Top Tip

Don't confuse nail varnish remover and face wash. It's very painful.

Shouldn't it be in CAPS?

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

From here.

Absolutely unmissable

I suggest everyone reads this.

Bush claims to be British!

From the BBC's Peston's Picks

For us here in the UK the big question is whether what Paulson's proposing makes it more or less likely that our government will have to launch a similar rescue scheme for our banks
President Bush

Thecreditcrunch

If I can work out how to upload pictures to the web from a 2003 mobile phone, I'll bring you a picture of the Walsall Obsever, which has the best creditcrunchery yet, something like

"Credit crunch forces pets onto the street".

[update, I've found a weblink!)

On the creditcrunch, I remember that old phrase, something like 'everyone is a conservative on things that they know a lot about'. Hank Paulson must know nothing about investment banking if that's the case.

British experts, on the other hand, have of course distinguished themselves since Northern Rock was nationalised. When Bear Stearns was bought by JP Morgan we were told that thank God the US authorities realised the folly of nationalisation and found a quick private sector solution, unlike Gordon Brown and the Labour government. When Fannie and Freddie was nationalised we were told that thank God the US authorities were prepared to put practice before theory and found a quick public sector solution, unlike Gordon Brown and the Labour government. When Lehman Bros were allowed to go bust we were told that thank God the US authorities were prepared to restablish moral hazard, unlike Gordon Brown and the Labour governmen, and when AIG was bailed out to the tune of $85bn we were told thank God the US authorities had put public money up in the defence of the financial system, unlike Gordon Brown and the Labour government.

This kind of know-nothing financial market commentary [as an aside, you can really tell someone who knows absolute nothing about financial markets by when they conjure up liquid financial markets out of their arse, and the speciality of this is 'shorting', which if you believe some of the more ludicrous bloggers is a practice one can do in any market, at any time, in any quantity*] comes to a head in the ravings of Ukip members, for whom nothing, even if it happened in the early 1990s, is not the fault of the euro.

* Thinking some more, it's that they never realise that a transaction requires two parties. I can't short HBOS if no-one wants to go long it. It's as if they've read so much about the private sector they've never actually had the time (or inclination) to be part of it, and I suppose really it makes sense as think tanks are quasi-public bodies, particularly in the sense that a very rich man (the governmemnt) hands money over and you never need to actually sell anything.

That was quick

The giant particle thingy starts up in Cern...

...and a £3bn "black hole" appears on the London Underground.

One always wondered how the Northern Line originated, and now we know.

Nationalisation

"Now will Brown save our housing market" screams the front page of the Daily Mail. Broadly speaking they seem to be calling for the nationalisation of half the mortgage market.

A little busy at the moment but if I have time I want to do a post on what seems to me to be the soft bigotry of low expectations (possibly related to anti-Americanism) that a lot of the anti-liberals have with respect to Sarah Palin.

Uk car sales worst August since 1966

Says this article. The figues are very poor, 63,225, down 18.6% year-on-year. But the SMMT's "lowest since 1966" is surely misleading. August is a weak month nowadays because the new number plates come into force in September and so people wait until then. Until 1999 however the new number plates came into force on August 1st, and only once a year (compared to twice nowadays) so August sales were huge, sometimes nearly a quarter of all new cars sold. Conversely July sales were very weak, e.g. 37,896 units in July 1998 compared with 505,308 in August 1998.

So this is the worst August since 1999 is the correct claim and a sub-claim could be it's probably the worst December 1999 on a seasonally-adjusted basis and the worst August since about 1996. Perhaps the SMMT do seasonally-adjusted figures (I did the above calculations myself) but I can't find any.

Sterling at $1.77

How you all laughed at my currency speculation. But now, my dollar at average rate of about 2.01 are looking good now sterling is at 1.76.

I don't think Alistair Darling has a high reputation as a Chancellor (although I can't really think of anything disastrous he has done), and for that reason this idea hasn't been considered. But when everyone is wondering why he was so candid about Britain's economic outlook, no-one seems to have considered that perhaps it was because he was talking down the pound deliberately?

The 2012 Olympic martyrs

It's not actually an Olympic sport, which is shame as Britain is not short of martyrs, but this couple are willing to risk jail to not pay the surcharge involved in paying the Olympics.

This appears a similar case to the first episode of Ever Decreasing Circles. In that Martin, played by Richard Briers, ended up complaining about a lorry parked in the close and it ends up in court and he faces jail for not paying a fine, but caved in when it was pointed out to him that if he went to jail he would still have to pay his fine. Obviously the episode ends with Paul saying that he had a mate on the Council who has sorted it out. I am probably mixing up about ten episodes here.

Anyway I fear the Glenisters protest is misguided. We all pay taxes for things we do not want to, and even when we will not be alive to see them. One can't start picking and choosing like this. It would be nice if they find out that the Olympic bid was illegal, and cannot be funded, and therefore the Games have to be cancelled. But I can't see it.