A Perfect Storm is Brewing

[vinteuil]

anyone want to downsize to a nice place in wiltshire.......village location, pleasant outlook, bus stop 20 yards.............??

open to offers !!

... well, a Wiltshire boy myself, I'm open to temptation. But you'd need to be a bit more specific - vale of Pewsey? south of Salisbury Plain? ...

[teamsaint]

er , don't think i should have started this really.. but anyway, just East of Salisbury.

Place is in decent nick, but needs the odd bit of TLC here and there.

Good schools. small but attractive garden.(suit keen gardener).

[vinteuil]

er , don't think i should have started this really.. but anyway, just East of Salisbury.

).

teamsaint - thanks for that!

I'm a north Wilts boy - Devizes and thereabouts - never really understood what happened south of the Plain....

[teamsaint]

all roads lead to gods own county of Hampshire , from where I live !!

Devizes always seems the best of the north/west wilts bunch to me. Could do with a railway line though !!

[vinteuil]

Devizes always seems the best of the north/west wilts bunch to me. Could do with a railway line though !!

... and when I were a lad, it DID have a railway! - sadly Dr Beeching thought otherwise...

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

it aint over and there is no fat lady ....

the banks the banks

British banks, despite beginning their disposal programmes much earlier than their Continental European peers, still have by far the biggest pool of toxic assets. Deloitte estimates

the size of the non-core and non-performing assets held on the balance sheets of UK banks at £460bn, more than the combined total for Ireland, Spain and Italy.

German banks come a close second to the UK, with a toxic asset pool of about £447bn.

[Chris Newman]

anyone want to downsize to a nice place in wiltshire.......village location, pleasant outlook, bus stop 20 yards.............??

open to offers !!

...ok....bus stop is 100 yards but http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMbxCRvEHy4

[greenilex]

"there is no fat lady".....evidence please? We're doing nicely round here. Threadneedle Street can go darn her own knickers.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

When the subprime crisis started to buffet Wall Street in 2007, banks sought shelter by turning even more to European sovereign debt, especially countries with the best returns. The B.I.S. data show that bank lending to the governments of Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain, largely through bond purchases, rose faster than usual, by 24.2 percent, to $827 billion, between the second quarter of 2007 and the third quarter of 2009, when the crisis in Greece first started to taint European sovereign debt.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/business/global/sovereign-debt-turns-sour-in-euro-zone.html?pagewanted=all

surely you do not think that it is possible to quench the financial system's insatiable thirst for crisis?

[Lateralthinking1]

Yes, a storm is brewing and on many fronts. Calum occasionally reminds us of Iran. Just when I start to think that I don't understand the modern world, I discover something that absolutely proves this to be the case. Today I bring you Press TV.

Among the past and current presenters of Press TV are George Galloway, Ken Livingstone, anti-war activist Lauren Booth, Andrew Gilligan, disgraced Conservative centre right ex-MP Derek Conway and commercial radio phone in presenter James Whale who has been known to speak at UKIP conferences. An unlikely bunch of colleagues you might think with views as diverse as they could be.

Whale and Conway in particular would not be expected to be fans of the BBC. Too state controlled in their opinions. Too constraining on individual expression. Oddly Galloway and Livingstone are among high profile left wingers who, like them, choose commercial radio as their preferred broadcasting mouthpiece in the UK - Talksport in the first case; LBC in the case of the latter.

What then is the ordinary member of the public to make of the fact that Press TV, which is available internationally on satellite and includes use of Sky Channel 515, is funded by the state of Iran and is a division of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting? The annual budget of Press TV is 250 billion rials (more than 25 million US dollars).

Press TV broadcasts news reports and analyses which are close to the official position of the Iranian government, and its programmes are monitored and regulated by the Islamic Republic.

Press TV Limited in London was incorporated in 2006 to produce news, factual programmes and documentaries to be sold to the Tehran-based Press TV News Channel. The company is registered at Companies House and is wholly owned and operated from the UK. Press TV also maintains a presence in the United States through intermediary companies. "American Dream," produced in Washington, DC by Atlantic Television News (ATN).

I don't understand this at all. It makes no more sense to me than the intricacies of the recent Liam Fox debacle.

[teamsaint]

the lunatics have finally, completely, irrevocably taken over the asylum.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/8969196/Moodys-warns-UK-credit-rating-at-risk-if-growth-stalls.html

or to paraphrase, if I may,

" the problem originally caused by us, have made economic activity stall, so we will downgrade you, and ,make things worse as a result".

Prison would be a lot too good for these politically motivated economic savages.

Words almost fail me.

2012 is not going to be good, if you don't work for a bank or a ratings agency.

[ahinton]

the lunatics have finally, completely, irrevocably taken over the asylum.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/8969196/Moodys-warns-UK-credit-rating-at-risk-if-growth-stalls.html

or to paraphrase, if I may,

" the problem originally caused by us, have made economic activity stall, so we will downgrade you, and ,make things worse as a result".

Prison would be a lot too good for these politically motivated economic savages.

Words almost fail me.

2012 is not going to be good, if you don't work for a bank or a ratings agency.

And probably not too bright if you do, either! The lunatics that you mention have almost no asylum left to take over and the prison that you state as being "a lot too good for these politically motivated economic savages" is a non-starter, since there are nowhere near enough places available in such prisons to accommodae more than a tiny handful of them and, in any case, with the massive cutbacks already in "progress", there will be hardly any staff left to look after either the prisons themselves or most of those who might otherwise be incarcerated therein. Words may as well fail you completely for all the good that any of them might otherwise try to do.

[Lateralthinking1]

Standard and Poors are now God. It's official. But oo the flippin eck are they? We must see their undemocratic faces immediately.

(and Moodys as it seems from this that they are not just interested in Belgium)

[teamsaint]

Standard and Poors are now God. It's official. But oo the flippin eck are they? We must see their undemocratic faces immediately.

(and Moodys as it seems from this that they are not just interested in Belgium)

It is amazing what they get away with. it really is scary.
I agree about seeing their faces. When did the dear old BBc ever run anything on these crooks, i wonder.
shame about the prison being full. no doubt we could come up with something else.

[Serial_Apologist]

It is amazing what they get away with. it really is scary.
I agree about seeing their faces. When did the dear old BBc ever run anything on these crooks, i wonder.
shame about the prison being full. no doubt we could come up with something else.

Well BBC 1 has a daily programme titled Rippon Britain or some such, in which well-known 1960s media slebs including Angela Ripoff "expose" the wrongdoers offering scam financial packages, whose victims are then told there is nothing they can do about any of it, but at least the BBC offers free apps presumably advising as to the alternative non-dependable choices on offer, and what can't be done about it when they too fail.

I am just waiting for the envelope to drop through my letter box... Dear Sir, we are writing to inform you that the financial package which you signed up to is now out of funds, and that payments will henceforth cease.