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iceland_express

Listed below are comments made by iceland_express between Friday, 10th July 2009 and Thursday, 3rd December 2009.

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Public servants on $20m a year 11:09pm on 03 Dec 2009 #181 mr ralphy.......i guess you must be about 28 years old...a bit of a dweeb....don't read too much.....uncomfortable in the company of girls....impressed by your high flyin boss? drive a second hand porsche......well laddie work is tougher than you and your banker chums think....way tougher........way way way tougher! you'll learn.....degrees from Cambridge? MBAs? Doctorates.......kids stuff!
RBS board to quit if chancellor vetoes £1.5bn in bonuses 10:40pm on 02 Dec 2009 Judging by comments on this blog, the government would be committing political HariKiri by allowing these bonuses to be paid.

If RBS is unable to make satisfactory profits for the British public without recourse to paying ransome demands to its hired guns every quarter then the British public should divest itself of the Bank and take its 60Bn investment to another firm or collection of firms.

In short there is no political reason to rekindle the staus quo ante and as for economic reason??????????? The words "economic" and "reason" no longer mean anything when put next to each other.
Dubai not too big to fail? 8:48pm on 26 Nov 2009 I remember thinking last autumn that this crisis would track the major events of early 1930's USA, with the exception that it would be thousands of non-financial corporations going bust this time. Instead of the thousands of banks that crashed in the 30's.

I run a small engineering firm that supplies capital equipment to the logistics industry, among others. I have recently spent time looking at the balance sheets of many of my high growth clients and conclude that these firms really are little more than (highly leveraged) property firms..... with lorry drivers. Just wait and see what happens to some of these companies.

I wonder also about the extent that many supermarket firms might also be property firms..... with shelf stackers. Or how many construction firms are property companies.....with JCB's.

The banks are safe.....but the dressed-up property firms????????
Boxed in 1:29pm on 06 Nov 2009 In the space of nine months the British government will have exchanged £200Bn worth of IOU's for £200Bn of freshly printed cash. That's equivalent to fifteen months salary for every single person on the state payroll...police, nurses, teachers, doctors, bin men, mp's.....the whole lot!

WHAT A WASTE OF INK!!!!!
Bank reform: The radical way 10:29pm on 21 Oct 2009 Sorry to hear about your troubles old mate. Hope things get sorted in the right way.

Your article is pretty dense with information.....I imagine you must be bursting with stories that you are keen to publish.

The bit that caught my eye the most however is the bit about the CDS market potentially being clipped in the future so that only one CDS at a time can relate to an underlying instrument.

To my mind the fact that 10 or more CDS contracts can each be "in the money" to a value equivalent to the amount that a single bond is "out of the money" is no different in principle to QE.

Except QE is small beer compared to the amount of CDS wealth that was manufactured in the eight years prior to 2007. .....

The cause of the crash may well be CDS related to a greater degree than is presently being spoken about.

All the best Robert
Turner: Not banks' enemy 6:24pm on 23 Sep 2009 Well it's taken the best part of a year of pretending that all was well but now at last the City is squirming. The financial losses are getting crystalised into real life balance sheet dramas. And politics is inexorably overtaking economics as the driving force in our country.

Turner knows the City is going to be slowly and surely eviscerated by our politicians over the coming years...he is merely trying to ingratiate himself with his soon to be new masters.....make a note please Mr. Osborne that Turner isn't a baddie....it was all them others!

The City of London has been a miserable failure for Great Britain...an absolutely appallingly run and unjust waste of talented people and money.

The devastation being wrought on our island due to the misguided, ill thought out, selfish and arrogant philosophies of the Financial Elite and their coterie of pseudo academic cheerleaders is forming into the worst peacetime crisis in our country for 90 years.

Forget Turner, forget casino capitalism, forget regulating your way to a brighter future. Forget protectionist Sterling devaluation.....it will blow up in our faces......the ONLY way out of this hole is to put people to work....in real jobs not finanacial NON-JOBS.
Is economics a busted flush? 10:40pm on 17 Jul 2009 #39 Glanafon
That's a very good point. How do you model the "wierd" things that people often do?

My example is not as good as the curry house case study but anyway....

Is it just conceivably a little bit possible that practitioners of "wierdness" pretty well know that logical thinkers (think Belbin) will tend most of the time to put what they see into some sort of a pigeon hole with an appropriate label on it?

Eg. Young man is saving up....must be for a house (could be for a wholesale cocaine deal?) Eg. Business man wants to raise capital.....must be for a profitable investment (could be for a gambling habit?) Eg. Supermarket chain X grows its profits.....must be operating more efficiently than other super markets (could be that profits have been mixeed in with windfalls from increased valuations on high street premises?)

And best of all.....
GDP of Western nations goes up.....must be to do with leverage of intellectual capital (could be that the value of credit derivatives was wrongly calculated).

For the dodgy businessmen in this world....and there are more than a handful.....it must be pretty convenient to let financial analysts and commentators interpret your actions as "expansionary" or "consolidating" or "globalising" or "hedging" or "additive".........better that than be shown up for a snake oil salesman
IMF's gloomy views 11:22pm on 16 Jul 2009 #8 Foredeckdave.
Nothing stupid about the gold standard. There is a problem with valuing assets at the moment. There are firms and individuals out there with massively over optimistic views of what their assets are worth.

I was approached by an industrial surveyor today asking me if I wanted to invest in some factory space with a "very attractive" 6% yield....He must be joking...go back a few years and property investors would have said NO to anything yielding less than 12.5%. There are loads of would be investors out there who are keeping their powder dry until Returns on Capital Employed go back to where they should be in uncertain times.

What's stopping a recovery is the Zombie firms and households who (in league with their lenders) are propping up insolvent balance sheets.

Until the busted balance sheets are brought into the open there will be ongoing slump.
A tale of two economies 00:00am on 13 Jul 2009 Having just read Ambrose Evans' weekly piece in the Sunday Telegraph about the state of the Euro zone...one of the more alert financial jouro's....I am again of the view that we are back in seriously troubled waters.

Forget about green shoots for the moment ladies and gentlemen it looks as if the credit crunch has finally been acknowledged by EuroLand. Germany is in a deep malaise now, as is Spain, Greece Ireland and a host of other major economies. Britain is having to borrow (=print) each month an amount roughly equivalent to the ENTIRE public sector wage bill.

Unless there is a plan to cut public sector wages by at least 25% across the European Union this autumn the whole Eurozone will enter a downward spiral......driving the major economies into a long depression.

Cameron has his boot pretty well hovering above Brown's throat. He
could sort things out for Britain right now if he would just stop pussyfooting around.
A tale of two economies 10:38pm on 10 Jul 2009 #7 citygambler
Deflation is bad because it wipes out people's wealth eg houses, cars, earnings stream. It also prevents firms from expanding, and bearing in mind the ongoing contraction of firms and state corporations we badly need some expansion....otherwise how else will unemployment be reversed?

The economic situation is deteriorating badly again I fear.....

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