The BillyB, Aster & JR8 roundtable!

[JR8]

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The Bundebank's vice-president Sabine Lautenschlaeger hammered home the point in what is a clearly co-ordinated push to check the plan. ...

"Whoever is footing the bill must also have a right of control".
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/fina ... union.html


So much for the fraternal brotherhood of 27 nations eh. Don't say you weren't warned.

[JR8]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GrxHDyX ... r_embedded

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Daniel Hannan, MEP for South East England, and a Telegraph blogger, has this to say on Spain's €100bn bailout:

'The only impact of this bailout has been to indebt every Spanish household with a further €15,000 that they didn't have last week. Europe is giving itself a transfusion... it's taking blood from one arm and pumping it into the other arm.'

As usual he is almost alone in observing the truth. Whilst all the other bloated and troughing politicians sit beside him grumbling that he is rocking the boat ('M/V Gravy-train')


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And, also yesterday...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TN_1mF-3 ... e=youtu.be
The Genius of Mutual Indebtedness - Nigel Farage

[JR8]

From the Mises Institute:

"There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion.

The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved".

[JR8]

Nigel Farage (UK MEP) to Jean-Claude Junker (President of the Eurogroup):
'You said that when things become serious you have to lie'.

Jean-Claude Junker to Farage:
'I did not lie, what I said was at times it's difficult to tell the truth'.



Shame these clowns are so expensive or it might be quite funny.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTtu_8yiwq4

[JR8]

Hey Aster, I think you'll enjoy this article

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'Booming Iceland makes second early loan repayment to IMF
Iceland, whose economy has recovered rapidly following the 2008 collapse of its banking sector, on Friday repaid $483.7 million in loans to the International Monetary Fund.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/fina ... o-IMF.html
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[JR8]

... the euro is a political project and not an economic one.

Tony Blair, this weekend:
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'The problem of the eurozone was that it was "motivated by politics and delivered in economics"'.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/fina ... -euro.html
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p.s. Just a bit rich of Blair, given he was gagging to have the UK join the euro! That aside it is perhaps the most honest thing I've heard pass his lips.

[Strong Eagle]

... the euro is a political project and not an economic one.

Tony Blair, this weekend:
---------------------------------------------
'The problem of the eurozone was that it was "motivated by politics and delivered in economics"'.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/fina ... -euro.html
----------------------------------------------


p.s. Just a bit rich of Blair, given he was gagging to have the UK join the euro! That aside it is perhaps the most honest thing I've heard pass his lips.

I read the article... Blair wants the "pain of reforms", aka austerity measures. Won't fly. The Euro will be saved only under two conditions.

a) Failing countries return to their own currencies, promptly devalued.
b) The Euro is inflated at a modest to fast rate.

Bondholders eat it, either way. But, who is it better to hurt? Bondholders? Or the population at large? Witness Ireland. Witness Greece. Austerity does not work.

[JR8]

Neither do bail-outs

Blair wants what ever will grease the tracks for him to become President of the EU.

It is really weird how he has suddenly come off the US/ME lecture circuit to start appearing on UK TV this week. He hasn't had any profile in the UK since Brown took over (i.e. years). So, he's up to something!

[JR8]

Inadvertently hilarious headline from the Daily Mail, over the Barclays/LIBOR story...

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'Barclays' rogue traders are no better than barrow boys with the morals of the casino'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/artic ... asino.html
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Hehehe... oh yeah gosh who would have thought? That's like writing 'Shock: soldiers in combat kill people'.

Didn't bother reading the article if that is the intelligence behind the ''''shock horror'''' headline. In fact watched the BBC news tonight for the first time in months and was amazed by the immaturity of the presenter Robert Peston.... his piece was as if imploring a schoolroom of 8 year olds.... weird!

[JR8]

If you want to see quite how reviled the EU, the euro, the EC, all of it is, here is the latest data from the European Commission itself (consider them the EU equivalent of the Soviet Politburo).

http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/ ... l-off-ukip


A cut/paste chart and piece of commentary from the article:


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[Mi Amigo]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18695191

So apart from that Bob, how's your week going so far?

[JR8]

Interesting story isn't it. Started out as Barclays being the bad-guys, hey even the PM personally criticised Bob Diamond in interviews*. But now we hear the first rumblings that Barclays were pressured by the previous government via the Bank of England to under-report the LIBOR rates to help keep a cap on inflation and bank rates.

And diamond is up for interrogation before a Treasury committee this pm. I wonder if Gordon Brown has soiled himself yet today.



* Cameron seems to be going on something of a moral crusade these past couple of weeks, publicly criticising the morality of other individuals. I find it very distasteful... but that's another topic

[BillyB]

It was a big shock on the street. Diamond transformed the IB division and turned barcap from a laughing stock to a well respected and slick 'almost tier 1' player (Acquiring LB helped) - he had the vision and personality to really change the status quo from a high street plodder, to a bank that now competes with MS, JPM etc.

It sounds like yet another huge operational risk issue where traders do what they want and there are no internal controls to keep an eye on things. Similar to the JPM fiasco last month. Ultimately, in these situations, the buck stops at the top of the tree.

I believe there'll be more banks exposed as part of the LIBOR collusion in the coming weeks.

[JR8]

Food for thought:

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"Germany is not bailing out Europe, it is rescuing itself"

"The ECB and eurozone governments, as well as bailing out other members states, have quietly been rescuing German banks and, by extension, German savers. Without these emergency operations, the eurozone would have broken up, German banks would have gone bust and the savings of many ordinary Germans might have been wiped out. More likely the German taxpayer would have had been forced to bail out those banks.

So, as the German people distribute blame for the situation in which they find themselves, they should not ignore their own bankers. If those institutions had not made these investments and financed the current account deficits of Germany's neighbours for so many years, their country would not be on the hook for hundreds of billions of euros of bad debts.

Yet this is something German politicians refuse to acknowledge."
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h--p://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/com ... 12743.html

[JR8]

It was a big shock on the street. Diamond transformed the IB division and turned barcap from a laughing stock to a well respected and slick 'almost tier 1' player (Acquiring LB helped) - he had the vision and personality to really change the status quo from a high street plodder, to a bank that now competes with MS, JPM etc.

It sounds like yet another huge operational risk issue where traders do what they want and there are no internal controls to keep an eye on things. Similar to the JPM fiasco last month. Ultimately, in these situations, the buck stops at the top of the tree.

I believe there'll be more banks exposed as part of the LIBOR collusion in the coming weeks.

It's turning into a bit of a shocking story. Apparently there are several more banks involved. The linked is an interesting though long article. It points out the perversity of RBS/HBOS who were on ELS (that could be an acronym for emergency life support) from the BOE, because they could not raise funds in the interbank market, reporting lower LIBOR figures than Barclays who had far less material liquidity issues. And apparently the BOE knew about this... well, hard not to notice you'd have thought.

Apparently Diamond got taken out my Mervyn King himself. Oh the BOE knew LIBOR was not representative, under-reported, as long ago as 2007.

Tucker the Dep-Gov of the BOE faces the Treasury Select Committee tomorrow. This story has legs!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/news ... -heed.html