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Dull accountant man.

Listed below are comments made by Dull accountant man. between Wednesday, 21st January 2009 and Wednesday, 2nd December 2009.

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Health and safety on the way to work act 3:19pm on 02 Dec 2009 "Four men were dismantling scaffolding from around the building, and as I passed underneath..."

'nuff said. If not walking underneath was an option you could have exercised more caution. If not walking underneath was not an option contact the council.
Aren't all election promises hypothetical? 1:13pm on 30 Sep 2009 Let us not forget; we have no legitimate expectation that manifesto pledges will be adhered to and party conference promises carry even less weight. Whatever Brown Cameron and Clegg promise is worthless. Judge them by what they do.
A donor for dinner at the conference? 10:03pm on 29 Sep 2009 Mr. Crick,

Another question I hope you asked is whether Mr. Abrahams had got his money back. Gordon Brown stated the donations were illegal. The Electoral Commission rules would appear to agree. As such the Labour Party should have returned the money to Mr. Abrahams (I vaguely recall they said they would) and forfeited the same value to the Elec. Comm. (as the rules say they should).
Why ministers must never upset their drivers 9:40pm on 17 Jun 2009 Much ado over nothing?
If they want the overtime they can do what almost everyone else can - opt out from the working time directive in writing.
Three extraordinary personal decisions 3:46pm on 05 Jun 2009 "Many Labour backbenchers who were ready to call for a change of leader will now be asking themselves: "If they're not willing to act to end this, why should I?" "

If they had any sense about them many more will be thinking 'If they're not willing to act then I must'.
1213GMT - The shape of the deal emergeth 12:48pm on 02 Apr 2009 "OK, so what's the price they pay for this. To get China to stump up to the IMF they may have to agree to keep Hong Kong and Macau off a blacklist of tax havens."

This bizarre cartel's fascination with tax havens is perverse. Tax havens are not a bad thing. They serve as a canary in the coalmine for high tax countries.

Future taxpayers are being pushed into poverty by Governments without mandates to maintain specious GDP growth* despite the doublespeak of free markets and global trade. Trade is good. It lowers the cost of living for us and raises poorer nations out of poverty. Yet Governments these days maintain trade tarrifs and subsidies and cannot accept deflation even when it is benign. They are hellbent on maintaining the illusion of prosperity rather than actual productive growth.

You cannot create wealth by dividing it. Too many people are now wholly reliant on the State for their income.

If you agree with Darwin's argument that the most adaptable survives what we have had for more than a decade is going against the tide of progress. Global financial regulation was the cause of this crisis not the solution - over specialisation brings death to any species as it cannot adapt to change. Survival of the fittest requires that different economies try different things and we see which succeed. Instead we had badly stage-managed growth built on credit spending not spending real earnings.

It didn't have to be this way.

* Specious as inflation has had the better of it for a long time.
A Chile reception 01:58am on 28 Mar 2009 "This is ironic since President Bachelet is a socialist and an admirer of Gordon Brown. Today she warmly welcomed his leadership of the G20 and his efforts to seek a global solution to global economic problems."
Ironic it is not. Tragic perhaps. President Bachelet has clearly done the sensible thing by her country while Gordon Brown has talked a lot of sense but not been good to his word. The most immediate example that springs to mind is his predictions for Public Sector Borrowing Requirement. Year after year he would rattle off detailed figures for how the PSBR would be rapidly reduced to reasonable levels only to be miles adrift a mere 12 months later.
Brown is a man of words not deeds. By his inaction he will be judged.
Not quite the full sorry 6:37pm on 10 Feb 2009 "Perhaps they never will grasp fully what went wrong. But it matters that we learn the lessons, so we can design a sounder, safer financial system."

The nanny state interfering with the pricing of risk is a major factor in what got us into this mess in the first place.

In the US pressure was put on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to fund the banks for them to give out NINJA loans. In the UK the regulators sat back and twiddled their thumbs to allow our banks to get over leveraged, effectively doing the same. All in the name of a home ownership feelgood factor and a relentless rise in GDP.

We already have enough regulation. Indeed, perhaps we have too much. Too complicated and messy, it no doubt provides many loopholes and blind alleys for financial services to pass through and hide in. A simpler system, thoroughly enforced (unlike the regulations we have now) would be a better approach.

The one fundamental point I have not seen discussed often is how the banks managed to so completely misunderestimate the risks of securitisation. In a rising house price market you can get away will selling your forward income from buckets of mortgages - your next tranche of CDOs will naturally be larger so covers any defaults from the last lot and fractional reserve banking means the cash you bring in via the CDO mechanism is effectively multiplied as well. In a falling house price market the value of mortgages falls, so your next lot of CDOs is no longer enough to cover your liabilities.

That is pretty much the problem. Banks turned assets of questionable quality (mortgages) into liabilities for themselves (CDOs) and leveraged those liabilities into more assets. They were either mistaken in their belief that house prices would fall, or mistakenly believed securitisation alone somehow magically protected them from such a fall.
It wasn't a "Balls up" 1:13pm on 10 Feb 2009 Not only is Ed Balls incompetent (as his time at the Treasury with Gordon Brown ably demonstrates) he cannot read a speech put infront of him.

Ed Balls knows the importance of words. It would behove him to be more careful in future.

The charge that the Tories are a do nothing party assumes that whatever the Government does is the right thing. We know from the last decade this is not always the case. Seemingly with Labour's desire to be seen doing something they are ignoring the risk of doing the wrong thing.

I see Balls' comments, both what he said and what he claims he intended to say, as simply more hot air. He, his colleagues and no amount of experts can actually know what the future holds and nor do they definitely have the appropriate answer. He and his ilk would be bigger men for admitting this.
Restoring science to its rightful place 4:37pm on 21 Jan 2009 Have any actual physical studies been done to quantify the effect changes in CO2 have on our atmosphere? Not just quantifying the energy CO2 can absorb, but actual data on how much trace amounts can absorb in competition with all the other constituents of our air. There is only so much energy passing through the atmosphere that can be absorbed and much of it gets absorbed by water vapour. It can't be that difficult. Some sealed greenhouses with different concentrations of CO2 in them would be a simple enough test to start with.

Changes in land have been ignored until recently. The sheer variety of feedbacks the climate creates cannot yet be sufficiently modelled.(And in some cases the expected feedbacks have been found to be the reverse of the models) The number of weather data stations both vastly skew the data to reflect the northern hemisphere climate and have plummeted in number recent decades.(Particularly in Canada and Russia.) They also do not collect surface data from the 2/3rds of the earth covered by water. Satellites do. But satellites show both a short time frame, and a statistically insignificant change in global temperatures. That is why Hansen prefers the surface station data. Yet for a relatively small figure the surface station could be vastly upgraded and better distributed. We should make every effort to collect good quality data but it isn't being done.

If scientists were honest enough to admit we don't know enough and that models aren't the be all and end all of climate science we would begin getting somewhere. Instead both pro and anti man made climate change groups tend towards the extreme positions in order to get attention, and more importantly, funding.(eg It's all man's fault and we're all gonna die v It's all the sun's fault and we can pollute as much as we like) Deniers/sceptics being funded by big oil is certainly a fair charge to make, yet no one ever seems to question the pro-warming brigade being funded by Governments who will hardly balk at more reasons to tax us and more reasons to interfere. Reason and common sense went out the window years ago.

None of this removes the economic benefits from encouraging energy efficiency and more considerate use of the planet. Nor does it remove the environmental benefits of helping developing nations. They can take leaps in energy efficiencies by obtaining modern technology rather than take the small steps the West has taken over the last 2 centuries. This should come about through free trade - allowing developing nations access to our markets so they can then enjoy the prosperity we do, and afford the cleaner technologies we have. It would raise their standards of living almost immeasurably. Ultimately most of the convenient sources of power are finite and it's in everyone's interests to make them last as long as possible.

At times the proposed solutions to the threat of climate change seems almost anti-human. They would keep the developing world poor and make them more reliant on hand outs than they already are. They would depress an already struggling golbal economy. They would cause food prices to rocket. The solution to James Lovelock's perceived population bomb appears to be taking hold. Yet our world leaders and prominent scientists, while seeking to address the risk of not doing something are ignoring the risk of doing the wrong thing.

For a world apparently so hungry for change the various world leaders sure seem keen to maintain the status quo of 'us rich, them poor'. Change will happen whether we like it or not. How we adapt to those changes will be what makes the difference.

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Dull accountant man.