Strangely Perfect

Guillotine and “The Reign of Terror” Funny how I missed this during the summer – I was in hospital, I think. This video is Henry Paulson, stumbling and squirming, as he struggles to evade quite simple questions for someone in his position.  (I talked about his deceit last year here and here, at the start [...]

fastloanmodification.com These Californian chumps sent me some spam early today which took me to this page: http://www.fastloanmodification.com/?mediatag=15666&kw=&click_id=5195940&sub_id=371493208 “Lovely”, I thought.  “Just what I need!” “But I’d better check those pesky Terms and Conditions… I’ve heard they can be quite stringent!” Amazingly, in a complete reversal of typical Google Money Bollox, Acai Scam, Green Tea and [...]

Introduction While fishing around for some chords I came across azchords.com – as you do.  They’ve a shedload of Google ads and I accidentally hit the banner ad while trying to get rid of pesky popups (why do sites still do this now?)  I was taken to the website of someone called Kevin Hoeffer and [...]

Willie Sutton In a curious parallel with the Great Depression when many millions lost their homes and money, I’m reminded about the phrase reputedly said by a USA bank robber of the time, and how it could equally well be applied to our current predicament…. When asked “Mr Sutton, why do you rob banks?”, he [...]

Clearly, there is something wrong with the motor and finance industries of the world (a.k.a America for this article, because when America sneezes, the world catches a cold). We are all acutely aware how their problems affect us. We believe that we live in healthy democracies where we vote for the people and systems that [...]

Many moons ago I read the short story with the above title. Although not one of Pohl’s best works, it has nevertheless left an obviously lasting impression on me. Written in the mid-fifties, it’s a future tale of consumerism gone mad. In the tale, it’s illegal not to consume as much as possible.  The hero [...]

Truly this car is the pits. -and here’s how.. The engineers seem to have responded with the most short-term planning possible to a demand from the BMW marketing department to make the company look green now that sales of their monster cars are down 40%.  Some “ad” bloke has said “clean electricity, that’s the way [...]

Happenstance, Circumstance or Co-incidence? In Ian Fleming’s “Goldfinger”, the villain, Auric Goldfinger uses part of the above phrase after bumping into James Bond several times.  The second time he actually says to Mister Bond; Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action In this article (Warning signs that may force committee to think [...]

Mortgage approvals hit fresh low In a shocking admission, the banking community has said that for years, they’ve lent to really dodgy cases. This is what I understand by the sentence, “The number of new mortgages approved for home buyers fell in July to just 33,000 – down by 71% on a year ago”. Furthermore, [...]

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 – [...]