Tim Worstall

Does anyone actually know the answer?
Starting here.
Via email I am told that:

What’s it like being a total, and I mean TOTAL  asshole?
 
 
Most EU residents have their deposit accounts in Euros, you dumb schmuck. Hoo boy, and they let you vote. Furthermore, you jerk, most interest earned by EU residents in Switzerland is from bonds, mostly […]

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Gets a little confused I fear. Take it away Mr. Murphy!

Switzerland has announced that:

there has been a substantial increase in the amount of tax retained on behalf of the European Union for 2007. The withholding tax on savings accounts of EU citizens added up to SFr653 million ($618 million) last year, SFr116 million more than […]

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All in a good cause.
Read this and then spread it please. A little bit of ridicule, some naming and shaming, might budge Abbey National from its entirely indefensible position.

I, however, feel Abbey have fucked up royally, and despite their goodwill gestures, feel that it does not take 16 weeks to calculate and pay interest. Indeed […]

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Yay!

The fees became a subject for consumer rebellion last year after the OFT ruled that similar fees for late and unpaid credit card repayments were unlawful, and consumer groups started to encourage customers to claim refunds.
More than 1m reclaim letters were downloaded from websites, and in some cases customers were able to win back thousands […]

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OK, the first part is obviously true:

Richard Lambert said the bonuses rewarded success but did not penalise failure, and that if bankers had been staking their own capital they might not have taken such big risks. The CBI chief also accused investment banks of being cavalier in their attitude towards risk.
He said: "At the heart […]

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But any of you readers know how I could go about purchasing a put option on the price of crude oil?
1) Needs to be an option, not a future. Hey, I’m a private investor.
2) Reasonably long term: 12 months or more if possible.
3) Well out of the money….like $70 a barrel stuff.
OK, so I’m pretty […]

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The way I put it is that lessons learned at th cost of hundreds of billions of dollars tend to stay learned. But Jamie Whyte, as usual, says it better:

And now that everybody knows about the risk, regulation is redundant. The same goes for liquidity risk in mortgage- backed bonds. When no one knew about […]

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Eamonn Butler (yes, one of my bosses):

These days, banks are huge. If a big name failed, it would be an enormous catastrophe. The Bank of England rightly doesn’t want to risk that. So why exactly are banks so huge these days? Here we come to the ultimate cause of this crisis - governments. The authorities’ […]

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Good, vastly better than I expected it to be.
One further thought. If those are the minimum haircuts possible, won’t every bank have to write down such loans to at least those levels?

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Well, perhaps this is the same offer that anyone else joining at the same time would have got but:

Under the BBC pension schemes, which allow staff to retire at 50, the corporation pays in about three times the amount paid in by employees.

Three to one employer payments? Retire at 50? Sheesh.
You might just about understand […]

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Hmm, not sure about that description of this:

Alistair Darling will unveil an unprecedented scheme to offer £50 billion in taxpayer-backed loans to high street mortgage lenders today in an attempt to solve the credit crisis.
…
Under the plans, to be unveiled this morning, the Bank of England will swap Treasury bills for mortgage debts and other […]

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This looks so insanely profitable that I simply have to be missing something here. It just cannot be existing.
So, single farm payments, the CAP subsidies. There’s a market in them (the farmer can sell the subsidy stream and keep the land. You can buy the stream but not the land.)
But the prices seem absurd. Here. […]

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If Uncle Milt were still with us, what would have been his views on Northern Rock, Bear Sterns etc?
Brad Delong explains it very well indeed.

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2007 earnings:

Oprah Winfrey: $260 million
Tiger Woods: $115 million
Steven Spielberg: $110 million
Dr. Phil McGraw: $90 million
50 Cent: $33 million
Gisele Bundchen: $33 million
Miley Cyrus: $18.2 million
Mary-Kate Olsen: $17 million
Ryan Seacrest: $12 million
Trouble (Leona Helmsley’s dog): $12 million
Eli Manning: $11.5 million
Katherine Heigl: $11 million
Jeff Foxworthy: $10 million
Jessica Alba: $9 million
Mariska Hargitay: $7 million
Carrie Underwood: $7 million
Scarlett Johansson: $5 […]

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Re the earlier point about screams of profiteering:

Britain’s largest mortgage lenders were last night accused of fattening their profits at the expense of increasingly stretched homeowners as two leading firms ignored the third interest rate cut from the Bank of England in five months and pushed through price increases on some of their most popular […]

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From the usual sources:

The Monetary Policy Committee cut its base rate from 5.25 per cent to 5 per cent amid growing concern about slowing growth in the economy.
But some lenders increased the rates on some of their loans hours before the announcement. Yesterday morning, Nationwide - the biggest building society - and Alliance & Leicester […]

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Umm, can one of you finance specialists tell me, is this correct?

For example, the United Kingdom’s City Code mandates a strict application of the MBR, where all bids for blocks of 30% or more of the stock must be followed by a bid for the remaining shares at the same price.

I didn’t think that was […]

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They coincided with an IMF warning that the costs of the financial crisis are set to rocket to almost $1 trillion (£508bn) - higher than the Japanese banking collapse which caused a decade of stagnation.

Yes, and the Japanese losses were almost all inside the Japanese banking system. The current losses have been globalised.
As, umm, we […]

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Into sub-prime, CDOs and the like.
I’ll admit to only having skimmed it, nothing very new in it.
What I didn’t see in it though was the thinking behind the whole system: to spread risk. And, as Alex Tabarrok points out, at speading the risk the system was actually very good indeed.

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Talking about the hedge fund world:

In addition, TCI, is estimated to have increased funds under management from $8bn in 2006 to $11bn by the end of 2007, a year in which the fund reported a net return of 40pc.

Umm, if you start with 8 and grow it by 40%, don’t you end up with 11.2? […]

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