Catalonia - not so simple... by JD

A few more thoughts based on my reading of many of the Spanish newspapers as well as some phone conversations with friends in Spain.  My friends vary in other opinions from 'not quite reactionary' to 'not quite republican' but they are unanimous in regarding Puigdemont as deranged! This evening's news that Puigdemont thinks the Spanish government has carried out a coup d'etat against Catalonia is proof that he is living in a parallel universe...

Nice touch to have TinTin observing the landing! Elsewhere on the news pages a previous catalan leader, Josep Tarradellas,  is quoted as saying in his memoirs that 'in politics, everything is acceptable except ridicule' Once you become an object of ridicule you are finished. 

The Spanish newspapers online have readers' comments, as they do in the UK. A large percentage of those comments regard 'El Puchy' as a joke. In fact I saw in one of the papers a photograph of a Puigdemont Halloween costume complete with baggy suit and oversize 'Beatles' wig.

This scorn and contempt began after Puigdemont had called a meeting of his political party at which he was expected to announce regional elections. While party members assembled and waited for his announcement he was in a car travelling to France and, after boarding an aeroplane in Marseille, he turned up in Brussels to plead his case 'at the heart of the EU' instead of before his own people. He ran away from the conflict which he had created. At that point he lost all credibility. His own supporters were extremely angry and even called him a traitor. And then Rajoy called the election for him.

 Last week the former Spanish PM, Felipe Gonzalez, said that Puigdemont running away to Brussels was an act of cowardice. In Spanish that is a very serious accusation. You can insult a man by calling him 'cabron' or 'coño' or say he is 'de puta madre' and they will have minimal impact but to call him a coward will produce a volatile reaction because that is to call into question his manhood. Many of the online comments have reflected this view.

There have also been more than a few comments about who is paying for this long and expensive stay in Brussels. "Is it coming from an anonymous bank account in Andorra or from the famous 3%, (a reference to the backhander extracted on all public contracts in Catalonia.)"  The two previous Catalan parliamentary leaders, Jordi Pujol and Artur Mas are both currently under investigation for fraud and two of Pujol's sons have served prison terms in connection with the aforementioned 3%. So it is logical to expect that people will ask those questions of Puigdemont.

Another thing I have noticed in the Spanish press is the exasperation and irritation at how the press of other countries view Spain in terms of stereotypes; flamenco and bullfighting and sunshine and vino. But invariably they view Spain in terms of the Civil War and through rose tinted glasses. They rely on the romantic fiction perpetrated by Orwell, Hemingway and going back as far as Washington Irving. And it is very definitely romantic fiction! 
Even the historian Paul Preston finally acknowledged on ‘Start the Week’ on Radio 4 in 2012  that Orwell's book, Homage to Catalonia was about as relevant to the Spanish Civil War as Spike Milligan’s Hitler: My Part in his Downfall was to World War Two. 

The foreign press and commentators all rely on the same tired clichés about Spain: they focus on ideals instead of common sense. They are more in love with Don Quijote than with Sancho Panza. They ignore the reality and the seriousness of the current farce, a tragic farce.

"The escapade has damaged those former ministers who faced up to their responsibilities in Spain by seemingly creating a push for them to be subject to strict precautionary measures because they constituted a flight risk. Indeed, eight of them are currently being held in pre-trial custody. Puigdemont’s behavior must be entertaining for some, but it is tragic for those who were unlucky enough to be in government with him.

"The decision by Puigdemont and his ex-ministers to call themselves a government in exile is laughable in that they are responsible for nothing, in contrast with the Catalan and republican governments based overseas during the rule of Franco. They oversaw the protection of exiles, assets and archives, while also being responsible for institutional relations with other countries that recognized them."

"The comparison between the restrained 40-year resistance of the former premier of Catalonia Josep Tarradellas and the shameful adolescent blunders of his successor over the course of just one week is a sad one for both Catalonia, and for a Spain that is committed to an autonomous and pro-autonomy Catalan region."

https://elpais.com/elpais/2017/11/07/inenglish/1510043525_086434.html

FRIDAY MUSIC: Mighty Northumbria, by JD

Separatism and independence seem to be the current fad. Long Live Freedonia! Long live Sloganism! Well, now is the hour! It is time to restore the ancient Kingdom of Northumbria! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Northumbria

And, unlike Catalonia, Northumbria has the historical legitimacy of having been an actual Kingdom with a long line of real Kings who lived in Bamburgh Castle. Time to display the heritage of music and poetry and dance.













"Dance To Your Daddy" (When the boat comes in) - embed disabled, please click for link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hO1GPGtetw






Update: JD sends a bonus track...

The wand of collusion

Look at the modern Labour Party and ask yourself:

If each Labour MP had a wand that when waved, would magically create for all their voters reasonably-paid jobs, good housing, well-disciplined and talent-stretching education, and good health practices rather than burgeoning sickness services, with the additional result that the politician was no longer needed...

... which of them would wave that wand?

I'd say, people like Frank Field and Jess Phillips, yes - but Blair, Mandelson etc?

Isn't it the case that some "reformers" do enough to justify the need for themselves, and not so much as to make themselves redundant?

From what I read of the Fabians, they started out as posh people discussing "doing good" unto the lower classes without the slightest desire to elevate the latter to their own level - in fact they had quite an enthusiasm for eugenics. So really it was about power - themselves as gardeners, weeding and pruning their social inferiors.

And as for people like "Tony" - didn't he do well out of "doing good"? Not just what in the Seventies was called an "ego trip", but money and status. Then there's the serpentine Peter, and the other managerial types, both smooth and rough, who had a d**n good career out of it all - the nearest I ever came to hearing from Roy Hattersley was when his megaphone car toured the constituency to say so long and thanks for all the fish.

Yet on the other side of the Commons, what do we see? Friends of property developers and money-shufflers, gatherers of directorships and inside tips. With honourable exceptions, I suspect that many would wave their wand to vanish the great unwashed and make piles of money appear; or alternatively, to create millions more poor, MD-enriching people, so long as they were kept well away from where the ruling elite live.

I'm beginning to see some points of cross-party resemblance.

I'm not clever enough to imagine what the LibDems might magick. Though looking at the education and careers of the Cleggs one can see what the wand has done for themselves, if not for others.

The masks slipped in the Palace of Westminster when Cameron led the applause for Blair, and when both sides stamped on electoral reform (proposed by the LibDems, but mostly for their own purposes).

Getting out of the EU is just the start.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Van Morrison, by JD

No introduction necessary for this man........ "take me back to when the world made more sense"

A demographic question

Energy Trading: Why We Need Those Big Swinging Dicks

Our host asked me to pen this piece - and even came up with the title ... [BSD is © Nick Leeson - Ed.]

He'd seen reference to how Nicola Sturgeon was being disingenuous when she announced her new publicly-owned Scottish energy company saying it would have the advantage of not needing to pay "corporate bonuses":  but that her careful choice of words meant she knew full well there would need to be the customary big bonuses on offer to the energy traders involved.  How so? - couldn't energy trading be automated?  Might I be able to explain ..?

Well, many commodity markets are indeed already characterised by a lot of algorithmic trading.   But the gas and electricity markets are different (and also, for idiosyncratic reasons of market design, Brent crude oil at the 'spot' end of the market - though not in the longer dated, more liquid forwards).  It was once considered by some academics that gas, and still more electricity, was a paradigm case of a commodity that couldn't be traded (for "reasons" I won't bore you with, because they were fallacious). 

Turns out though, it's not impossible to trade them: this was proved triumphantly by *ahem* Enron, as a pure act of intellectual conviction and commercial will.  But it is more difficult - and in the case of electricity, much more difficult. The primary reason is that in most electricity markets there is virtually no inventory to act as a buffer in the market, so that relatively slight physical events (which happen all the time, with major events not uncommon) within and around the extensive infrastructure can have a rapid and profound impact on the supply / demand balance. In those few electricity markets where there is an effective buffer - which mostly means those such as Norway that are dominated by hydro-electricity, where the buffer is represented by water stored in dams and 'ponds' at the top of the mountain - trading is concomitantly easier.  Gas suffers from a similar, though less pronounced problem of limited inventory.

A secondary (and related) reason is the 'granularity'.   Copper, for example, trades in units of one month: gas is traded by the day; and electricity by the hour, or even the half-hour.  The gas grid needs to be balanced daily; and the power grid requires balancing in real time.  There are many, many other related contributory factors besides, making gas and electricity highly dependent on more than just the usual financial principles.  In consequence, gas and electricity prices (wholesale / traded markets) are hugely more volatile than has ever been encountered elsewhere - an order of magnitude more volatile in the case of gas, and often two orders more in electricity.  Phenomena like the growing amount of intermittent wind power in the 'fleet' only serve to make this more extreme.

Until, then, the advent of that Holy Grail - an effective and efficient form of electricity storage on a large scale(1)  - successful trading in these markets requires a unique blend of classical 'financial' trading skills, plus deep understanding of the very extensive physical / infrastructure aspects and their complex dynamics.   As a rule, financial traders hate getting their hands dirty with the physical stuff; and physical specialists don't understand the financial stuff (which can be deeply counter-intuitive to the novice, even the highly numerate novice, as most engineers are). 

So the winners - who really clean up - are those who can be arsed to acquire both sets of skills.   The amateurs get destroyed.  Some household-name big companies have really screwed this up over the years.  Many companies actually outsource their trading requirements to specialists - and pay a nice mark-up, but can then say "we don't need those nasty traders(2) & we don't pay those immoral bonuses".  But of course they do, really - like retaining an overseas 'agent' to do the dirty business with the backhanders. 

I wonder which route the pious Sturgeon is going down?   Sadiq Khan had promised to set up a municipal energy company for London, but seems to have thought better of it which, in my view, is wise.  Keep those big swinging dicks out of sight of the innocent Scottish politician ...

ND
______________
(1) Mr Musk has a very, very long way to go yet.  He's a great BS-merchant, though.

(2) The traders' culture is abhorrent to the engineering culture that quite naturally dominates the energy co.s.   There are many points of conflict.  When an energy co eventually realises it needs a trading floor (and be willing to pay serious bonuses), it can cause truly dreadful frictions.  Traders and the like have been heard to call the old-timers "Dougs" - dumb old utility guys ...  and since this is a family blog (is that right, Sackers?), I won't relate what the engineers call the traders.

Moving House, by Wiggia

"Having the benefit of readily accessible bacon..."?

This is a short piece on the perils involved in moving house; far away from the daily nonsense about leaving the EU - which in real terms we won't - it was the fact I am in the process of house hunting and this article that brought this on...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41708597

The article is a simple rehash of proposals made many times about simplifying the transaction process and as before, little meaningful will be achieved.

Do I have the credentials to write anything on this matter ? Probably more than almost anyone, would be my answer. For reasons never explained, each time I have moved or attempted to move house I have somehow found myself  the guinea pig to all the nefarious items that can arise during the process.

Without detailing all, it started with our first move when after exchanging contracts we were told two hours later we had a “problem”: our contract had been posted and the vendor of the house we were buying had changed her mind and phoned her solicitor who told her he still had the contracts in the office and would not send them if that was what she wanted. All legal in those pre-electronic days, but we were effectively homeless and all with no redress, a rare event even then but it gives a fair insight into what has followed.

You name it and it has happened to us and that includes incompetent solicitors, two of whom we have had to take to court for redress when they failed to do the job we paid them for. So yes, I am qualified to have an opinion on the whole process.

Government action in this area is bound up with vested interests: the Commons is stuffed with legal representatives of all colours. They have no reason to simplify the house moving process as they will lose money. In fairness - and I don’t like being fair to solicitors - they don’t earn much from a straightforward conveyance, which probably accounts for the number of errors and over-sights we have encountered; giving our house conveyance to the office junior and not checking has consequences.

The only government attempt at reform was the disastrous HIPS pack that took four years to clear Parliament and came with more holes than the Titanic. Again as I pointed out to my useless MP at the time, if the Commons stuffed with legal eagles could not in four years issue a document on the simple ? matter of house purchase  there had to be a reason and it would not be a reason acceptable to the public if revealed. He didn’t like that; they never do.

Estate agents, that merry breed of winkle-pickered, tight-trousered and -waistcoated, size-too-small-suited and (in modern times) mainly bearded individuals, also have a large part to play in the process. They are of course supposed to work for you, the person who pays their commission fee, but that will only apply with an easy (i.e. no work involved) sale. As soon as things go wrong - wrong meaning a slow sale for a variety of reasons - you will find them working for themselves: no sale no commission, so they get you to lower your price after four weeks on the market , start telling prospective buyers behind your back you will take an offer much lower than the asking price and start to  tell you of all the factors your now rubbish property has that is affecting the sale and why the price should be dropped further. They have no interest in you, the payer of their commission, only in getting it off the books, whatever.

I am convinced that the ‘feedback’ one has to endure is part of the wearing down process: the conveying of a viewer's opinion on your house is pointless. "Garden too big" - what am I supposed to do? Didn’t they read the brochure? "Too many front steps" - you can count them in the photos. "Dogs can get out" - my problem? Endless drivel that you could do nothing about even if you wanted to and you can add the comments of those professional viewers to whom house viewing is a weekend pastime: they never actually buy anything, just look and say whatever comes into their heads when asked about the place. It is all a wearing down process, that is if you let or are new to the game; personally I now state I do not want any feedback other than when someone makes an offer.

There are certain elements to selling that are very difficult to assess. A good example in the rare event of several offers is the “cash buyer”: there is no way anyone can prove that a buyer is in that position, it puts him at the head of queue as regards offers for obvious reasons and can demand a premium discount for that; but I have had a so-called cash buyer who - when it came to the crunch and everyone was wondering why the sale was slow - turned out to be negotiating a mortgage. I was not happy but you are then a long way down the train of events and are you on principle going to tell him he lied and get on his bike? Nonetheless there should be a way of verifying a person's status; agents claim they can, my experience says they can’t.

The late discovery of an alleged structural problem is another offer-reducing tactic. Despite having had a survey, at the last minute there is a query on your drains! Or "Do you really own that boundary fence?" Anything to delay and hopefully get a further discount. None of this should happen if the survey has been done and dusted and the searches completed; that should be it, but often it isn’t.

Never get involved in leaving deposits to cover a perceived eventuality discovered at the last moment. Most minor problems of that sort if real can be covered by a simple insurance. If a cash deposit is asked for you can guarantee you will see none of it again despite your own solicitor's guarantee you will - got caught with that one myself and the solicitor totally failed in his duty to keep tabs on it, a story in itself; they are only interested in getting the conveyance off the books.

The one thing that has never been addressed in house buying and selling is having a deposit system whereby when someone makes an offer a deposit is given so that in the event of a buyer pulling out the vendor will not be out of pocket in any way. Why should he? He will have incurred costs by that stage and wasted time. It is the buyer's choice to pull out so he should suffer the costs. This is not of course in relation to survey findings and the like, just the change of mind syndrome. This was once actually proposed but a myriad of dubious reasons came up and it was dropped; again there was no interest in protecting the innocent party.

It would also stop an awful lot of chain break downs caused by one party wanting to bail out on a whim, as often happens.  Many people out there treat house buying as a game; it isn’t.

There have been many attempts (and that is all they were) to shorten the time it takes from offer made to exchange and moving in. Many excuses for the drawn out process are made but all are spurious. During the late eighties property boom houses in London were sold and completed by specialist solicitors in less than 48 hours. Yes you had to pay for a lot of running about getting documentation, but it was proved to be possible, so why the long-winded performance we put up with. Is it another example of being seen to be earning the fee by the time spent on the job?

Gazumping and gazundering should not be allowed, - how many times have we heard that? Yet the position remains that until the exchange actually takes place both practices can be employed, usually at the last moment when someone who is desperate to get the whole thing over and done with will capitulate and accept the lower price or be told they will have to stump up more than agreed as another party has emerged (or not) from the woodwork.

The "other offer" ploy is also used by agents when selling. It can be true but how can you know? I had it used a week ago on a property I was viewing: “We have had a lot of interest and two offers on this property, Sir.” So why have you still got it on the market, I asked, are two offers not enough? Silence; the owner who was present told me later there had been interest but no offers. At times like that you can really build up an intense dislike of the estate agent class.

And there lies another problem. Over many years listening and being involved with what is basically a seriously flawed and corrupt system one does become cynical with a big “C”; estate agents' words and blurb, solicitors “solutions”, all are received with an incredulity as to their worth.

So how is the current move going, you ask. Not good at the moment and we have run out of houses to view. There is a shortage of what we want on the market so our sale is in jeopardy. Not for the first time we may have to start over.

Of course many will ask, why do you keep moving. That is another story. Many moves have been simply because of changing circumstances,not necessarily choice. The only thing that helps with all this is I do not get attached to the property I am in; only once did I feel a pang of remorse when leaving a house. As long as the place suits it will be my home whilst I am there, I do not put down roots; just as well!

I have told before about the image at the top of this piece. It appeared in an estate agent's listing by mistake (?)  The photographer took the picture after the house was put up for sale; it was not intended for the house details, but for a short time it found its way onto the site. Yet I had been told about this pig in the house long before that sale came about, as my plumber had been called to the property/sty to do some work there and saw said pig in situ. The world is a wonderful place...