大象传媒

'Novermber' should be spelt: 'November'

:-)

Just heard John McFall MP on Newsnight. He advised that the Northern Rock fiasco is due to failed management and executives, adhering to a flawed and risky business model.

Strange then, that one of the ousted Directors, Sir Derek Wanless, is collecting an Honorary Business Doctorate from Coventry Cathedral tomorrow.

Booted out for failure and incompetence on Friday 16 November, collects Honorary Business Doctorate from Coventry Uni' on November 20.

You couldn't make it up !!

Why are they all wittering on about renewables now? Many people have been urging renewables on many UK governments for about 30 years now. Nothing has been done yet and it seems nothing has changed.

Yet more eco-twaddle propaganda. Boring and misleading.

Nothing about MPs debating the European Communities (Finance) Bill today then?

Trust you're going to do something on it tomorrow.

Failing to even mention MPs voting an extra 拢7bn to the EU - a mere week after it failed its audit for the 13th year in a row - would be an utter dereliction of duty!

If you don't shine a light on such blatant waste of vast sums, few people hear about it, MPs start to think they can get away with anything, and our democracy is all the poorer.

Over the last 10 years the government has allowed, nay encouraged, financial institutions to loan money recklessly. They allowed all sorts of financial wizardry packaging up loans and selling them on in an effort to make city people prosper. They have failed to regulate those institutions, clearly on purpose, because they wanted a sort of financial bonanza with all and sundry having access to unlimited credit - seeing this as a means towards their holy grail of economic growth.

It is peculiar that in the meantime Gordon Brown has become associated with the word Prudence.

One of the banks gets itself into trouble by being over-excessively reckless. The government bails it out with a huge sum of taxpayers money. Wasting taxpayers money that could have been spent much more wisely and usefully. Now banks know that the government won't let them down, no matter what sort of mess they get themselves into. I bet Nick Leeson wishes he'd had Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling behind him to settle his accounts.

The only thing taxpayers can do, short of revolution which will never happen due to the mild British temperament, is punish the government for this bad management at the next election.

Vince Cable is an excellent politician and seems always to ask good questions in the H of C. What a shame he is not standing as leadership candidate.

Ed, what a wonderful contribution: the article is excellent. 大象传媒 reporting tonight indicates that the Chancellor has walked the taxpayer into a potential unwanted tax of 拢900 each. We were told that it was, a gentlemen's overdraft agreement, and that the city was sound. The Rosk of credibility that Brown has been building since he allowed the Bank of England its independence has fallen on a Northern Rock. WIth these guys on the controls, its time to remove the lifejacket from under the seat in front of you, note the emergency lighting strips, and hit the big red emergency exit button.

The discussion between the government minister and the representative from Greenpeace wasn't anything like a discussion but plain bullying. Greenpeace is undemocratic and unelected and yet considers that its views and aims should be followed unquestioningly by the government.

if Greenpeace want this power, then they should put themselves up as candidates in elections. They should put up or shut up, to use the phrase. Unfortunately for them, when we look at green candidates, only two out of the 25 in the GLA are Green Party and there are no Green Party MPs in Parliament.

I feel that the current debate is ignoring the lessons that could be learnt from the last round of banking failures in the UK in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

A number of small banks and finance companies ran into trouble, ostensibly for a variety of reasons, but the common thread was property lending 鈥� both on commercial property and sub-prime mortgage lending 鈥� and over-reliance on interbank funding which evaporated as the banks鈥� problems become more apparent.

One message from this period is that when a bank鈥檚 management makes serious errors in one area of the business, it is likely that they will have been weaker than their competitors in other areas. While the banks in question in the 1980s and 1990s failed because they ran out of cash, the subsequent work-outs identified imprudent lending practices and poor operational standards. Northern Rock鈥檚 management failed to understand the risk they were taking through the bank鈥檚 funding model, and we should not be surprised if we subsequently discover that they were not the best in the industry in evaluating and managing other risks, including credit quality and operational risk. The question of 鈥榩ayment holidays鈥� for Northern Rock borrowers experiencing payment difficulties may well be the tip of an iceberg, and a stagnant or falling property market will exacerbate such problems

To my mind, ignoring the question of supervision and looking solely at the position that faced the authorities when Northern Rock realised it was running out of cash, the one mistake they made was to guarantee wholesale deposits as well as retail deposits. A blanket guarantee of retail deposits would have prevented a run on other banks by the public, and the interbank market would have faced up to the challenge in the way they did with banks such as Chancery Bank, British and Commonwealth, Provincial Bank etc.

The problem the authorities have now created is that the interests of Northern Rock鈥檚 biggest creditor 鈥� the taxpayer 鈥� and the interests of the shareholders are incompatible. The share has been allowed to continue to trade despite the clear evidence that various parties have been given access to information not available to the vast majority of shareholders, and the false market has created unreasonable expectations among many shareholders.

There is clearly no prospect of a 鈥榖id鈥� for Northern Rock that will repay the Bank of England funding immediately and also be acceptable to shareholders 鈥� and it is of course shareholders who vote on a bid, not creditors.

Accordingly there are only two alternatives:

1) Allow a 鈥榖id鈥� that shareholders will accept to go ahead by committing government funding for a number of years and explicitly accepting commercial risk 鈥� i.e. losses -for the taxpayers鈥� loans. This means that some degree of subordination for the taxpayers鈥� claims would be unavoidable, and the likely future losses large. The taxpayer would then both be supporting a bank that took bad decisions and allowing a bidder to anticipate a profit at the expense of the taxpayer 鈥� moral hazard of the highest degree.

2) Recognise that if the taxpayer is to maximise the recovery of its loans, Northern Rock needs to be moved into work-out mode as quickly as possible. The mechanism is simple 鈥� if the government asks for its money back then Northern Rock has no alternative but to go into Administration. Retail depositors could be repaid in full over a relatively short period, demonstrating the 鈥榲alue鈥� of the government鈥檚 promise and restoring some degree on confidence for the man in the street. Sadly wholesale depositors would probably be able to demand repayment as well thanks to Mr Darling鈥檚 generous promise 鈥� although some of the major banks might be persuaded to stay in with a continuing undertaking from the authorities. The assets can then be realised for the benefit of the main creditor 鈥� the taxpayer 鈥� over time. The performing loan books are probably saleable without any large discount even in the current strained market, but the true level of poorly secured and problem loans will only be known once the book is under proper experienced management. The task will be large and the professional fees far from small, and the taxpayer will in all likelihood never recover its loans in full. The only consolation is that the taxpayer will not incur additional losses because of the profits being earned by a new owner, and the aggravated sore of losses for small shareholders will be over in one fell swoop 鈥� as it should have been in August.

Once upon a time there was a country which, we were told, contained a populace of patience, humour and unselfishness. They were noted for calmness under pressure and danger and with a willingness to co-operate. To judge by the media, that populace has turned into a horde of drunken, fornicating villains who think they're above the law and are unaware of anything beyond their own skins.
That being the case, global warming will be irrelevant. Well have finished ourselves off first.
It's amazing that the word restraint is still in the dictionary.
The 'interview' with Malcolm Wicks added nothing to the overall wisdom.
It was bullying and unhelpful. We had an advance warning about fuel in the seventies. Who could have guessed?

Germany has made progress on renewables, but it's not all jam. According to the article, gearboxes which were supposed to last 20 years have been failing in large numbers. There have also been other failures, including rotor blades flying off.

Now whilst the financial cost and percentage of generated power is often quoted, what never is quoted is the whole reason why these things exist in the first place - CO2. If these devices are failing and having to be replaced or repaired frequently, how much extra carbon does that generate and how does it affect the amount they save - in short - are they saving the planet or just another business opportunity?

It also leads to the question, if the UK rushes into more and more renewable before the technologies are mature, are we going to find costs rising on projects just as the Germans have?

Perhaps Newsnight should do a report on the reality of the German experience.

Spiegel Online - The Dangers of Wind Power -

At last something positive from the government about carbon capture. What could be more sensible than to extract all the carbon from the power stations where it is produced? All UK coal and gas stations should be retrofitted immediately, at public expense. I pay for everything anyway, one way or the other, and this is so obviously the way ahead we can't afford to mess about debating who funds it in the first place. Plus there is a huge world market to be won. Get on with it!

yet up to 50% of solar planning applications are turned down only because its not in keeping with existing appearances. Of course not. its a new technology. They didn't have it in the 1890s which seems to be where planners want to keep us.

As much as I sympathize with the Burmese people, as well as, any poverty stricken people in the developed and developing world, the Newsnight film about Burma was tinged with propaganda and made such a one sided anti-Burma argument. Amongst other things, the emphasis on poverty, suggesting that poverty in Burma is as a result of the Junta and making out that the average peasant in China / India / is so much better off was laughable.

Why can't the 大象传媒 just make unbiased news reports without making it blatantly obvious that it's yet another 大象传媒 propaganda movie - it would give the 大象传媒 so much more credability. But no, the 大象传媒 is just a tool to manipulate us.