on February 13, 2009
If you would like to reuse this drawing please ask me here. Thank you!
Financial details which are this gory are only ever released on Friday afternoons. Read all about it here, here and here.
To try and put the headline figure of £10bn into some sort of perspective, here is an extract from a report on the invasion and occupation of Iraq from the Global Policy Forum*. (It is my emphasis in the following quote).
The costs incurred by other Coalition members for their contingents should also be taken into account, but the calculation exercise is exceedingly difficult, given the many small contingents and the hidden budget numbers for many participant governments. The biggest of Washington ‘s partners, the UK , offers some glimpse of other Coalition costs. Though the UK government has hidden its Iraq expenditures and did not make them available to Parliament or the public, researchers using the Freedom of Information Act discovered that the UK had spent about £4.5 billion (about $9 billion) for its military involvement in Iraq as of late 2005. [35] According to some estimates, and in spite of substantial draw-down of forces, each additional year in Iraq will cost the UK treasury an extra £1 billion. [36] So UK costs as of late 2006 would total about $11 billion. Such budgeted figures do not take into account costs such as refurbishment or replacement of military equipment that the British Ministry of Defence will eventually have to cover. [37] Nor does it take account of the many other long-term costs including death benefits and health care costs for veterans
So, Halifax Bank of Scotland lost about £10bn during 2008 which is roughly equivalent to the UK expenditure on the invasion and occupation of Iraq between 2003 and 2006. The Government encouraged Lloyds TSB to ‘save’ HBos in th autumn of 2008 through a bank merger – and this happened, however, the new unified Lloyds banking group is now liable for all of this inherited HBoS debt.
* Who are the Global Policy Forum? See here, this quote is from their about us page.
Global Policy Forum’s mission is to monitor policy making at the United Nations, promote accountability of global decisions, educate and mobilize for global citizen participation, and advocate on vital issues of international peace and justice.
on February 13, 2009
If you would like to reuse this drawing please ask me here. Thank you!
[flash http://www.youtube.com/v/U9czXhjH7BI w=500]
If you are interested in how the asset, or value, bubble which is now bursting got so big in the first place, you might want to watch this clip. It is with a journalist called Bethany McLean. Bethany reported on the business activities of an energy corporation called Enron in the USA in the early 1990s. From the outside, Enron appeared a fantastic economic success story with massive growth, massive profits and huge acquisitions of smaller firms as it grew. However, its complex trade in energy derivatives was hollow, it did not actually make anything and eventually, someone asked how it made its money with the resulting and mighty collapse of its business. The parallels with human behaviours inside the financial sector are stark, lending credit (or, money which does not exist) is a sure path to what Mr Micawber would have called misery. Apologies again to Mr Dickens.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and six pence, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds and six pence, result misery.
on February 11, 2009
If you would like to reuse this drawing please ask me here. Thank you!
Simon Jenkins puts it into words in The Guardian;
What we await is the remotest idea as to why bankers, or the institutions they represent, should still be trusted with rescuing the British economy from recession. They yesterday presented themselves as like the lame-duck carmakers, shipbuilders and steelworkers of the 1970s. They had been beaten by the market and run out of money. They wanted more. So what was new?
The FT’s Alphaville has a rather damning extract from The Financial Services Authority – the regulator of the financial industry set up by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown when they came to power in 1997. In it we discover just how incestuous the relationship between banks, regulators and accountants and auditors has been. This is a must read.
on February 10, 2009
If you would like to reuse this drawing please ask me here. Thank you!
Click the image for the cartoon, or go here
Artist Mark Wallinger’s striking design for a giant White Horse has won the has won the public art contest for a piece at Ebbsfleet in Kent.
on February 8, 2009
If you would like to reuse this drawing please ask me here. Thank you!
One balding, loudmouth Englishman writes about a one-eyed Scottish idiot.
Gordon Brown is Scottish. Gordon Brown is one-eyed. These are both facts.
Gordon Brown is an idiot. This is an opinion.
Gordon Brown is Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. This is a fact.
Jeremy Clarkson is under a contract of employment to the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) or, an associated production company. This is a description of employment.
The British Broadcasting Corporation is funded by the government which is currently led by Prime Minister Gordon Brown. This is a fact.
Jeremy Clarkson has apologised for his two recent statements of fact but is standing by his debatable opinion. This is a fact too.
on February 6, 2009
If you would like to reuse this drawing please ask me here. Thank you!
Published here and here at the start of October 2008.
UPDATED: Noon. The BBC reports on the rise on company insolvencies in the UK here.
UPDATED: 10th February 2011. A recording of an acrimonious interview between Angela Knight of the British Bankers Association (Trade Association) and Lord Matthew Oakeshott, Liberal Democrat politician on the Radio 4 Today programme about responsibility for the activities of the financial industry.
on February 5, 2009
If you would like to reuse this drawing please ask me here. Thank you!
Major Western banks market capitalisations (or, market value in $Bn) for Q2 of 2007 compared to late January 2009 – data from Bloomberg. Isn’t there some cliche about pictures being worth 10,000 words?
on February 5, 2009
If you would like to reuse this drawing please ask me here. Thank you!
The frozen protests at the North Killingholme oil refinery have had a lot of media coverage because of what they represent. Any clash between the economic interest of citizens and the globalised industrial system (Total oil in this case), is explosive for any elected government. The workers in Lincolnshire are voting this morning on whether to accept a compromise deal brokered yesterday by ACAS and the Unite union.
Click the picture for the cartoon.
UPDATED: Noon. The BBC is reporting this unofficial strike is over at the Lindsey Oil refinery.
And the Bank of England has cut interest rates again. High Street reaction is available here.
on February 4, 2009
If you would like to reuse this drawing please ask me here. Thank you!
If you have an interest in Digital Britain as one way we might start to recover from the economic recession we are now in, this is the place to go and comment on it. Kudos to Joss Winn and Tony Hirst for setting the site up so fast. We have about four months before the ‘final’ Digital Britain report is produced, so, if you have things to say about the issues highlighted in last week’s interim report, and anything it might have missed, this is the place to go and say them.
