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SovereignJaguar

Listed below are comments made by SovereignJaguar between Monday, 19th January 2009 and Thursday, 2nd July 2009.

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What did you think of The One Show? Guest: Peter Fonda 7:19pm on 02 Jul 2009 Adrian Childs!! Get those socks off. You cannot wear socks with shorts, and secondly , for the office, get them ironed!! You look dreadful!
He failed to lead 3:49pm on 19 May 2009
#68 Dreaming Ben said:
"Personally, I'm fed up with all the bile and vitriol that is being aimed at Michael Martin. And as for all the people commenting on blogs like this one ... well, it's amazing how many "hard working taxpayers" find plenty of time to spout their drivel on the internet in the middle of the working day.
Everybody knew exactly what the system was like; there is no new information of substance in the latest furore. Yes, the system needs changing - it always has - but there is no need for everyone to get so NASTY about it!"
Obviously he wasn't dreaming around noon; but he was dreaming when he wrote the above as he is not bothered. People who use their votes are bothered, and rightly so.

This is yet another Blair fantasy (problem). If Blair had not broken with the formerly agreed principle regarding who should be Speaker this would never have happened. We could have known all about the expenses even before the last election, which could have produced a different spread of MPs.

Now we have the unedifying picture of our Parliament being held up to ridicule by all those in other countries who look for any reason to say - don't ever tell us what to do. It is so, so stupid. All those who saw the expenses system as a good way to cheat us and the IR and the other MPs who have not indulged in cheapening themselves and us, have brought about a serious disgrace of Parliament. And it is OUR parliament, where our MPs are supposed to be representing us, not themselves.

Honesty went out of the window when they decided to pay MPs, let alone bring in expenses in the 70s. Money has attracted some of the worst characters; so what about the selection process? As both leading parties take control over selection can we expect them to exercise better judgement in the future? Anyone got a crystal ball?
Why tax the rich? 1:50pm on 30 Apr 2009 #454 Mr Truthseeker.
No chancellor, the treasury, HMRC or whatever knows in advance what tax avoidance measures will be used until after they've been used! Legal obstacles et al are not easy to come up with (and the law is never known for fast results) so it is left to the next budget to stop the gaps. But every measure introduced inevitably brings with it yet more chances of avoidance.

What amount decides who is a high earner? The lower you set the limit the more ridiculous it seems when compared to the rich. If your limit of 100k were set then what would you call someone earning 200k? Or 300K? Or 500k?
Why tax the rich? 11:15am on 28 Apr 2009 What budget? Might as well spent the time on achieving something solid.
Those who think taxing the rich will solve any problem obviously are either too young to know what happens under higher taxes or do not realise that the numbers of higher earners is now dropping - fast. Those with money will always find ways to protect it - those without will pick up the tab for the tax the government has lost.

Anyway it is not about hiking the tax rate; even if nothing is done to mitigate the impact of higher taxes, the government will not be able to rake in the huge amounts it needs to repay all that borrowing. What will produce the amounts in tax take that will be needed in the future is for business to boom enabling the take from corporate taxes to get us out of this mess. And nothing this government has done so far has been of any substantial use to business in general. The high street is not going to recover until the general public regains confidence in our future when saving will ease off and spending increase. That is impacted by the high number of unemployed who cannot spend whilst using up tax take in benefits.

No matter who is in No 10 in the future we are looking at a long period of economic difficulty - minimum 5 years and more likely 10. Howso? Those of us who have experienced serious busts in the past, going back to WW2, have the experience of what it took and the time necessary to turn around and all that without a world recession. The latter is something we cannot do much about.

Now we are having all our media time taken up by the coming pandemic. That is music to our politicians ears; they are off the news. But what are they doing? Nothing much as far as one can tell. Cameron can only repeat that we are in for a period of austerity - we know that - and Brown still bleats on about the global impact completely ignoring how he sat on a boom doing nothing; he is also the most IMprudent chancellor we have had in modern times, probably all time. We should never have been in such dire straits if he HAD been prudent; we would not have needed to borrow so heavily and we could have offset some of the problems leaving us in a good position to recover. Now he will go off into the Scottish gloom with a secure future whilst the rest of us are made to suffer (all in ptoprtion, but the poorest will get the worst end of the stick). Amazing to think that any labour government could have been so detached from taking care of the poorest in society; the gap between rich and poor has widened alarmingly under Blair/Brown.
Barclays' painful deal 4:13pm on 22 Apr 2009 ~577 sagamix

in fact, it's pretty much the ONLY new Regulation I want to see

I specifically do not want to see ...

- a ban on sub prime
- a ban on greater than 100 pc mortgages
- a new Glass Seagull
- the B of E back in charge of Regulation
- interference with securitisation

So you are happy for the housing market to boom again? You think it should all happen over again? It is the lack of good regulation that allowed the present mess to arise. And when the BoE regulated the banks it knew what was necessary and did it. The FSA will never achieve the same levels of competence.
Barclays' painful deal 4:02pm on 22 Apr 2009 #569 sizzler

Sorry you do not understand which is which - try telling your local cashier she is overpaid and they are overstaffed!! She would probably be too polite to respond but she would be seething. High st banks have cut staff to the bone and do not pay well. As for interest rates then that is a market plus/minus depending upon how much extra/less deposits the banks need. Any bank offering your figure would be swamped by deposits.
Barclays' painful deal 10:19am on 20 Apr 2009 At last everyone (almost) has got tired of this blog. Not surprising given that so much of it has been in the personal disagreement style. This has meant that the subject matter has drifted well off the main subject.

Barclays made an acceptable deal in the circumstances.
People who really understand these deals have pushed the share price up.
That is the present position and the future is unknown.

Politicians are at fault for everything that has happened, not so much for what they did but for what they did not do.
They have the power to control much of what happened by regulation and it is the lack of good regulation that enabled the investment banks to go for broke. They did it spectacularly without any thought of where they were going: even with unlimited money there are only so many mortgages - dodgy or good - that can be made.

The boom - which Brown sat on regardless and did nothing about - could have been controlled. However given that he utterly failed to realise that the FSA were unfit for their role it is no surprise that he failed to notice what was going on around him. He thought the 'good times' were here forever.

There is a lot of confusion among many posters about banking and banks. I said in an earlier post that this was understandable given that the media et al talks about banks as if they are all the same - they are not.

Goldman Sachs and others are investment banks; IMO they should not be called banks but something such as investment houses. They do not undertake actual banking which is the taking in of money from customers who then have current/deposit (checking/saving) accounts and lending out a proportion of those monies to other customers in the form of loans and overdrafts. The banks that undertake banking are those we see on our high streets.

Because of relaxation in the rules and regulation after Big Bang all the high street banks tried to get into the investment banking scene as they wanted some of those vast profits. However, the two types do not easily fit together, as the high street banks all found out to their costs and then retreated. Barclays retreated and then came back into that market in a limited way with their subsidiary Barclays Capital and having learnt from previously burning their fingers, hired Bob Diamond from the US (where he had acquired a good reputation for making money) to run their new operation. To get him they had to pay him more than he could get in the US. He has proved to be worth his very high remuneration by creating vast profits within BarCap. They also had to give him a position of importance within the main bank in line with the US style - hence BD became president but that is not above either the CEO or the chairman.

What next? Where next?

The politicians don't have a clue. Brown blames everyone and everything else utterly failing to realise that he is part of the problem. Darling does not know what to do except that they have incurred billions of debt that we will have to repay in the future. Brown & Co are relying upon the rest of the world to pull us through. The Tories are also in the mire of failing to understand - all they bleat on about is the mountain of debt. Even Vince Cable who talks more sense than the rest of them put together does not have any idea of how to get us out of recession and clear our debt.

So do rely upon our politicians.

But the future IS bright although the brightness is dimmed by the length of time - 5 to 10 years - that appears necessary to get us out of this mess. And for that we can look to British business to lead the way, not the politicians. The politicians must make every effort to assist business.

House prices and the mortgage market. Strict controls on the type of mortgages must be seen as necessary to avoid so many that should never have been granted; this in turn will help to keep house prices at a level commensurate with incomes. That will mean a return to insisting on deposits and no 100% or above mortgages, or other dodgy types such as the self certified. Rules on mortgages need to be introduced so that every lender applies the same criteria which will include some flexibility to help first time buyers. We need a market where house prices rise but not at the unsustainable levels seen in the boom or we will simply head into another boom.

Banks should be split up into those that serve millions of customers (high street)and all the rest. The rest should be renamed. The high street banks will come under increased pressure from the drain to credit unions (small) and companies such as Tesco which are large enough to be able to enter the banking market, meet the capital requirements, be granted licences, and provide real competition for Barclays, HSBC and Lloyds (which is far too large). That should mean that the high street banks become more customer oriented and realise that vast overcharging is not on any more (regardless of the result of the legal challenge still going forward).

We need high street banks and building societies to do what they have always done, and do best, and not become embroiled in international finance, other than in the normal course of business.

Most of all we need to realise that if we want to avoid problems such as we are experiencing now then we need to change our politicians. We do not have democracy; we are under the control of the parties and our individual MPs are little more than lobby fodder. One possible way out is to prohibit the use of whips or any similar arrangement. Another way is to vote in a high proportion of independent MPs who would be able to restrict the government in many of the fallacies and deceits that we have been subjected to.
There is an answer - it is up to us.
Barclays' painful deal 11:28pm on 11 Apr 2009 102 Prudeboy
We need bankers and banking otherwise our economy fails; banking is the oil that keeps the gears of commerce moving. What we don't need are a lot of non-bankers running our banks. Real banking is boring but they get it right and that's why we had almost 150 years with no bank failure and the BoE doing the regulation (the BSA looked after the building societies - ditto).

We all know that the FSA failed completely and will probably do so again as they do not have the knowledge, experience or command of banking to realise what is going wrong and what to do about it and that FAST action is imperative. When Brown put the tripartite committee - which had only met once before the NR saga - in charge he obviously had no idea what he was doing: the FSA was already unable to get on top of the other jobs it was set up to do, particularly complaints from customers across the whole financial spectrum. Get rid of Brown, put regulation of the banks back under the BoE (the Governor does not like doing that but that is his problem; he has the staff to do it) and tell the FSA to prove that they have got on top of their work and to stay on top or lose more of their senior personnel.

Everybody posting here needs to divorce banking from those so called bankers who failed to follow the essence of banking - risk - and went all out for profits and bonus. I am all for prosecuting those who failed in their directorial responsibilities and the sooner the better so the customers, staff and the general public can see the results.

#144 greyandancientwisdom

Really? So where is your deposit, and do you have the expertise to run the business? Barclays would have sold to a higher bidder if there had been one. I realise you were being sarcastic but you must accept that the business Barclays has sold was built up by people with the abilities to build up that business and were paid a bonus for doing so in a very competitive market. If you have the expertise and ability and can convince Barclays to back you in your venture then good luck to you.

These sort of deals are quite common and have been part of the financial market for many years. Only now, with so much media scribbling has any reporter taken a blind bit of notice. In better times Barclays would have almost certainly been able to sell at a higher price. Any brief examination of banks here, in Europe and the US will show just how much effort banks put into buying and selling a range of businesses in addition to parts of their own companies.

Barclays and HSBC have been determined to stay out of Brown's clutches, and we should be thankful for that. Not only does that relieve us, the taxpayers, of even more debt but it effectively puts a stop to bank nationalisation (through the back door). Even Harold Wilson realised it was not in any government's interest to nationalise banking - and there were strong labour moves to push him into it - because it would have been a complete failure. Just imagine what could have happened; civil servants running banks, making decisions on risk and loans, miles of red tape, serious over staffing and the government having to pump in large amounts of cash to keep things going with no hope of selling.

A lot of the comments above are made on the basis of what has been said in the media, but just how much has been really understood? It is easy to pass 'ho,ho' comments and decry everything that has happened. How many understand what CDOs and SIVs represent and how they are made up and why they have been so made up, in detail? How was it that the US investment banks were able to inveigle our banks into their new style assets? Why are investment banks called banks when in reality they are nothing of the sort? What is banking? If none of you were to get paid you would very soon want to know what the banks were doing; and it could be a very good education lesson to understand how banking works, and why we need it - unless you consider that we should all go back to Roman times and barter for everything.

Let's get this into proportion: prosecute the bad 'bankers' and get back to having strong, viable, competitive banks.
Barclays' painful deal 2:14pm on 10 Apr 2009 The vast majority of the above comments demonstrate that most people do not understand banking. This is hardly surprising as banking is not like any other business. When a customer goes to his bank for a loan of, say, £1,000 the bank puts £1,000 in his current (cr) account and the £1,000 becomes a loan (dr) account. According to some that is creating money. But the bank cannot go on doing that without the capital requirements necessary to enable that loan to be made.
In simple terms, out of every £100 deposited in the bank about £10 has to be retained to keep cash in the tills and to cover running costs. That leaves about £90 which the bank may lend, provided that the total amount of all monies lent is below the ratio of lending against capital that is required, formerly by the BoE and now the FSA, in meeting what are referred to as Tier1, 2 & 3 requirements. There are other considerations but the above is aimed at keeping it simple.
The need for sufficient capital is therefore a vital component of how much any bank can lend. Put simply that capital consists of the shares in issue plus the total of all deposits held. Customers can withdraw those deposits and if enough of them do so at the same time then we see a run on that bank (the cash in the tills would be roughly 10% of what is needed). And that is where the essence of banking comes in - the risk factor. Risk is the prime concern of every real banker. Unfortunately we have seen the banks 'taken over' by businessmen who are not bankers (a few of them were but they decided to ignore the vital importance of risk). Banking cannot recover completely until those in charge are of the old school of so called boring bankers, those who understand and work with risk as their prime concern.
Covering Gaza 10:52pm on 19 Jan 2009 In complete contrast to much of the above comment I suggest that the BBC should remember that there is other newsworthy items during any period such as this. Not only are we bombarded with acres of reports which are almost identical but we also are shown the same pictures over and over.
Given that the BBC, and other broadcasters, have teams of reporters and cameramen on the spot I have to ask "What for?" They must be able to show different pictures and if they have nothing new to report then why, why are we subjected to the same menu? What happens to all the other news? Surely it should be sufficient at times just to say that the position has not changed and then move on to other news.

The same thing will happen at Obama's inaurguration. We will be unable to discover anything else except what goes on in Washington. That's all right the first time around; but not when we need to learn other news. Perhaps a change to News24 is needed. After the full report then that and any follow ups should only be available on another channel and the internet, leaving the main programme to provide all the new news.

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