system. Interest payments ensure that bigger loans must deliver bigger returns. Finally tying money supply to existing value is short sighted. We must invest now to develop products and services that will be required in the future. This means borrowing against future value, which means money supply must exceed existing value. Overall I thought the programme was somewhat informative, but heavily one-sided. Its proposed solutions were unworkable, and the nationalisation of banking services and removal of interest is both witless and dogmatic. The proposed solution wasn't socialist, it was communist - a system involving the removal of investment incentives such as interest resulted in the collapse of soviet and chinese systems far faster than the odd credit crunch in western societies. As the programme pointed out, the western system's around 300 years old, neither of the oriental communist philosophies reached 40.

Hal9000, I think you're kinda missing the point. Fractional reserve banking isn't so much printing money, as the redistribution of money in the present against value that will be derived in the future: the loans have to be repaid for the system to work. FRB is vital for growth, but not dependent upon growth to work. Growth is the only way of sustaining new cash generation in FRB, but without growth the value of existing circulation doesn't reduce. FRB allows one to make an investment now, on the assumption of future earnings. For example, taking the gold standard referred to in the video, the outlay required for a gold mine doesn't follow proportionate to the value of the gold extracted. You have to invest heavily at first, and the return is long-term. Without FRB, this resource couldn't be exploited. The same applies with agriculture, you invest in spring to benefit in autumn. So without FRB, we couldn't feed the world. FRB isn't dependent upon growth, but is heavily reliant on the confidence that the initial assumptions will make good and the loan will be repaid. If the loans made were ill-conceived, and made assumptions about the ability to repay that in hindsight were illogical, then you get a run on the banks, and FRB stops working. The system only collapses if the bad debts exceed the reserves. In fact this isn't quite true, because you get the lemming effect (the reason why 'true' markets cannot work in execution), so sometimes perfectly functional situations will collapse because everyone gets the shits. See UK banks when the yanks and the krauts went short: we'll only guess at their motivation. Hence you can regulate FRB by increasing the requirements from cash reserves to exceed perceived threat levels. Sub-prime lending was rapidly turning out to be a mistake, as bad debt levels were consistently exceeding the assumptions made when the loans were exchanged. It only took the right two guys to start talking in a bar, and the fear that this could be a problem was enough to damage confidence, and undermine FRB. FRB loans are made against many types of future collateral such as resources, services and labour. For example, our mortgages exist on the assumption that we'll repay the debt with future labour. The confidence of home ownership encourages us to invest in our property and hence generate more wealth by improving our assets - whether that's a vegetable patch or an attic room. Growth starts to falter when FRB stops being calculated against timescales and productivity estimates that are reasonable, e.g. our working lifetime when calculating mortgages. You get massive periods of growth when we collectively believe that our society is growing faster than we expected. We get downturns like a hangover when our optimism evaporates. However, getting rid of FRB is utterly silly, and prevents us investing now to reap future benefits. Pol Pot would probably think it was a bright idea, but few others.

Hi sean, I know we've taken the mickey sometimes, but I'm sorry to hear you're leaving your company - did you get made redundant?

Terrible odds those

I understand njc97, I'll explain my interpretation, which may well be wrong: "Was almost done when I thought it best to use the calculator on my mobile to add up the cheques one more time" 'Almost done' implies a task that isn't instantaneous, and 'add up the cheques' implies there was more than one; 'one more time' implies this was a task she had done before and the repetition implies even more time passing. "I started to put away my purse and phone and gather up my papers" coupled with "I had all my things out in front of me" Implies that there was somewhere where these items were normally 'put away', but not at this stage, so they must have been brought 'out' from somewhere. Accept it may not be a handbag, it could be her pockets, or any other receptacle. Probably not a suitcase. Taking 'all my things out' initially could also imply time passing. "I was using my own pen" Implies she was writing something. For the number of cheques, see my earlier point.

Jason, yes it's very likely to be me ;-) *irony* I sympathise with her experience, I'm sorry that anyone's made any assumptions, certainly not me. I took a perspective on her written account, she described the following items: * a hellishly busy bank * an extended attendance at the machine facilities while she did her accounts * that she unpacked her handbag at the machine * that she wrote her slips with the pen at the machine for an 'number' of cheques * using her phone as a calculator at the machine (which takes time just to start, let alone pesky decimal points!) * the fact that she didn't actually have her card in the machine at any point. I assume it's the same description she shared with you? As I said, none of these are grounds for the man's overbearing demeanour, but it seems that that the first party wasn't entirely coming across as an angel. I can see that you disagree that the bank was busy, or that she used her phone, or that she wrote her slips at the machine. You also say he didn't physically harm her, which seems to conflict with her description of a thumping earlier. Your view may well be right, it simply doesn't seem to be what your wife wrote. As you can see, I felt the man's behaviour to sound thoroughly unpleasant, but the rest of the account seemed to simply suggest a more complex issue than "Woman goes to bank, gets assaulted, no-one cares". I would care, I would think it's terrible, but I just can't understand what happened here at all? Either way, I'm not sure that "she knows who you are" is going to help. Is the idea that your good lady wife points out a stranger in the street and you go and thump them? Didn't we see this somewhere before recently and it ended up in two life sentences? I'm bemused.

Polly Toynbee getting all over the EDF... But keep all this in perspective. Our politicians are among the cleanest in the world - 16th out of 180 nations and bunched less than two points from the top, according to Transparency International. Below us are the US, Belgium, France and Spain. But from the uproar, MPs stretching expense rules has been made to look like the pork barrel, backhander and bribery scams that plague other countries. Let's repeat this: our MPs are rarely corrupt. Our feral press, however, finds growing transparency and freedom of information - brought in by Labour - offers easy meat for cheap stories. These hyped up "scandals" are frivolous compared with serious investigations such as arduous and risky revelations on company tax avoidance. If only more newspapers gave the same space to investigating opaque corporate bad behaviour that they devote to expos?s of minor MPs' misdemeanours. Eternal trivia is not eternal vigilance.

I don't think there is one LegalEagle, I think Tony's dingling us ;-) We've been had, all that work for nothing.

Do they all 'feel' the same, if you know what I mean?

Rehash walk?

:D

Or in a bondage theme, we all know the Settling Teat Knot

Kittens Got Talent? Best I can do is... Got ten tit-anklets. Referring to some sort of East End jewellery perhaps.

Hark, a Welsh?

He-haw larks?

A rash whelk?

I thought this was TLS ;-)

Ermmmm. I hate being daft, but what was the anagram, did I miss it? :(

Carmina Burana - with suitable irony and lurking menace of course...