. . . there won’t be one. According to the FT: “Gordon Brown has been the most disastrous PM of all time for pensions; after just 1.3 years in office, Brown has presided over a negative annual return of 28.2% – only Neville Chamberlain is in that league, having overseen an 11% drop in the [...]
Monthly Archives: November 2008
On the other hand . . .
November 24, 2008 – 6:07 pm
According to the FT, The Bank of England’s base rate is expected to fall below 2% for the first time since the Bank was formed in 1694. Strange days indeed, but we shouldn’t pop the Pomagne corks. The UK has always been a nation of usurors and rubes. Credit card interest rates will maintain that [...]
The Great Train Robbers
November 24, 2008 – 11:18 am
The iniquity of the UK train operators’ stranglehold on a captive traveller since the botched 1993 privatisation, when a patchwork of mini-monopolies replaced the monolithic British Rail is well-documented. The network itself – tracks, stations, signals, overhead electric cables and all the costly stuff needed to run a railway – collapsed accordingly and was taken [...]
Ahoy there me hearties…
November 24, 2008 – 9:55 am
Pirates are suddenly everywhere: Indian Navy sinks Pirate Ship, Somali Pirates Hijack Saudi Oil Tanker: Cadbury’s Old Jamaica chocolate bar futures are set to surge. Why the sudden interest? Piracy is not new. Nor is this revival of interest so ephemeral either. We have had quite a few Pirates of the Caribbean to contend with [...]
Fiscal scriscal, fiddle-dee dee, Europe's suddenly OK with me
November 21, 2008 – 6:17 pm
Before spreadsheets enabled geeks to assume they could manipulate the economic weather, we knew that if we spent too much, we’d run out of money. If we ran out of things to sell or do in return for more money, we’d be in trouble. If we borrowed money at unrealistic interest rates, we’d be in [...]
Trouble at t'mill: I've just agreed with a Tory
November 20, 2008 – 7:40 pm
Julia Hobsbawm, the persuasive daughter of the world’s most celebrated Marxist historian invited me to get up very early today for an Editorial Intelligence Briefing. We heard a thoughtful homily from Yasmin Alibhai-Brown about Baby P and what this told us about our expectations of the nanny state. We are generally on the same side. [...]
Crunch goes the art market
November 20, 2008 – 4:50 pm
Sotheby’s shares lost 80% of their value since January 2008. The bank of Ponzi has stopped printing Mickey Mouse currency for idiots to buy pickled sharks at loony prices on the greater fool market. Why are we not surprised? It’s deja vu all over again (pace Sam Goldwyn). Although the media have focused on the [...]
There is a word for it ….
November 19, 2008 – 4:41 pm
I love online dictionaries. Does this make me a Dork, a Geek or a Nerd? I especially like the OneLook Reverse Dictionary. If you ever feel lost for words, take a concept that leaves you speechless, put it in, and out come the suggestions. One concept that has been leaving me speechless recently is how [...]
God in one ear, Cheney in the other. "W" The Movie.
November 17, 2008 – 8:17 pm
George W Bush comes off lightly in the new biopic, ‘W’ to the dismay of pinko liberals everywhere. Oliver Stone was scripted to serve up a tale of a neocon Golem, spoiled rich son of a former CIA Director turned one-term President whose legacy was that he did not annex Iraq. He fixed the polls in [...]
Human capital is only useful if you don't break the bank
November 16, 2008 – 11:30 pm
The mantra of the Third Way seems to be about “capabilities”. UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband pontificated in The New Statesman that this it is about creating an “I can” society. But what exactly is the point of all this? Coming from a Development background, it took me a while to realise that all politics, [...]