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TimBJones

Listed below are comments made by TimBJones between Monday, 23rd February 2009 and Wednesday, 30th September 2009.

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Seven months for The Sun to boost Cameron 6:31pm on 30 Sep 2009 re 82. Of course the recent anti BBC comments by the Tory front bench were to woo Murdoch. And the current campaign by the Murdochs to reduce the size of the BBC, especially its online presence, was Murdoch naming his price to the politicians.

But Murdoch has come out early. It allows Labour to do some News Corp bashing without worrying about the consequences.

May I suggest that it adds Premier League football and the European Champions League football to the TV reserve list (the list of sporting events that cannot be only on Pay-TV)? Everyone I know who subscribes to Sky says they wouldn't if Sky didn't have the football. Put it on free to air TV. A £5 increase in the license fee should pay for it. At a stroke it would remove Sky's dominence of the TV market but more importantly it would save all us football fans about £28.50 a month without any loss of the service we want. We could spend that on other things.

So it would be very popular with the voters.

Gordon could then ask DC if he would reverse it. If DC says 'yes' then he upsets the voters who have just saved £28.50 per month. If he says 'no' he will upset Murdoch. A win-win for Gordon.

It would be disasterous for Murdoch and so good for British politics as his influence would diminish. It would be good for football fans although the Premiership players would need to take a pay cut.

If Gordon is to get reelected he needs to start scrapping.
What future for media and journalism? 8:15pm on 29 Aug 2009 One of the many things the internet does is make to make much information readily available and often free. So any business that is in the world of selling information, be it news, or just knowledge is going to find things increasingly hard. One of the many reasons why China has become increasingly inportant economically is that its industrialists no longer need to buy in knowledge, they can now just Google much of it.

In the same way that the internet search engine has fundamentally changed the balance of economic power between those with knowledge and those with cheap labour because it has massively reduced the cost of information, so will it massively reduce the money coming into news organisations. Clipping the wings of the BBC may slow this process down, but it will not stop it.

State sponsored news organisations maybe the only way forward if we wish to preserve news sources that people trust. The internet makes news at the point of reading it free, BBC or no BBC.
An equality of shame? 11:19pm on 21 May 2009 'and that he would have been spared a lot of grief if he'd simply claimed thousands of pounds in mortgage interest (as, say, his leader has done).'
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I think that this is an important point that has been understood by the politicians but glossed over by the journalists.

The MPs who have bought excessively expensive houses claiming the full allowance as mortgage interest have potentially benefitted with big capital gains (and a nice expensive house to live in) at the tax payers expense. These houses are probably more expensive than is reasonble to do the job but have allowed certain MPs to claim the full allowance while getting a 'clean' bill of health on expenses from most of the press.

But if these houses are excessive they are just as guilty of overclaiming as the Duck House and gardening men who have had to stand down.

Maybe the journalists have largely ignored this because it is difficult to determine what is an unneccesarily expensive house, especially without a lot of research, or doesn't make such a good read as Duck Houses, moats, phantom mortgages and mock Tudor beams.

I notice that in the temporary rules published yesterday claims for mortgage interest have been limited suggesting that the MPs have understood that some of their colleagues have got off with little criticism while being able to pocket the lot.
A question of when, not if 9:57pm on 18 May 2009 #86 Humberstonian

'A BASIC salary and nothing else for all MP's of 100k with Cabinet ministers receive 135K.NO CLAIMS for expenses allowed at all for anything.'

I may be wrong but I think that if you increase their salaries to cover expenses you also increase their pensions. So effectively we end up paying out the expenses more than once (and giving the MPs from outside London more pension than the London members).

I think that many MPs would see such an outcome from this scandal as a very profitable result for them.

Expenses of doing the job needs to be kept separate from remuneration for doing it. Muddling them up got them into this mess in the first place. Everyone else manages this. If they are not paid enough then pay them more but it should be a separate issue from expenses (if they had had the backbone to do that years ago then we would be discussing something else).

Personally i also think they need to stop paying mortage interest as well. Rent for the second home is OK but mortgage interest allows for a capital gain to the MP paid for by the tax payer. A wealthy MP, who has the cash flow to finance his own expenses is able to trouser the full allowance with a straightforward claim for mortgage interest on one of his properties. He still gets all the money but avoids headlines about moats, mock Tudor beams and flipping. The poorer MPs have to trawl through every tenuous receipt they can to get the same income as a wealthy MP.

I have just seen the Speaker's performance. They obviously want him out as the first sacrifice.
A question of when, not if 7:19pm on 18 May 2009 The media have hanged him so he will go. The media won't give up until they have their victims. The facts are no longer relevant.
HBOS: Strong men will weep 8:05pm on 27 Feb 2009 #254 EBAHGUM

An off balance sheet liability is something that is close to being a liability of the organisation but has been structured in such a way that it doesn't meet the technical definition of a liability.

For example an operating lease is off balance sheet because you do not show your liability to make payments on the balance sheet. With a finance lease you capitalise the item and show the full liability. But with an operating lease just the rentals go through the profit and loss account. Yet in both cases you use the asset in the same way. The difference relates to who holds the risk of ownership.

Another example is the PFI funding. Technically the risk of the project to build say a hospital doesn't sit with the Government but with the private financiers. So the funding liabilities don't go on the governments balance sheet. So by transfering the risk to the private sector (for a huge fee payable by the government of course) the Government justifies keeping the liabilities off the books. Even though in practise if the private financiers could not meet their obligations the liabilities would fall into the government's lap. As may soon happen.
RBS: big losses, big bailout 6:04pm on 26 Feb 2009 It is a sign of the times we are in that the BBC report doesn't bother to mention that RBS's results have been improved by the change in the accounting standard IAS 39 Financial Instruments: Measurement and Recognition. Had the standard not been changed the loss would have been a little bit bigger (GBP5.3billion bigger). Minor detail.

RBS also plans to reduce or sell off its operations in 36 of the 54 countries it operates in. Just at the time it will probably get the least value for them in 50 years. Gordon Brown and gold reserves comes to mind.
Taxpayers to insure £500bn of bank assets 12:41pm on 24 Feb 2009 For those that think that Gordon Brown is harming the future of our children by excessive borrowing, maybe that is the least of their problems.

Not only are we going to run out of cheap oil shortly, making getting about prohibitively expensive but there was someone on the Today programme yesterday predicting that the world population would fall from nearly 7 billion to 1 billion by the end of the century (due to global warming).

Fortunately he admitted that he could be wrong.

He said the hot countries were the ones in trouble but the survivors would be in the cold countries and fertile countries like Canada, New Zealand and the UK. So maybe the UK is not such a bad place to be.

So Gordon making a pig's ear of the economy maybe just a minor historical detail and nothing to get too worked up about.
Taxpayers to insure £500bn of bank assets 10:15pm on 23 Feb 2009 Robert said

"Taxpayers may become liable for £500bn of poor loans and investments made by Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds TSB, the BBC has learned."

Once it was decided that these institutions were too big to fail the tax payer had become liable for these losses in all but name anyway. Also the losses of any other UK too big to fail institution that has solvency problems.

By making the banks absorb the first 10% loss all you would be doing is taking out the capital that was put in by the Government last year. So pointless.

If this underwriting is sufficient to allow these banks to operate properly and commercially then it has to be done. The alternative is them to be zombie banks which are no good to anyone. But the government should prescribe rules about investment in British businesses (not houses) as it is the British tax payer that is underwriting them. I mean real rules not just 'we would like you to...'. The British tax payer has no desire to support employment overseas, but wants UK banks to underpin the UK economy.
Rock revival 6:55pm on 23 Feb 2009 I am starting to think that the FTBers who are waiting for houses to be genuinely affordable are going to have a very long wait. With a shortage of houses and an increasing population those with money will buy to let before we get down to 3.5x salary of most FTBers.

As an investment even in this recession houses have so far lost less value than shares and most peoples' pension pots. We like owning houses, we trust them anyway more than we trust bankers and fund managers. For those with money they have been a good investment.

Rents may go down caused by unemployment. Unemployment will also take other investments down as well. Houses may soon be a better investment again than most other things.

If FTBers hold off longer than the BTLers then we will have a landlord class and a tenant class. Which are you and your children going to be in? If you don't want to be the perpetual tenants then you will need to buy before prices become 3x salary.

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