Strangely Perfect

How Bad was Thatcher’s Recession compared to the Current Economic Slump? Q. Well, how would you find out, exactly? A. Surprisingly easily.  This graph here compares historical economic slumps with the current one, on a month by month basis.  It’s taken from the “National Institute of Economic and Social Research” (NIESR) website here.  Notionally, it’s [...]

Too Little, Too Late, Gordon Brown This morning, PM Gordon Brown told Andrew Marr that he wants to ‘clean up’ parliament. He wants a ‘code of conduct’ for MPs to follow. The thing is, there’s already a code of conduct – it’s called the law! All we,  ‘the people’ want, is to have reasonable laws [...]

From the Department of the Bleeding Obvious World Bank warns of social unrest In this little snippet we find that bad things are going to happen because of the financial crisis! I we consider that the top bank in the world is “The World Bank” (i.e. it’s in the name), and the top bank has [...]

Highlighting the Differences in Public Health provision, the Attitudes to Death and Responsibilities of the State and the Individual to Public Welfare. The title is the biggest bit – trust me. Introduction This takes us from today’s news from America and the Duffy’s Cut project to a tiny hamlet in Northumberland, England, called Throckrington. Duffy’s [...]

It Goes From Bad to Worse! RBS In a completely passive demonstration of non-government and how toothless our government’s words are, it’s now been shown that not only does former RBS gaffer, Fred Goodwin get a massive pension of ~£33k monthly take-home, but the pot from which it’s being taken is already £2 billion under-funded!! [...]

Yay!  Today, 15 Nov 2008, with only a few weeks of his tenure as US President left to go, he still can’t stop saying one thing and doing the other. Bush warns over ‘protectionism’ is the news today.  This is at the Washington meeting of 20 countries, the G20, which represent 85% of the global [...]

- well not exactly – yet!  But I’ll let you know soon. Today’s news that Key finance firms will be ‘probed by FBI’ should be a bit of a pointer. If you take the opinion, as I do, that the difference between swindling and incompetence with regard to the actions of professional people within their [...]

Following on from the two bombers landing in Venezuela only 11 days ago (which I reported here when talking about the decreasing effectualness of Bush and USA power in the world), they will shortly be joined by a mean and capable looking ship called Peter the Great as well as a few others. They are [...]

As a follow up to my earlier post us-nationalises-banks-while-russia-devalues-the-rouble-total-irony pointing out the sharp reversal in political and economic fortunes of the (former) two world superpowers, I remembered something from last month. An American friend decided to post a present for my family here in the UK.  I (and then we) ended up having to pay [...]

The latest news from HSBC (Warning as HSBC profits fall 28%), looks pretty dire, (“oh no!  28% down, jump from the windows“), so I’ll be closing my account then, should I? Lets put it in context…. Last year, some chickens came home to roost for people who’d over-leveraged their investments to bolster their lifestyles – [...]

More on the Julius Baer (un)Trust(worthy) goings on with WikiLeaks. I’ve uploaded the documents as a public service. If everyone does this then they can’t close everyone!