Be Excellent To Each Other

Not if your mortgage was with Alliance and Leicester it's not. SVR never fell below 4.99%. When Santander took them over, I was happy as they had SVR of 4.24%. However, they then said that nothing would happen until the legal merger took effect. Then it did, and they announced that the SVR differential for A&L mortgages would remain. They won't even entertain me moving within Santander due to my self employed status. Cunts.

Ah, so the market is saying to Italy, we don't trust you, and by doing that, is making Italy less trustworthy.

Got it.

Italy's making itself less trustworthy by desperately upping its bond yields in order to attract investors, would be more accurate.

Borrowing more money to cover yourself in the short term when you're deep in the hole is never going to be viewed as a sound fiscal strategy unless you've got a plan to get out of it, after all.

Seemed more at home here than in the Bits & Bobs. There's an Occupy Cardiff starting in Queen Street at two o'clock. I shall be there with camera, photographing people going 'Boo-urns!', 'Down with this sort of thing' and 'Careful now'. Hopefully dramatic things will happen.

Wonder if I should fuss with model releases?

7% yield though! Woo! The government should def put all our money in Italy, it would solve our own budget crisis!

Well, looks like we're going to be having a general election soon.

It's all gone wrong.

Heh.

Cameron is going to give into his backbenchers on this, and the only way they can use this "opportunity" to get us out of Europe would be if the coalition dissolves, precipitating* a geenral election.

Which is still somewhat worse than if he doesn't, but the situation we're now in strikes me as a leetle bit massively bad. If we're still in the EU, we're one of two out of 27 who aren't involved in the new arrangements, and everyone now hates us for being such childish, petulant twats.

And of course we absolutely need the EU to succeed, as if it doesn't we're properly, properly screwed.


*that reminds me of something- The "Plain English Campaign" have named the Met Office as worst offenders of the year for "probability of precipitation". I wasn't aware that plain English meant assuming people have no fecking vocabulary. The PCE also hugely misuse the comma in their newsletters. WORSE THAN HITLER.

Indeed, and if we stay in it now we're just going to be throwing stones, shouting 'DOWN WITH THIS SORT OF THING' from the sidelines, while having no say in how it's run whatsoever.

This is seriously bad.

DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED.

Yeah but at least we'll be able to have bent (or is it straight?) bananas (or is it cucumbers?) and no more bloody health and safety madness and PC gone mad or human rights and stuff, yeah.

And eggs in dozens and sweets in ounces! It'll be amazing, like the old days.

When the country was fucked.

Also, what do they mean when they keep talking about taking our powers back? The only specific example they've ever given is the employment law thing I whinged about in the OP. I've begun to think they're talking about the Power of Greyskull, and that's why Sarko and Merkel wouldn't agree with Cameron.

They don't have a clue, really. The Tory backbenchers want to leave the EU, but still keep all the trade agreements. What they fail to realise is that the EU would not allow this. Why should they have all the benefits of being in the EU but not actually want to be a part of it? It's madness.

As a country we are much stronger as part of the EU, especially with the BRIC countries continuing to expand. If we leave we will become a spent force in the world.

Of course, anyone can rant about the UK having built an economy based substantially upon financial services and the problems that can (and has already) precipitates.

However, when one of the key planks of policy to save the euro is a new tax that would hit to an extremely high and majority extent in the UK, isn't part of global strategy meaning that a lot of that economic output could potentially leave the EU as a result but mainly the UK as that is where the sector is base, running the risk of seriously damaging our own economy while not significantly impacting most of the EU, due to a mismanagement of an ideal that we were not part of, there is an argument as to who is being most childish in taking their ball home.

Norway and Swtizerland manage pretty well being in the EEA.

I should also add that I know pretty much fuck all about what is going on, as I've been too fucking busy or drunk for the past three weeks, and so my first comment may be based on somewhat outdated 'facts'.

I seem to recall hearing on the radio the other day that the financial services sector makes up 10% of our tax take doesn't it, so presumably a roughly similar proportion of GDP, assuming there is no wholesale tax evasion going on, of course. Oh no.

This is a complete guess, but I suspect the proportion of that 10% that would constitute activities that would be hit by the proposed tax would be tiny.

What exactly was the proposed tax, anyway? I was fairly sure it wsn't part of the discussion last night. wghat Dave was] upset about was further regulation of our FS sector by the EU powers. Of course, on the other hand, EU officials make the point that it was lack of regulation of derivatives and other financial instruments that caused such a mess in the first place, and it's therefore imperative we have some kind of uniform regulation in place.


EDIT - HEH.

Firstly, the tax is something like 0.1% charged on the value any big financial transaction carried out in the EU. That doesn't sound like a huge amount, but when you consider that the way the market works is by making many millions of very short term transactions and making profit on a infintesimal margin very, very frequently, you can see how it would etch away.

Secondly, I think I saw that including PAYE, Financial Services tax take is somewhere in the 30% region. However, FS is misleading, because I thought Insurance didn't count for the transaction tax.

Thirdly, the Bankers made 'a mess', and what then happened set in chain events that precipitated 'this mess'. But I don't think that they can be blamed squarely for 'this mess'. Arguably, without the banking crash, Ireland, Greece, Italy etc would all have happened anyway, potentially on a larger scale if there had been more time to roll up even more years of mismanagement.

That mainly describes he arbitrage bit, yes, but I take your point. Still, what are the profit levels at the institutions where this would apply? I'k sure they coudl stand to rdistribute some of that welath,aseeing as trickle down never happened.

Still, it is correct to argue that it wouldn't work unless it's done globally.



I'd really be interested to see what the actual positino is, becuase we variously get told that it's a lynchpin of our entire economy or that it has far more influence than its size merits.


Well, quite, that was my point.




Arguably, yes. Also, arguably not. Either way, I'm not sure that this is a good argument as to why "banking", or whatever nom de guerre the relevant bit of the world of commerce goes under, does not need more regulation.

Hel moved her current account to Santander because she has savings and a mortgage, which means she gets £300 for doing so.

After 3 or 4 weeks since (I thought current account switching had to be done within 11 days?) without telling her anything except what DDs and standing orders she had (3 times!) that would be moved, she suddenly got a letter saying "Hey, this DD has been returned unpaid!"

It was her mortgage payment.

If you were reading above, you'll note who her mortgage is with. Mongs.

We also took a 123 credit card because of the cashback on Shell and Sainsburys petrol, amongst other things. £24 a year charge for the card but hey, we'll easily make that back in petrol alone! There are no asterisks or anything so what can go wrong eh? Let's check the website for the full list of brands just to be safe... oh, it's broken, never mind eh?

Yeah, none of the Shells or Sainsburys near us are participating, we found out when the website eventually went back live, two weeks after the cards arrived. We were mis-sold that card on their misleading advertising.

These two "minor" issues resulted in Hel spending 4 hours being bounced around Santander departments, no-one being able to do anything but bounce her on. Literally 20 people bounced her on after saying "I can't do that, you need to speak to other-department."

Eventually she cracked and demanded to be put through to complaints. Two minutes of silence later she was disconnected.

So she rang back to continue hassling. After another 20 minutes of being uselessly bounced, she again demanded to be put through to complaints, and they'd better not cut her off like last time, or else. She did get put through to someone.

Someone else in the same department, who also couldn't take complaints. Or help at all.

She went into a branch on Tuesday to get it sorted, and credit due, they closed the credit card and took the £24 charge on the branch, because the person couldn't get anyone to authorise it on the back end. And she did eventually get the mortgage paid on a debit card from her outgoing bank.

Needless to say, when the 13 weeks are up and she gets the £300, she's off again. And when her ISA rate expires, that's being moved. And when her mortgage rate expires, that's being moved as well. Oh, and her regular saver account too.

Even though the woman from the branch had a huge bouquet of flowers delivered to our house yesterday as a further apology.

FUCK Santander. Right through the fucking face. It is totally unacceptable to her to be treated like that, and it was horrible to have to helplessly watch my fiancee be so upset and angry.

My personal, absolute laymans thought on this (and it is layman, really) is that regulation is needed, but on a worldwide basis. Like it or not, any business is internationally mobile, and so heavy regulation in one part of the world will lead, like it or not, to a flight of capital (slowly or quickly) to places where regulation is easier, and hence cheaper, and business becomes more profitable. Let that happen, and the regulated area of the world gives themselves effective capital controls and this damages their economies, but the problem is not solved, as all the components for a new crash are present somewhere else in the system.

The cynic in me (and I'm not a Eurosceptic) does see the banking regulation measure as a nice political win for many of the Eurozone leaders, knowing that the UK would pick up the majority of tab. Also, they knew we would veto, and so they can say that they would have done it, but for the UK.

Call me Mr Scrooge Mcduck but isn't the reason where in this mess because the financial industry isn't making as much money as they used to, so tax revenue is significantly less, hence why we have a large deficit in the first place? We relied too heavily on it to support our country. If the banks bounced back it would get us out of this rather large hole almost over night?

Yes?

Interestingly I heard on News Night that Italy actually has a reasonable deficit of less than 4% (2010)which is the reasonable amount. The problem is they have so much debt they never paid from years and years ago. Until recently (2008~) it was one of the few countries that had a negative deficit (making more than it spent). Their current problem it's purely down to the repayment of the loans (and type of loans), if they go way up so does the deficit.

I think Greece, Ireland are a different kettle of fish but I don't know quite enough on these countries.

EDITED! Damn you and your ... your eyes!

Or a surplus, as it's more commonly known.

Details detail! I'm winging it at my best here man! Waiting for someone to shoot me down in flames with bettererer informational!

The Robin Hood Tax campaign is after 0.05%. One of the happy additional consequences of it being introduced is to strongly discourage high frequency trading which is seen as seriously destabilising (e.g. here). The complaints that it will seriously impact pensions is untrue, because pension funds (should be) making large. long term investments and will thus be least affected. If as recommended we're going to split retail banking and investment banking from each other, a retail bank holding customer deposits isn't going to be betting them on stock markets, so savings aren't going to be hit.

The problem I had with the EU-wide transaction tax as originally proposed was they were proposing the money all go into the EU budget, which has failed to pass audit for approaching 20 years. If it went to each member states' treasury Britain would actually have the most to gain, rather than lose from it.



Why would you include PAYE in the tax take, when it is paid by individuals, not the company? By all means they can include Employer's NI contributions to attempt to inflate the figure to make it look like FS is paying its way when it spends all its time avoiding as much tax as possible and helping others to do the same, but PAYE isn't a tax on the business. Unless they're trying to make out it's a tax on the business because they have to pay people more to negate the tax?



A lot of "the mess" is money borrowed by states to give to banks that couldn't repay the debt they ran up borrowing to buy worthless derivatives which were given the same rating as government bonds by the credit rating agencies.

Another problem Italy has is while everyone else at least had some benefit during the boom times, their economic growth remained low, so what should have also been a good time for their treasury wasn't, it was a "meh" time.

It said on the BBC today that the UK government gets 70 billion a year in tax from the “financial sector”, given how many corporations go out of their way to avoid tax I would guess that if the government tighten the thumb screws on them a bit there could be a lot more tax to collect.

Fair play to Cameron he at least stuck up for the UK this time in what just appeared to be a effort to get more money from the UK to tip into the black hole of the EU. I also guess he had little choice as he can’t afford to have a drain of business from the UK in the current climate.

We are paying enough for our own and other EU countries financial messes as it is.

My sister had a savings account with them and went through similar amounts of being fucked around when she wanted to move her money over to NZ when she emigrated. There's a reason they're always bottom of every customer satisfaction table (that 100/200/300 quid deal came out just before the annual Which table, which planted them firmly last again). They were when they were Abbey National/Abbey as well.

My Dad moved to them, for some reason he had no access to some of his savings accounts for a couple of weeks.

Spent ages on the phone getting messed around etc

To clarify the question above, Ireland was doing fine, even in surplus. It was the bankers and developers who were utterly fucked. However, when the crash came, the Irish government stepped in and guaranteed the banks/developers debt and it is that which has brought it to its knees.

And Greece was fucked over by having an economy so corrupt even Mugabe would have baulked at it. Most of the country simply didn't pay any taxes.

True but there was no managment of them or Ireland by the EU.

They were all too busy lending money hand over fist to Greece, Ireland and others, and profiting from it.

Ireland or at least Dublin is more expensive than London to live in.

With the crap exchange rate between £ and Euro all of Europe is very expensive for holidays etc, best value I found was Barcelona.

Who are the "them" and "they" you're referring to here?

Shape shifting lizards.

The tabloids won't be able to invent stupid laws that don't exist anymore. It's political correctness gone mad!

Maybe they'll just pretend we are still in the EU? They might as well seeing as everything else is just made up. If they don't people might start forming rational opinions about Europe...

Is there anywhere that just posts the facts of what is going on, in an easy to read and digestible format, with explanations of ramifications and no bias?
I suspect not, I kinda get what this is all about, but delving deeper i'm hit on all sides by party political bullshit.

Seeing as how easily most tabloids manage to confuse the EU and the Council of Europe, I doubt something as minor as that will stop them.

It feels dirty to say this, but Cameron has done the right thing. For the wrong reasons, mind you, but he's done the right thing. The agreement is utter madness - not only is the ECB *still* not the lender of last resort, but the 'fiscal compact' essentially outlaws fiscal stimulus. The deficit of each country will be limited to 0.5%. Look at the Eurostat figures for 2011 - almost every single country in the Eurozone is above that - massive massive crippling cuts will ensue. Which is going to help the Southern states out, obviously.

I think the wolves are sensing blood now.



Election in April?

The LDs have been at pains today to stress how they're going to stay in coalition to mend fences with Europe. As if Europe would listen to them, or even know who they are. Given their current polling if they went for an election in April they'd cease to exist.

Dorries, amongst her many faults, clearly doesn't know the meaning of the word "cowardly".

If there were to be an election, I suspect that you would be quite right, and the Lib Dems wouldn't get a lot at all. The Tories would win with a decent majority and stay in power for a couple of terms. I suspect we'll be seeing quite a lot of negative things direct towards the Lib Dems over the next few months or so, to wear them down and cast some seeds of doubt in the voter's minds.

I'm not convinced tht's how it would go down - I think given the disillusionment with "Tory cuts" and so on, and the fact they're singularly failing to stimulate any growth (except amongst Eursceptics getting tumescent at the thought of breaking from Europe), any losses from the Lib Dems (of which there would be a lot) would go to Labour more than the Tories, so we'd be back to a hung parliament.

Do you think Milliband has that kind of attraction, though? In my kinder moods, he's fucking terrible. Also, Ed Balls has said that Labour would have made the cuts as well (but, it would have been done in a different manner) so I think there would be a chance to make capital on that, given the mantra "It was Labour's reckless spending that did this, we've got to fix it". Respectfully, I'd call a Tory majority, Lib Dem's down to about 45 seats, And Labour/Tory splitting those losses evenly. I certainly can't see the Tories returning any less than the most seats.

Yeah, but I think people are starting to remember why they hate the Tories, and are near to coming to the conclusion that anyone would be better than them. Even the adenoidal Millitede is a better bet.



The "different" is important there, as they weren't going to cut as much, and weren't going to frontload it. The "too deep, too fast" has mileage, particularly now that we're heading back into recession. They can make great play of Osborne's "no plan B", given that his plan A isn't working (save for the not particularly voter friendly argument that they needed a credible deficit reduction plan to ensure the bond markets liked us, but then who's to say Labour's plan wasn't credible enough for that too?), and is in fact actively harming the average voter’s bank balance.



That’s certainly easily counterable though – that spending was what was making people’s lives better, if it was that bad the Tories wouldn’t’ have pledged to follow our spending plans, and look what’s happened now they’ve come off it, the economy’s tanked etc.



I still disagree – I think LDs will be down to about 15, and you’d get a roughly 60/40 split of the lib dems’ losses in Labour’s favour. But then I'm pulling this out of my arse just as much as you are

well, i can understand cameron wanting not having to do with all eurozone misery, but i think it is an illusion you can escape by just vetoing (guess i'm bit a bit with milliband here)..

and the libdem's what do they actually want, now all crown jewels are gone, and the government is neither liberal not very democratic..

Judging by seat calculators I've been playing with, the LDs would be extremely lucky to return even 15 seats. Some put them down as low as two. Perhaps that's pessimistic, but they'd certainly be lucky to get much into double figures, and the election in England would turn into a bitter, nasty Lab/Con fist-fight, a dual slanging match over Europe and Tories being Tories. I've no idea what the result would be, but with the LDs being nuked out of existence (and, almost certainly, Lucas losing the one Green seat), I'd also not be surprised to see Lab or Con returned with a small majority. Either way, I don't see much of an improvement: Cons would continue dismantling everything, but now with the full backing of the electorate (as it would be spun); Lab seem pretty weak right now and would probably just blame everything on what the Tories have been doing this term.

I think this is why the ineffective nature of the LDs pisses me off so much. We have such stupid reactionary and partisan politics in the UK, and coalition could have been a moderating force, giving us debate and more democratic process. Instead, this coalition has turned the concept to poison in people's minds, meaning it could be a decade or two before people consider the idea non-hateful again.