Myners was quoted in the Telegraph on 23rd January 2010 as saying “The argument is that hedge funds, private equity and proprietary trading are a source of risk – that is not our general view. In the UK, the three activities were not responsible for RBS, HBOS or Northern Rock, who, on the whole, failed in the rather classic way of making bad loans.”
This is either stupid or disingenuous. Banks made bad loans because an investment bank would then, for a large commission, underwrite (using their prop desks) the repackaging of these loans to others – hedge funds, other banks etc.. Banks therefore could make any loan and flip it keeping the fee and moving on to the next borrower.
How hedge funds and prop trading didn’t contribute to this I do not know.
I can certainly excuse Private Equity from the equation – these guys are mostly borrowers and are in any case unrelated to the banks.
One very interesting and tricky issue is how can splitting up the banks by itself offer a solution to the securitisation of these loans? The answer, and Myners is right here perhaps (although he hasn’t given this as the reason), it doesn’t. Stopping banks from making mad loans and flipping them is best curbed by either capital requirements or outlawing the activity by forcing banks to hold a significant portion of all loans that they make.
Obama is a big disappointment. Never has someone offered such hope and disappointed more. As a master of politics he is becoming rather transparent. Two examples, first a call for a world without nuclear weapons for which he won the Nobel peace Prize (while continuing two wars perpetrated by the Bush regime). Second a call for a total freeze on all settlement growth in Palestinian occupied territories including what is termed as “natural growth”. Both these statements were clearly ridiculous.
Most recently we have “break up the banks!” It won’t happen. If I had the cash I would be long in banking shares and would have been for at least 6 months. Politicians don’t depend upon people’s votes but on the support of business and in particular the bankers. What is wonderful about this statement is that the breaking up the banks if not easy – there is a huge grey area between taking deposits and simple lending and the more exotic activities such as securitisation. This gives Obama a lot of room to negotiate with the inevitable opposition yet still come out with a win or at least what can, in time for the next election be termed one.
In my view banks that take deposits should not be able to carry out any activities apart from lending to individuals and businesses. I would exclude proprietary trading of course and any equity investments. In addition I would exclude any commission-based activities such as underwriting, broking and M&A. The later are best practiced by independent operations with no conflict of interest as it most often described (what I would describe as “unfair advantage or even insider trading”).
Who is going to support that? The people yes but politicians….? You just be joking. Viva la revolucion!
At least 12 months before they have to declare its existence (IAEA obliges members to inform them 6 months before nuclear materials are in use) Iran announced on 21st September to the IAEA that it is building a new plant for the production of LEU uranium for use in nuclear reactors and that it is open for inspection.
Why then does the UK press, Obama and others suggest that it was secret? They even knew of its existence before the announcement?
Israel is playing a smart game and the US and its poodles are toeing the line. What better way to distract from continual settlement growth and the damning report of the UN with respect to the Israeli attack on Gaza.
The UK and US press is being completely disingenuous in suggesting that Iran has been caught red-handed and equally is being irresponsible in fueling our fears about Iran. Nuclear materials for a bomb require 80% pure Uranium, Iran produces small amounts of 5% pure Uranium. The difference is enormous and there has been NO evidence of any attempts to increase purity above 5%.
I doubt whether anyone will but I do advise those who are least interested in this issue to listen to Ahmadinejad’s UN speech that so may so disgracefully walked of.
Unlike Obama’s carefully trained delivery this is an impassioned speech that talks clearly and intelligently about what he perceives to be the problems of the world.
Disagree if you wish with his speech but at least sit through it! Certainly don’t bother me with your opinions if you haven’t.
Copyright holders lobby ignorant Government Ministers and their advisers to impose draconian measures against downloading pirates! Or is that uploading pirates?
Who are they trying to catch.
A good friend of mine downloads the latest movies using some Torrent application that takes little bits of films from lots of users. Each bit is useless by itself – it cannot be played. The only thing that can be used to trace this friend is his IP address. Since when was an IP address proof that a particular user is guilty especially if his wifi network is open – it could be anyone. Since when was allowing someone to upload a small useless string of numbers illegal.
My advice, carry on doing what you do, open your wifi network and if pressed say that it wasn’t you.
I do object to Google’s position in the world of web search. Acknowledging and respecting their brilliance is one thing, accepting poor search results hijacked by advertising is another.
Google came to world of the techies and excelled in very quick clutter free quality searches. Adding advertising supposedly created a virtuous circle. I dispute this. The overall quality fo they search led them to dominate the search space. This is turn now obliges anyone selling on the web to use Google Adwords – still over 95% of Google’s revenues. This is where the circle ends. There is no benefit to the search of having advertising on the search page especially if the higher ranked results are there predominantly because they paid the most to be there.
Google’s search results are increasingly irrelevant except to find only the most obvious sites. Increasingly a user needs to tweak the search terms or sift through to page 2 or 3 or beyond. I sometimes find myself going straight to page 10 in the vain hope of finding something relevant away from the clutter.
My suggestion is simple in its philosophy and no doubt tricky in terms of execution. Use people to recommend search results. In other words, if a user finds a particular site that corresponds to the search results entered then this is useful information and of much higher quality than some algorithm based on keywords in websites and links between websites (Google’s current methodology).
What I would like to see is people power bringing the ownership of the search back to the people – high quality search based on peoples judgment of the quality of the results.
This idea is not entirely new although the emphasis is different. Digg and other such sites do store peoples recommendations and you can use Digg to search. This however is an after-thought – the main emphasis being on online bookmarking or in the case of Stumble Upon discovery of new sites based on your overall subject preferences.
Let’s get back to quality search and no advertising.
Our democratic system is being challenged. Our system is what I refer to as “modern-day feudalism”. My children have a good grasp of feudalism and when I talk to them about our Government and the democratic system of today even they see the similarities:
- a small number of very wealthy supported and pandered to by those who aspire to reach their position or at least benefit from the association
- a corrupt and dishonest group of representatives in Parliament who are overpaid and hugely influenced by the small number of wealthy and powerful
- a vaste majority who are tied to their properties and to their jobs by large mortgages and overall indebtedness
One major difference is that the power of the Church has been replaced by the power of the large Corporation.
What is challenging this system?
When I first came across the Internet in 1994 and purchased a pair of jeans from the US using Compuserve I saw not only the power of this medium to change business forever but also the much more fundamental change that is Governments worst nightmare – freely available information that is uncontrolled and uncensored and available to all those with a computer and Internet connection. Anyone with the time and motivation can now learn more than ever before and extend their horizons beyond anything that a traditional education can bring – this is the era of the autodidact!
The democratisation of information is the one major event of the last century that will give back power to the people. Bring it on!
How will easier access to information bring change? Well, we have already seen, with the publishing of MPs expenses, a public outcry against elected members who are abusing the system. We have also seen a rise in social networking, a phenomenon that encoruages more transparency. One the of the major issues though, as we have seen with 9/11 is also the rise of conspiracy theories – yes, when information is easily created and distributed then the truth can sometimes suffer. Exactly how and to what extent the Web changes our society will be intriguing to see – my feeling is that information is power and the more we all have access to it the better for the majority.
Firstly iPhoto – don’t use it except for de-duping the photos. I had 19k of photos of which only 4k were unique – the others werre spread across various files on my PC and were copies. I used Duplicate Annihilitor, an iPhoto plugin to do the job. Watch out though – when you move your photos from your PC to your Mac (assuming your computers are on a network this is drag and drop – I use my wi-fi network – plugin and play easy) make sure that, before you show import into iPhoto that you have gone into Advanced Options under iPhoto preferences and unticked the box that asks whether you want iPhoto to import into its file system – say no. Then anihilate away. Why shouldn’t you use iPhoto for the long-term? To print photos you need to use exclusively Apples photo print service. I use Photobox and don’t want to be locked in to Apple’s service. The only feature that I will miss is the face recognition in iphoto that is really good indeed. You can search by person without filing the photos. Picassa is brining out this feature shortly (I hope).
Safari is rubbish – limited cool plugins, lots of sites that aren’t configured for Safari and don’t work well and limited in functionality compaed to IE and Firefox. I use Firefox because it does have a huge collection of 3rd party plugins (my favourite is StumbleUpon – browse the web serendipitously according to your preferences!).
A dear friend of mine just repaid an old debt by buying me a Macbook. I unwrapped the sleek packaging, took out the Macbook and switched it on. Within 2 minutes (slow on the first boot as I had to run through the basic configuration wizard) I was connected via my Wifi and could see all my PCs on the home network. I set-up my email (1 minute) and retrieved my emails. I then connected my iPhone and synchronised my contacts and calender. Installing Office for Mac took about 20 minutes. I was then up and running.
There are no gotchas if you have an iPhone – if not then it is indeed quite tricky I believe to import all those contacts and calender items from your PC.
What surprised me most was the ease with which I was able to connect to the home network and pull files as I needed them from my PCs. I had anticipated many hours of laborius transfer by memory stick!
My other great surprise was that I can share calender events with Outlook users although not via a Blackberry.
I am using all the standard Mac applications for the moment – there is an advantage in that Apple have put together a nice suite of applications that do in some instances integrate quite nicely. This is something that one loses going for best breed i.e. separate vendors for each application. For instance, in iMovie I can use photos from iPhoto in my movies and vice versa.
iPhoto is a pleasure to use and the face recognition takes a lot of the pain out of finding photos of a particular person. One issue I have though is that I can’t use Photobox – Apple has tied iPhoto into their own service – my feeling is that this is short-sighted.
Has anyone had experience of moving to mac – I would love to hear what your experiences have been!
Anyone who questions the way the banks were saved is asked by the incredulous interviewer whether it was better to let the banking system fail. Well, the only response to this question is clearly no. This does not mean that there wasn’t a better way.
Did you know that on 15% of RBS’s balance sheet relates to UK commercial and consumer lending?
I recently pointed this out to the opposition Treasury spokesmen and have sent a note to the Economist. My email asked the simple question, if we want to ensure that UK commercial and consumer banking is saved then why not focus on the 15% that this represents not bail out the 85% that it doesn’t?
Corporate law and Government powers would have enabled the Government to let all banks that couldn’t survive go into administration. Of course this wouldn’t have been done without giving depositors 100% loss protection. Once in administration the Government would have nationalised the UK commercial and consumer banking operations and let the administrator and subsequently the liquidator sort out the rest.
This would have cost a fraction of the supposed £200bn that the IMF suggests that the bail-out will cost the Government. Why has this not been discussed? I can make a few guesses.
www.fluidinfo.com is a new database where anyone can add data – hence “a writable world”. Think of data being the underlying data and the meta data – in Terry’s world the two are dealt with the same way – an article and a rating, a film and a comment. Anyone can write to the database and if that data is public then anyone can search on it.
The big difference here is that the database does not have complex tables and schemas – any filds can be added and then searched upon. In a typical database the developers have to design the schema to be able to anticipate what you will be adding or searching for.
Show me all the web articles that I have liked that my Facebook friends like? Facebook would need to update their database, expose this information through their custom API and then another developer would need to create a database of information ralating to your favourite articles so that the search query could combine and search across the two sets of data. Data would sit in proprietary silos and our freedom to connect information would be limited to what was exposed via the applications various customer APIs.
Terry’s approach allows all applications to use the same API (Fluidinfo’s) and for us to search across this data in ways that don’t have to be anticipated in advance!
