Be Excellent To Each Other

He said something mean about APOD's rich mates'/clients' tax avoidance.

Have you got a link to the article?

I think it was this one:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... of-century

Cool, I'll read it and make my own judgements. Ta.

I honestly didn't see what Monbiot had done wrong there (I tend to like his stuff on the whole, by way of full disclosure), but then I'm not as financially literate as some.

It's one of those times that having knowledge genuinely feels like a curse. 99% of people would reasonably agree with him on the facts presented.

You can prove anything with facts, though, APOD.

Fair one, can you give some citations to demonstrate where he is wrong in this article. I've got my skeptical head on here so totally open to listening to both sides.

Hmm, in the linked article he does acknowledge the Hand of Blair in all that, y'know.

And it does all look pretty honestly put, and damming. But yes, what do we "99%" know

Northern Rock to be sold to Virgin Money for £747million.

Sky News says:



Which is all jolly exciting.

You know how to pitch tents on concrete. Which is quite the feat.

How come it can make more money from it in the future?

%age of profits, gains from targets being hit, etc? Probably a clause in there to give Virgin Money confidence in the profitability of the bank, and to ease their risk exposure to the sale?

Does this mean they can finally pay back all that money they owe me?

Kissyfur owes me more money.

What, because Gideon is as much a language mangling retard as the average member of the public?

He doesn't mean "the taxpayer", anyway - he means the Treasury. As well you know.

Yeah, of course I know. But the public he's addressing don't, and that was why you owe me (or maybe Craster, can't remember) a lot of money.

No, the public do too. If they really really thought they personally owned the banks they'd be rocking up there asking for dividends.

People who I'd quite like to know the difference between the Treasury and the taxpayer: The Chancellor

This is the same argument you lost last time, remember?

Won, you mean. Did you ever run the poll with the right question?

Yes, pretty much exactly as you said it. Before you changed your mind and said it in lawyer-speak, of course.

No, you asked the wrong question. The whole point is that people use "taxpayer" as equivalent to "government" and don't think they personally own the bank as a taxpayer, so the question needed to address that latter point.

You said that last time too, but that's still the point Craster was making, not you.

[edit]See?

Eh? I was making that point in that very post.

It is?

The rioter/looter quoted as saying "We're taking our taxes back from the banks, innit?" very much suggests the public haven't got a fucking clue about anything that involves money.

See also the massive personal debt we have in this country, and people thinking >100% mortgages were great, let's have several. And Brighthouse. And payday loans companies.

Making the massive assumptions that said rioter had actually paid taxes, and was stealing something from a bank, then he had a point - taxpayers' money did indeed go to the banks, it's just that the taxpayer doesn't then own the bank (as everyone knows, even rioters).

However, I suspect he hadn't paid taxes and was nicking something from Lidl, so he's just a retard.



Word. See also - FarePak and suchlike.

This is quite cute.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/blog/2011/ ... -bank-live

But ultimately futile and costing even more taxpayers' money.

Ha! From the comments against this article comes a corker:It's a broken analogy that doesn't fit reality yadda yadda - I just think it's funny.

Posted this on RLLMUK, but I ended up in the middle of a protest/parade on Saturday. Even got interviewed for radio (cue Mrs P saying "you're such a media whore" - they approached me!).

OK, so I'm in the middle of Dublin on Saturday and just finished off a bit of lunch outside Dublin Castle. Next thing I know, there is a massive protest/parade passing by. The Spectacle of Hope and Defiance, organised by a lot of community groups in protest at the ongoing cuts to funding and budgets in Dublin.

The parade was led by children from the local community carrying tombstones for all the inner city projects that either had been closed or were threathened with closure.



People followed behind with slogans painted on butterflies or with placards. I think that the youth groups in the march had been working on them as projects.







Then we had a couple of floats - I liked the design of this one.



Ex-Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, who built the Celtic Tiger has retired with an annual pension of 152,331. Although to be fair, he did take a cut in it last week. He'll really miss that 4,200 they lopped off it.



Of course, no protest is complete without drummers.



And a clown making balloon animals



And the bloody Socialist Worker.



Those stuck in the traffic jam didn't mind.



The Scales of Injustice, complete with Marie Antoinette throwing cake out to those below.



One of the Marie Antoinettes. Cake not pictured.



Of course, the protest covers all of the people in Ireland. So here is a group of bankers on the way to the golf course.




And a banking fat cat, who threw cake at anyone photographing him (he was a good shot).



One of the EU Bondholders, who handed out Euros to the crowd.





The fat cat makes his way past the Bank of Ireland. The Bondholder shouts at him "Darling, look, it is our cash machine! Do you have the ATM card?", which I thought was pretty funny.



Finally, the back of the parade was brought up by this huge phoenix.



All in all, good fun and quite uplifting to see the turn out and support, not just from the parade itself but the people it was passing by. Pretty much brought Dame Street to a halt, but it was all good natured and friendly. Special mention to the Gardai, who was more interested in keeping traffic moving - if this was the Met, it would have been truncheons, kettling and nicking of cameras. It really brought home just what a bunch of cunts the policing of protest in the UK is.

That's amazing! They seem to have a generally better approach to demonstrating over there.. Good pics.

Unsubstantiated at the present, but:
http://twitter.com/#!/cormacholly



Not a bad return on the bailout, even if it takes as long as 15 years.

I eagerly await my share of the 22bn.

OH WAIT, MAYBE TAXPAYERS IS THE WRONG WORD.

...£34Bn profit in 10-15 years, eh? ZOMG!

Wahey, perhaps HM Government should completely fail to regulate the UK banking sector more often! Allowing said banks to gamble/short themselves into the ground and expect the hapless UK taxpayer to shore them up to the tune of multi-billions of pounds, at the expense of hundreds of thousands of jobs, important capex and infrastructural investment and near collapse of the entire UK economy - I must confess that it looked like economic mismanagement on a catastrophic scale at the time to me, but hey, apparently not! Actually it was a GENIUS MONEY MAKING SCHEME! Thank goodness for those banks, eh?

Hurrah!

Yippee... Cavey is back...

Yay, hello Cavey.

Hiya guys. Couldn't resist that one!

/waves

He only came back because he heard there was £22billion being shared out.

OK, so I'm not an accountant, but surely borrowing £37bn, then getting back £48bn over about 20 years doesn't count as "£11bn profit"? Interest on the borrowed £37bn and the fact that all those extra guarantees on our balance sheet probably raised the cost of our other borrowing must wipe out that £11bn pretty much entirely.

Don't try to apply logic to the situation. This is banking fer chrissakes!

Indeed mate, and that even assumes that the underlying 10- or 15 year projection upon which all of this is based, and no doubt the sweeping assumptions about the UK and world economy during all of that time that in turn underpins it, is even remotely on the money (no pun intended). The kind of people making these projections are presumably of the same ilk as those who claim that the financial crisis itself was 'unforeseeable', that the Euro was a great idea, lending money to sovereign states was, by default, risk-free and that the likes of Greece, Portugal, Ireland et al, not to mention grossly over-leveraged banks like Lehmans, RBS, HBOS etc. all deserved solid platinum credit ratings.

As you quite rightly point out though, even if we swallow this whole and assume it's absolutely correct, the real cost of money is far from zero (most especially the commercial cost of money for bailing out a failed enterprise on some supposed 15-20 year timeframe; it's hardly as though these banks could obtain this credit from anyone else at the time?), so if you compound up this interest on £37bn over 15-20 years, you get a very big number to subtract from this supposed bottom line. The very fact that this crudely misleading line is being taken at all smacks of bias and a political agenda to me, as you allude to.

So, excuse me if I take such predictions, from people like this (who may well have a vested interest in putting these failed banks in a good light to the infuriated UK taxpayer?) with a neutron star's mass of sodium chloride? To be brutally frank here, anyone who gives pretty much any credence to stuff like this really does deserve to have their head examined IMO. But hey, what do I know etc.

I think the bailout of Northern Rock was the right thing to do - a full blown bank panic would have been horrific. However, the government did it because letting a high street bank fail would have have really damaged the economy, not because of any profit or lose considerations. That it'll roughly pay for itself is good, and probably not that surprising, seeing as Northern Rock was suffering from a major liquidity crisis, not huge losses as such, but it shouldn't used as some sort of post hoc rationalisation of the government stepping in in the first place. Saving Northern Rock was an action taken to prop up the banking system, not an attempt to make some profit 20 years down the line - whether it was a good or bad decision is not really dependant on any profit made by 2025.

According to the source link, it equates to a 4.5% rate of return. Which isn't stellar, but isn't bad by government investment standards either. Governments don't invest money, they borrow it.

I'm not suggesting this definitely vindicates the bailout -- we'll never know one way or another if it was a good move, because we don't have an alternate reality where the bailout didn't happen. Without that we cannot know what the cost of letting the banks fail would have been. It's pure buffoonery to suggest we know for sure if it was the right idea or not.

Still, I'd suggest the fact that government can -- according to one set of figures at least [1] -- claim to be emerging from the bailout not only with the original stake returned but with a non-stupid return on the investment is pretty interesting stuff. Given that some chatter at the time was that Labour had just piled up £22bn and set fire to it, I'd tentatively suggest this whole bailout thing wasn't as badly managed as some would have you believe.

[1] And admittedly they come from the institute doing the management of the fund, so on the one hand they clearly have vested interests in presenting a positive view. But on the other hand, it's a published report that will be subjected to hostile scrutiny; I assume that if they simply made shit up then the Tory party would give them a kicking over it. A brief review of the headlines suggests this hasn't happened, so presumably the numbers in the report aren't total bulldust. I remain open the possibility they are, though.

Sigh. Here's what the piece that you posted actually says:



In other words, a 3.5-4.5% annual rate of return (note: NOT 4.5%) as compared to a "notional" cost of money of 3.9%. So, even at this ridiculously cheap "notional" rate of borrowing (that the busted banks themselves would never have got anywhere near getting commercially, as Barclays found out at the time and had to borrow at vastly higher rates of interest than this I might add), the actual NET rate of return is predicted to be ZERO; Squirt is quite right. And as I'm the first to admit, I know *fuck all* about banking and finance...

Your last post demonstrates that you know significantly more than I do.

Which is actually a hell of a lot better than the doommongers who shouted about how bailing out the bank was actually throwing good money after bad and cost everyone £22bn (or whatever it was). If (and it's a very big if) those figures and predictions are proved true, it will cost the taxpayer nothing and saved a bank in the meantime. I call that a pretty good result, regardless of whether that was the intention.