Slovenia's economy shrank by 2.8% on a year-on-year basis in the last three months of 2011, data just released showed. That follows a 0.5% contraction in the previous quarter, making Slovenia one of several eurozone countries in recession.Shame. Nice place, Slovenia. I once spent a happy long weekend in Ljubljana ...
The European Central Bank will on Wednesday step up its campaign to stabilise the euro, forestall a new credit crunch and shore up troubled banks by flooding the markets with hundreds of billions' worth of easy money for the second time in two months.So the ECB lends vast amounts to the banks at a paltry interest rate who then proceed to buy up the sovereign debt of peripheral countries, yielding a much better rate of interest. So everyone's happy: the banks make a tidy profit, the peripheral countries sell off their debt more cheaply than would otherwise be the case and the ECB is lauded for bringing aboout financial stability. It's just like magic.
The offer of three-year loans to banks at the cheap interest rate of 1% represents a boon for the banking sector in the troubled eurozone periphery, and is broadly seen as a masterstroke by ECB president Mario Draghi of Italy (pictured), who launched the policy in December in one of his first moves as president.
Analysts speculate that the take-up of what amounts to a eurozone policy of quantitative easing could reach €1tn (£850bn) when the funds are made available, the expectation is that the borrowing will roughly equal the first round of lending in December when more than 500 EU banks netted €489bn.
Did Cameron not consult DWP before appointing Ms Harrison? If not, why not? If so, why did DWP not tell him about the fraud allegations? Is the government that dysfunctional?
Warnings that police were investigating fraud allegations involving Emma Harrison's company were not passed to David Cameron before he appointed her as his "families tsar", Downing Street said yesterday.
It sought to distance the Prime Minister from the controversy as it stressed he was unaware of the inquiry into the alleged misuse of public money at her firm, A4e. The Department of Work and Pensions is understood to have been told by the company about the investigation in November.
But it appeared not to have relayed that information to Number 10. A month later, Mr Cameron appointed her an adviser on helping problem families get off benefits and into work. She was unpaid in her post, but A4e won further Government contracts worth £400,000.
In my view, the greatest threat to the euro is that Greece will make a success of default and devaluation. Something like it has happened several times before, notably with Argentina in 2002, when it defaulted and devalued. The country went from an appalling financial crisis to growing by 11pc in the space of 18 months.Firewalls round the voters? Silly question. You impose technocratic administrations on those countries which fail to perceive the benefits of austerity and then you send in the Brussels bureaucrats to run their economies. Who cares about the voters? Ask the Greeks ...
Suppose that once the new drachma has fallen by 30pc to 50pc, Greece begins to show signs of growth. How would it then be possible to persuade the electorate of Spain, Portugal, Italy, and even Ireland, that there is no alternative to years of misery? It is all very well building firewalls to stop financial contagion, but how do you build firewalls around the voters?
I love it when academics turn their erudite brains to everyday subjects. My favourite is the study by Tania Sanchez, whose institute spent years of research on perfume to discover what scent most drives men wild: "We discovered," she said, "it is bacon."
Now the psychological benefits of working with horses are being recognised by growing numbers of therapists who work with autistic children, young people with behavioural problems, adults with depression or celebrities with addictions.Didn't do Lorraine Kelly any good, did it?
"The horse is the perfect mirror, they are very emotional beings; we're only starting to realise how intelligent they are," said therapy counsellor Gabrielle Gardner, of Shine For Life, watching the horse dance around his pen at a farm in Blackstone, a village a few miles north of Brighton.
Speaking after a Friends of Syria conference, held in Tunisia, Mrs Clinton said that Russia and China must join international condemnation of President Assad's regime. "It's quite distressing to see two permanent members of the Security Council using their veto while people are being murdered – women, children, brave young men – houses are being destroyed," she said.
"It is just despicable and I ask whose side are they on? They are clearly not on the side of the Syrian people."Now, if you take Mrs Clinton's statement and substitute "Palestinian" for "Syrian", you may find that it is a rather different permanent member of the Security Council which has, over the years and not infrequently, been using its veto.
The freedom of women in France is very much a matter of words, and I think it is intimately related to language. As with many Latin languages, the masculine form trumps everything when it comes to grammatical agreement of adjectives and so forth. We say Un Français et trente millions de Françaises sont contents; those 30 million French women have to be contents in the masculine form as dictated by their one male companion, rather than contentes as they would be without him.I would normally place myself with those who consider that there are more important things in life. But Madame puts her case most elegantly.
A lot of men tell us that we are fighting the wrong battle, that we should fight first for wage equality, or against the glass ceiling. But words matter. Let's imagine unmarried men having to tick the box Mon Damoiseau, the medieval equivalent of Ma Demoiselle. The boys soon stopped allowing people to call them bird, with its insinuation of virginity. Whereas I, at the age of 43, still get called "Mademoiselle", literally "my little hen". Charmant, non?
Taxpayer-backed Royal Bank of Scotland remained at the heart of the row over bankers' pay today as it unveiled total losses of £2 billion for 2011 at the same time as paying £785 million in bonuses to its staff.
RBS, which is 82% state-owned after receiving a £45.5 billion bailout at the height of the financial crisis, said the bonus pool included £390 million for its 17,000 investment bankers.
Controversial plans to make it easier for companies to "hire and fire" workers may be revived by George Osborne in next month's Budget.It won't actually do anything to improve the UK's economy, but it will keep the Tory backbenchers happy.
"In the end, males are uncertain little creatures and the way they are made is very different in mammals, birds, insects and worms," said Steve Jones, author of the book Y: The Descent of Man and professor of genetics at University College London.Not exactly comforting. But this "uncertain little creature" is far from down-hearted; after all, a world of females would not necessarily be a Bad Thing. I think ...
"In the long term we are all dead, and that is certainly going to be true for the Y chromosome, which is rather an arriviste on the evolutionary scene. It may take a long time, but I am pretty confident that the Y machine will, one day, be replaced by something else. Quite what that will be, you will have to ask me in a hundred million years."
Well I can think of a few winners, notably those damn bankers who despite having caused the problem did very nicely on their bonuses."Someone with a £100,000 pension pot, who could have expected that to yield an annual pension of a little under £7,000 three years ago, would now get just under £6,000. That is a rather substantial income loss. But it is only part of the story," he said."Those pension funds will typically have been invested in a mix of bonds and equities. The rise in asset prices as a result of QE also raises the value of the pension pot, providing an offset to the fall in annuity rates."He added that pensioners should not expect to be immune to the downturn. While savers have been hit by record low interest rates, working households have been squeezed by a 7.5pc fall in real incomes, compared with where they would have otherwise been, as well as rising unemployment.
"Real household income declined a total of 2.5pc in the two years after output troughed, whereas in normal conditions it might have been expected to rise about 5pc in that time," Mr Bean said.
He added: "Savers have every right to feel aggrieved at losing out; after all, they did nothing to cause the financial crisis. But neither did most of those in work, who have seen a substantial squeeze in their real incomes. And unemployment, particularly among the young, has risen. There have been few winners over the past few years."
... the markets are convinced that the politicians are working out a managed default that would allow Greece to devalue but stay within the euro, a new "soft" euro band; for those with long memories, not unlike the old exchange rate mechanism. This would allow Greece to devalue by up to 25 per cent and continue using the euro note, but a Greek one stamped with its insignia, thus keeping pride intact too.Sensible idea. But far too sensible for the muddle-headed bureaucrats in Brussels and Frankfurt?
It's impossible to know whether such a plan is being hatched, but the markets are usually pretty good at smelling these things out; if it happens, August is the most likely month. No one is going to admit to a Plan B as it would have to be conducted in secrecy with the other eurozone central banks over a weekend, and announced first thing on a Monday to avoid a flight of capital out of the country. The Greek banks would have to be recapitalised, a floor would have to be put under corporate and household debt. Such an arrangement has the benefit of allowing Portugal and Spain to opt out too into a more flexible band, should they need to. And hey presto, you then have a northern "hard" euro area of Germany, Austria, Finland, Netherlands – maybe France and Italy – and trading can start competitively.
Men tend to come to pills quite late in life. For our first 50 or 60 years, what has a chemist's shop meant to us? Toothpaste, shampoo, Calpol when the kids were small (or even, in our own impossibly distant youth, an attractive drawer marked "Liquorice"). Certainly, we've been aware of another kind of man in the queue – a shakier-looking or more breathless-sounding man, perhaps leaning on a stick or sitting on a chair opposite the pharmacy counter where an assistant in a white coat is about to deliver him a bulky paper bag with words such as: "Here you are, Mr Mackenzie, that'll last you 'til next month." But what were such men to us, who wanted only Euthymol? Then suddenly one day we are … not that other kind of man, not exactly, not yet, but certainly more aware that becoming that other kind of man isn't so impossible.Och well. Onwards and upwards. As long as I have my books and music, a fag and a glass of beer, life is still sweet.
A bulky paper bag with a prescription form attached awaits us. The pills have begun. To women, a regime of pills may be no big deal in a life that may have been governed since the age of 16 by the contraceptive pill; and women, to risk a generalisation, are less alarmist about medicine. But to many men, pills are a sign of vulnerability – sometimes the first sign. Cholesterol, hypertension, type-two diabetes: our 50-year-old selves were hardly aware of the prospect of them. And now 10 and more years later they come marching towards us with their little warning banners about heart attacks, a risk to be moderated by an unending commitment to pills.
"When the referendum on independence is over, I am open to looking at how the devolved settlement can be improved further. And yes, that means considering what further powers could be devolved."I think that we will need an elaboration of that promise before it is convincing.
The train is hurtling down a track towards five recklessly drunk people who are about to be killed. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can delay it by enough for the drunks to move away by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very trusting, very fat man next to you. Your only way to avert disaster is to push him over the bridge and on to the track, killing him to save five. Do you proceed?Well OK as far as it goes. But what if you're the prudent fat man, relying on annuities or savings to keep you afloat?
Philosophers and others with too much time on their hands have been mulling this sort of thing for ages.
Sir Mervyn's runaway train is that even if QE does save the five on the track, the fat man – pensioners, savers – are being brutally mowed down.
Annuity rates are tragic. Savings returns are not much better.
QE is a transfer of wealth from the prudent to the drunk. But if Sir Mervyn hadn't put it in place, everyone might have suffered.
The point is that there are no "good" policies when it comes to the economy, merely ones that are the least bad available.
Osborne: I welcome Moody's assessment of the economy. It is a ringing endorsement for the government and shows we are right to continue to make cuts and put people out of work.Aye, and it's becoming obvious ...
Cameron: Are you sure?
Osborne: Absolutely, Cams.
Cameron: Then how come you said the same thing about our handling of the economy when Standard & Poor's took us off negative watch two years ago?
Osborne: Because Hilto tells me to say every piece of bad news is a ringing endorsement.
Cameron: He says that to me, too.
Osborne: Don't blame me. I'm just a fairly dim public schoolboy who has never had a proper job, whom you made chancellor because we were both in the Bullers. I don't know any more about running the economy than you do.
In what moral universe could Carlos Tevez possibly be seen as an unlikely hero? The answer, needless to say, is this one. Within the football force field that envelops this septic isle, I find myself experiencing wildly misplaced admiration for the prodigal Manchester City striker, who this week returned from Argentina.Whenever I watched him playing football on the telly, it always seemed to me that he gave 100% commitment to whichever side he was playing for, not something which could be said of all the football stars plying their trade in Manchester.
Tevez has spent the past three months in what is described as "self-imposed exile", which makes him sound a bit like a Shakespearean duke, as opposed to someone who got in a bate about warming up for a Champions League match. The Argentinian is estimated to have lost himself a staggering £9.3m in wages and fines over some warped point of non-principle, and against football's current backdrop, this stubborn two fingers to the cash takes on a sort of Bizarro-world heroism.
Yeah, I could live with that ...DAVID Cameron is to launch a series of initiatives that will make being paralytic much safer and more convenient.The prime minister wants Britain to stop worrying about alcohol poisoning and nasty head injuries and go out and get as drunk as it possibly can.
Mr Cameron will announce a series of 'drunk-safe' measures today including:
- US style 'drunk tanks' where people can sleep it off in safety rather than adopting the foetal position in the middle of a busy road.
- More police in A&E units to stop the utterly hammered from beating the hell out of each other.
- And 'booze buses' manned by paramedics that will scour the streets looking for drunk people and then give them hot tea and a Pot Noodle.
As things currently stand, Greece will receive the €130bn it needs to stave off a disorderly default and it will be able to write off €100bn of privately held debt. But the agreement has to be finalised by EU finance ministers in Brussels tomorrow; only then will the money be released.Well no, actually. There remain some significant details to be cleared up. The Greek leaders need to give believable assurances that the agreement will be implemented; a missing 325 million euros of cuts need to be identified; and the German Bundestag (don't ask why) has to agree the arrangements on 27 February. None of these is a given.
Privately, Mr Cameron is deeply frustrated by the divisions within his party over the [health] reforms. At a recent meeting at No 10, he is said to have thumped a desk, saying: "We've not shed blood on these proposals not to go through with them."Mr Cameron has to learn (obviously the hard way). He is like a punter betting on a horse that keeps on losing; regardless of experience, because he has lost so much on the poor nag, he continues to invest in it in the foolish belief that it will come right in the end. Perhaps it will, but it seems unlikely; better to cut his losses.
Almost two years in the making, the once eye-catching plan to take the axe to the NHS's bloated bureaucracy and hand power to family doctors has become a metaphor for Mr Cameron's worst failings as Prime Minister – lack of attention to detail, a hands-off management style, misplaced loyalty to old friends and a deep-rooted belief that shouting at the Despatch Box will silence one's critics.Tut tut. How infra dig ...
One exasperated government strategist resorted to quoting Malcolm Tucker, the foul-mouthed spin doctor from The Thick of It, to sum up how bad things have become: "It is a fucking omnishambles."
The idea behind many financial models goes back to Louis Bachelier in 1900, who suggested that fluctuations of the stock market can be modelled by a random process known as Brownian motion. At each instant, the price of a stock either increases or decreases, and the model assumes fixed probabilities for these events. They may be equally likely, or one may be more probable than the other. It's like someone standing on a street and repeatedly tossing a coin to decide whether to move a small step forwards or backwards, so they zigzag back and forth erratically. Their position corresponds to the price of the stock, moving up or down at random. The most important statistical features of Brownian motion are its mean and its standard deviation. The mean is the short-term average price, which typically drifts in a specific direction, up or down depending on where the market thinks the stock is going. The standard deviation can be thought of as the average amount by which the price differs from the mean, calculated using a standard statistical formula. For stock prices this is called volatility, and it measures how erratically the price fluctuates. On a graph of price against time, volatility corresponds to how jagged the zigzag movements look.It's quite put me off my bacon and eggs.
Black-Scholes implements Bachelier's vision. It does not give the value of the option (the price at which it should be sold or bought) directly. It is what mathematicians call a partial differential equation, expressing the rate of change of the price in terms of the rates at which various other quantities are changing. Fortunately, the equation can be solved to provide a specific formula for the value of a put option, with a similar formula for call options.
Aye, it's a tough life being a peer of the realm ...
The House of Lords is a sedate place where little disturbs the calm, but there are two major issues currently endangering their lordships' blood pressures.
One is the overcrowding caused by David Cameron's determination to stuff the upper house with political placemen and women. The other is their car park.
Driving to this otherwise desirable London club has become increasingly frustrating, not just because more peers means extra traffic, but because of the security.
Their lordships complain that those who drive in have to execute a large loop to get through security, while those arriving by taxi have too far to walk from the drop off point.
Come on guys, it's make your mind up time. Kick the can down the road, one more time ...
Greece yesterday unveiled a political deal over budget cuts that should unlock a €130bn (£109m) aid package and enable Athens to avoid a potentially catastrophic default next month. After a week of fraught negotiations between the three parties that make up Lucas Papademos' coalition government, the Prime Minister's office yesterday confirmed that agreement on €3.3bn of new spending cuts had been secured.
But there is still some way to go before the deal is finalised, as the chairman of the meeting of eurozone finance ministers said Greece has to identify an extra €325m in savings for 2012 in order to trigger the bailout.
Jean-Claude Juncker said the Greek parliament will also have to pass the full package of cuts and reforms on Sunday and party leaders have to make clear that they will back the measures after elections, due in April.
"Banker and bonus bashing" by leaders of all three main political parties is undermining British business and harming the nation's image abroad, senior Labour figures have warned.
Alistair Darling, the former chancellor, and Lord Mandelson, the former business secretary, have joined an industry-led backlash against the attacks on executives in line for big bonuses by David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg. Political pressure forced Stephen Hester, the RBS chief executive, and directors at Network Rail to surrender their bonuses and saw Fred Goodwin, the former RBS boss, stripped of his knighthood. One senior business figure said: "Mr Cameron should show leadership and stand up for business rather than follow the baying mob, even if it makes him unpopular."
In a sign that Downing Street may soften its line, it declined to urge restraint at Barclays Bank, which is today due to announce its bonuses, including one for its chief executive, Bob Diamond, who may be entitled to a multi-million-pound payment.
Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul.
I got no futureYeah, the new Leonard CD* arrived this morning. Great, terrific, magic, what can I say?
I know my days are few
The present's not that pleasant
Just a lot of things to do
I thought the past would last me
But the darkness got that too
Most new Kindle owners buy an avalanche of classics in their initial excitement. All of Trollope for £1.99! All of Dickens for £3! But are they actually read?Though the writer's argument is undermined by her earlier comments (in the same article):
...
The reading public in private is lazy and smutty. E-readers hide the material. Erotica sells well. My own downmarket literary fetish is male-oriented historical fiction (histfic). Swords and sails stuff. I'm happier reading it on an e-reader, and keeping shelf space for books that proclaim my cleverness.
Publishers say that there is little real change going on, just substitution: those who buy genre books start buying digitally instead. I'm not so sure it is wise to underestimate the boundless idiocy of the unobserved reading public.
Amazon, the dominant player, is secretive with its numbers. As the company revealed its mixed results for 2011 last week, all its UK division would say was that ebook sales over the past three months were up five-fold on the equivalent period last year. No actual data.But why allow the absence of hard data to invalidate literary prejudice?
Amazon has started supplying data to Nielsen BookData in the US for the Wall Street Journal's bestseller lists, but the information is limited. UK publishers know their own genre titles do best as Amazon tells them this privately; across the industry there is nothing to go on.
The Telegraph:Ah, now I see; it's just the usual southron English winter panic.
Severe snow and ice bring Britain to a standstill
The Independent:
Travel warnings as snow blankets UK
The Observer:
Big chill set to last several days as Britain is reduced to a go-slow
The Mail on Sunday:
Snow-go Britain! UK hit by up to six inches leaving hundreds stuck on M40 (and Heathrow cancelled flights BEFORE flakes even fell)
... by the Chancellor’s own logic, RBS is a prime candidate to be broken up.Why not? Where is the logic of retaining them under the baleful domination of RBS? And it would encourage competition.
More encouragingly still, most of its businesses are fundamentally sound, and the original Royal Bank of Scotland still exists. It was granted a charter by George I as long ago as 1727 and is one of the very rare British banks with the authority to issue its own bank notes. It is screaming out to be split off from its ruined parent organisation, recapitalised and sold to the public.
The same applies to Natwest. This is a first-class clearing bank acquired by the RBS group in a stock-market coup 10 years ago. Its reputation has been damaged thanks to its association with this humiliated group and it, too, urgently needs to be given back its independence. Exactly the same argument applies to the smaller banks that still belong to Mr Goodwin’s doomed business empire – The Ulster Bank, Child & Co, Adam & Company as well as Coutts, long standing bankers to the royal family.
These banks have well-known brand names and are part of a fine historical legacy that can only be fully restored by removal from the RBS state-owned morass. Finally, the same surely applies to RBS’s well-regarded insurance subsidiaries, Direct Line and Churchill. Indeed, it is impossible to understand what benefit these businesses gain from being run by the former Credit Suisse investment banker Stephen Hester, whatever the size of his bonus.
First, run a disk clean-up (Start>programs>accessories>system tools) which will remove temporary files and all sorts of other junk from your hard drive.
Secondly, disable any programmes you don't need that automatically start when your computer is switched on (start>programmes>startup).
Finally defrag your hard disk (start>programs>accessories>system tools>disk defragmenter). This will take several hours – you may want to leave it overnight – but it will speed up performance by more logically storing data on your hard drive.
If you are running a Mac make sure to clean up your dashboard as it eats up your machine's memory. Fire up the activity monitor (applications folder>utilities>activity monitor), if you see a lot of dashboard applications high up the list, consider disabling any that you don't absolutely need.
David Cameron has been making contingency plans for a limited cabinet reshuffle as the Crown Prosecution Service disclosed that it will announceon Friday whether it will charge the energy secretary, Chris Huhne, over allegations he avoided a speeding penalty.I suppose that everyone must have a moment in the limelight?
Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions, will give his decision on Huhne, and his former wife, Vicky Pryce, in a televised announcement at 10am.
With his Florida victory in hand, Mitt Romney (R-1 percent) did a series of round-robin interviews with the television morning shows. But he skittered way off course during his interview on CNN. I kid you not, the man who looks like he fired your spouse, foreclosed on your house and shipped your kid’s job overseas told anchor Soledad O’Brien, “I’m not concerned about the very poor.”This is the man whose linguistic dexterity had already baffled us:
... this former governor of Massachusetts, whose net worth hovers in the $250 million range and who is the son of a wealthy former car company chief, has the uncanny ability to muddle his message by repeatedly sticking his ample silver foot in his mouth. “I’m not concerned about the very poor” comes a week after Romney said, while standing in front of a foreclosed Florida home, “Now, the banks aren’t bad people.” And that came 15 days after he said, “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.”Makes Sarah Palin look sensible ...
