Did Lloyds Bank have a heart attack last week?

Last Sunday, "hundreds of thousands of customers were left unable to use debit cards and 7,000 cashpoints" (Daily Mail).

 

The BBC News website said the cause was "a hardware failure" but - perhaps in an attempt to reassure us - the bank told them "the faults were not caused by any external upgrade work or cyber attack."

Funnily enough, Sunday was also the day that Lloyds borrowed an extra c. £766 million, according to the Wall Street Journal:

Source: WSJ

Just in time - or very nearly so, anyway?

As it happens, our current account is with Lloyds and earns 0% interest. This Harvard economist has just withdrawn $1 million from Bank of America for exactly that reason: the odds against a collapse, though presumably small, are not zero, so the risk to a depositor is underpriced.

Weekends seem to be bad for banks: on Saturday, September 13, 2008 the Federal Reserve was in talks with Lehman Brothers, Barclays backed away from making an offer (as reported in the NYT next day, Sunday) and the bankruptcy filing came on the Monday - at 1.45 in the morning. Not much chance for the likes of you and me to queue up at the counter.

Shoebox or bank account, bank account or shoebox? So hard to decide.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Total control zone

From Google Earth - Kaechon Gulag No 14 - School for Child Prisoners

Asahi Shimbun has a piece on Shin Dong-hyuk, a North Korean defector who was born in Camp 14, a political prison in Kaechon, 80 kilometers north of Pyongyang.

He said the camp was like a town. It had a population of several tens of thousands of prisoners who worked on a farm, a coal mine, a cement factory, a sewing factory and other facilities there.

Camp 14 is also a “total control zone” prison, the harshest category for such facilities in North Korea. Inmates of these prisons are not allowed out of the camp for their entire lives.

His story is horrendous and quite impossible for most of us living our comfortable lives to imagine. In particular, indoctrination can do the vilest things to people.

When he was 13, something happened to his brother that prompted him and his mother to plan to break out of the camp. Shin happened to overhear their plot, and he knew that he would be shot if he did not alert the prison wardens. So he did.

His mother and brother were executed in front of Shin and his father.

“Back then, I believed that tipping them off was the right thing to do,” Shin said. “Otherwise, I would have been killed.”

After escaping from North Korea, however, he fully realized the consequences of his action. He says he is still in agony over the decision.

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Imitation

The child looked about him, watching with keen impressionable eyes what the grown-ups were doing and how they were spending the morning. Not a single detail escaped the child’s searching attention: the picture of his home life was being indelibly stamped on his memory; his pliable mind was nurtured on the examples before him, unconsciously planning his own life after the pattern of the life around him.

Ivan Goncharov – Oblamov (1859)

The greater part of life is imitation. We have other names for it such as learning, reasoning and intelligence, but at the core of it all lies imitation. Sometimes we are almost original but the opportunity is given to us only rarely. Free will may be real enough, but is far from being the norm.

How could things possibly be otherwise? Life would be chaotic...

Hmm...

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27 June 2003

At the height of the row between the BBC and Downing Street over the "sexed-up" briefing that served as a pretext for UK involvement in the invasion of Iraq, there was an incident which made me feel as though the scales had fallen from my eyes.

Jon Snow was anchoring Channel 4 News and five minutes into his programme, in strode the Prime Minister's communications manager and simply took over. I saw this live and can't forget it - I can give you a Youtube recording (below) and Channel 4's own clip, but none of these shows him striding in masterfully, in seeming rage and indignation; nor the grateful, fraternal handshake Snow gave him at the conclusion of the interview. That was the moment when I thought, "They're all in it together."



Yes, questions were asked - but not ones that Campbell couldn't have been expected to prepare for. What really mattered was the man's exhibition of raw power, instantly subverting a national news schedule to serve his own agenda of red-faced, blustering self-justification, drilling the messages into the newsman's desk with his long and bony finger, interrupting Snow with a raised palm as the latter (or a Paxman) might do to a lesser interviewee. And then - away into the night goes The Shadow! What a man!

Channel 4 may have congratulated themselves on a coup - look at the excitement behind the scenes! - but to me, as an appalled viewer, the coup wasn't theirs. If Snow had ordered him out of the studio immediately (oh Lord, if only!), I could have believed in journalistic independence; as it was, he surrendered the dance floor and let Campbell do Night Fever all over it.

According to the Guardian article the next day, Channel 4 had actually asked Campbell for an interview and been refused 15 minutes before transmission. So did Blair's enforcer change his mind, or had he wrong-footed the programme-makers in order to make an extra-dramatic, swishy entrance?

³⁵Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cockcrowing, or in the morning:

³⁶Lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping.

And a decade later, we're still waiting to find out the whole, the real, truth about the events leading to the tragedy we helped foment in Iraq.

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What to do about the poor?

John Ward has an appalled look at the underclass and, though naturally a humane man, is leaning in the direction of abortion and sterilisation. I say:

I teach their children. Your observations - and I share your worries - raise philosophical and econo-political questions.

1. Before advocating abortion and sterilisation, consider whether we are nothing more than temporary forms of matter with the capacity for pleasure and pain. If a grain of sand is a nothing then there are no Arabian sands, since a zillion times nothing is nothing. This kind of thinking allowed Stalin to murder millions of people for the good of... er...

2. Peter Hitchens (who makes a living by stating what fifty years ago would have been unpublishable because it would have been thought too bleedin' obvious) is quite right that the middle class, by giving themselves ever-greater license in terms of substance abuse and sexual mores, have ruined the working class who do not have the same resources to recover from the concomitant pitfalls.

3. Much of the moral decay is also owing to a deteriorating economy and the shockingly cynical callousness shown towards the working class even by the Labour Party. What happened to the Rover works at Longbridge, Birmingham in the runup to the 2000 General Election is a damning reason why I can never see the modern LP as the friend of the workers.

4. As John Mortimer has Rumpole observe, the woes of the underclass provide much lucrative employment for their superiors, so the rot has spread much further than is immediately visible.The political class has signally failed the country as a whole.

5. The temporary beneficiaries of this state of affairs are the upper strata, who have created (as in e.g. the EU) a transnational governing class that is suborning the news media and any other form of supervision and governance that might restrict their endless self-enrichment. Their intermarriage (or interfornication) is, I suggest, leading to the surreptitious re-creation of a full-blown aristocracy - Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube (“Let others wage wars: you, fortunate Austria, marry”). The TV commentators dine with the ministers and money-men, but neglected to bring a long spoon. Soon they will wear the livery of their true masters, and the more attractive or better-connected among their children shall refresh the bloodline of the new global ruling class. "Notting Hill and Islington, you have stolen my land away."

6. Part of the process is economic globalisation. Sir James Goldsmith warned us all in 1983 at the time of GATT, and now that the talks have stalled, see (those who matter in) the US pushing on via the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

7. And to distract (one of the central themes of your blog) from this dreadful scheme we are encouraged to click our tongues at what is now the benefit class, people who once were the hewers of wood and drawers of water and have been abandoned and exploited at every turn, latterly to scare the lower middle class into submission (in the vain hope that they will not be next). We are enjoined to moralise at the unfortunate victims of our own actions:

“If it were indeed the case that bad nourishment, little education, lack of air and sunshine, unhealthy housing conditions, and overwork produce better people than are produced by good nourishment, open air, adequate education and housing, and a reasonable amount of leisure, the whole case for economic reconstruction would collapse, and we could rejoice that such a large percentage of the population enjoys the conditions that make for virtue.” - Bertrand Russell, "Unpopular Essays"

8. A heavy reckoning is coming, and not just for the current poor.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Central England Temperatures

As we all know, the Central England Temperature (CET) record is the world's oldest continuous surface temperature record, going back to 1659, although to put it mildly the early data has a number of defects. It can be downloaded from the Met Office here.

In an idle moment and as I live in central England, I downloaded the data  aiming to play around with various ways of presenting it. For example, the Met Office shows each monthly mean temperature as a difference from the 1961-1990 mean (fig 1) which brings out the recent warm spell very well.

fig 1

Only data from 1772 is used by the Met Office, as in Parker et al. (1992). By the way, the Parker paper highlights rather well the complexities and the adjustments made in compiling a long historical temperature record. It certainly isn't a list of thermometer readings.

However, if you simply plot the temperatures rather than the 1961-1990 differences (fig 2), the graph is rather more innocuous. After all, it's worth remembering that we experience daily and seasonal temperature changes far larger than those we are supposed to be alarmed about. 

fig 2

I see nothing wrong with either format. I'd use the Met Office approach if I had a reason to emphasise the recent warming spell. However, if I was wondering whether to move north to escape catastrophic warming, then I might use the simple temperature graph in fig 2.

fig 3

The graph above (fig 3) is the CET data from 1979 - the satellite era. Just for fun I've fitted a second order polynomial which appears to show that the CET temperature has peaked, albeit a very shallow peak. I don't yet see it as a trend though, but it is worth noting how easy it is to present the data in many different ways depending at least in part on your agenda. 

fig 4

For example,  the temperature record from 2006 plotted the Met Office way (fig 4) seems to show a rapid cooling trend. Maybe so, but as nobody knows where it will go in 2014, let alone the longer term, what conclusion do we draw from that? Don't try to build an agenda on temporary trends in cyclic phenomena is my conclusion - at the moment.

Finally, the month of June from 1659 to 2013 (fig 5) shows a flat linear trend over the entire three and a half centuries - h/t to sunshinehours for that oddity.

fig 5

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Rubbish! Incompetent UK Government blames EU

Pics: Guardian, Telegraph

"When rubbish piled up for weeks in 1979, it was a crisis; now it's an EU policy." That was my starting thought, after all the MSM (and Conservative Home) complaints about fortnightly municipal waste collections.

Not so. EU regulation in this area is about reducing landfill and packaging waste, especially rotting organic waste. To incentivise change, a landfill tax was introduced by the Conservatives in 1996, at two different rates. Currently the standard rate is £2.50 per tonne, but "active" (organic) waste is charged at £72 per tonne, rising this April to at least £80.

Local authorities' failure to meet recycling targets results in heavy expenditure on landfill tax, so to save money they have threatened to cut down on household collection frequency, and the Government compensated them to maintain the weekly service.

Germany and Austria manage recycling rates of over 60%, compared with the UK's 39% so it can be done; our national government is paying councils not to pull their finger out. Unless we want to disappear under a swelling mountain of garbage, we need to do something, whether or not we're told to do so by some supranational body.

Pic: European Environment Agency

I'm agin our membership of the EU because, among other reasons, I believe in democracy - and on constitutional grounds, I say we're not in the EU anyway, since we never gave our informed consent. But in the case under discussion, it suits Parliament to blame the EU for its own weakness in dealing with recalcitrant councils, whereas in other cases our Government pretends to make decisions that have already been handed down to them by Europe.

Getting out of - or as I'd prefer to say, confirming that we're not in - the EU is only the first step. The next is to clear out the Augean stables in Westminster and institute more open, responsive, responsible and competent government.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.