For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Useless regulation was the principal failing. Brown was responsible for that in the UK.
The regulator became bigger and entirely pointless.
Money laundering and insider trading became huge, and yet all the money spent achieved nothing. In fact some of the big beasts just did exactly that for fun.
Stability... not a bean spent, nor a thought given.
Regulation (and therefore Brown) was the main culprit? Nope. Not having it. Culture trumps systems. There is so much evidence for this in so many areas. But where I concede is on the point that it happened on Brown's watch. That's a fact and in politics it's rightfully important. My argument that it would have happened just the same - or maybe worse - under the Tories is rock solid but it's not that thrilling.
Regarding mask wearing, every time I think masks are pointless and decide to not wear one I remember that idiots like Piers Corbyn are anti mask wearing and that pushes me back in the pro mask wearing camp.
A look at all the heroes who voted against the Government today does it for me.
Regarding mask wearing, every time I think masks are pointless and decide to not wear one I remember that idiots like Piers Corbyn are anti mask wearing and that pushes me back in the pro mask wearing camp.
A look at all the heroes who voted against the Government today does it for me.
Yes, but this is tribal nonsense.
When Billy Bragg was asked why he wore a mask, he said: "I don't want people to think I'm a Tory."
I admire his honesty, but for crying out loud, what are we doing to ourselves? Why does everything have to be a weapon for pathetic culture warriors?
I am not sure how mask wearing can be weaponised culturally.
These big boys and Esther "McCray" are just demonstrating how hard they all are punching against oppressive government and takimg **** off no one.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Useless regulation was the principal failing. Brown was responsible for that in the UK.
The regulator became bigger and entirely pointless.
Money laundering and insider trading became huge, and yet all the money spent achieved nothing. In fact some of the big beasts just did exactly that for fun.
Stability... not a bean spent, nor a thought given.
Regulation (and therefore Brown) was the main culprit? Nope. Not having it. Culture trumps systems. There is so much evidence for this in so many areas. But where I concede is on the point that it happened on Brown's watch. That's a fact and in politics it's rightfully important. My argument that it would have happened just the same - or maybe worse - under the Tories is rock solid but it's not that thrilling.
Well it's an impossible argument to have. However you in part suggested what I meant anyway with the culture trumps systems idea. There was the wrong regulation. The BoE used to fill a good supervisory role. They did so well, and with small cost. Since such times regulation has been poor and at high cost.
Regarding mask wearing, every time I think masks are pointless and decide to not wear one I remember that idiots like Piers Corbyn are anti mask wearing and that pushes me back in the pro mask wearing camp.
A look at all the heroes who voted against the Government today does it for me.
Very good figures, same day last week comparable are: 42484/165/768
And Starmer just now saying the measures do not go far enough
For all his faults, and he has many, I am pleased Boris is PM at this moment and not Starmer
It will help Boris no end in the GE campaign to be able to point at Sir Keir and say "He'd have locked you up, I set you free" - the REFUK waverers will come running back.
Not to mention "I got Brexit done, he'd have spent the last 4 years procrastinating over a 2nd referendum", "I got the vaccines done, he wanted to wait for the EMA..."
I think there's something that the UK does much, much better than the US (and, I suspect, continental Europe), which doesn't get brought up much:
Lateral flow tests.
In the US, they are extremely rare. I went to my local pharmacy to get one, and they said "Nah, don't have any. We get a couple every few days. Call back tomorrow."
What this means is that people in the UK can check that they are not highly contagious before meeting friends or vulnerable relatives. When we were in the UK, we tested ourselves every day. And, yes, sure, they aren't perfect. But they're pretty good at identifying the most infectious and limiting their likelihood of spreading Covid to others.
We've got four boxes, can I sell them on US ebay?!
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
I’m waiting to be convinced that the Scottish cases aren’t linked in sone way with COP26. If they are, would we be told?
Cop26 finished 17 days ago, too long ago, surely?
The cases have been linked to a function 10 days ago. If someone caught it at COP26, and were asymptomatic, they would still be contagious by the date of the function. However, it would also indicate that Omicron may not be as severe as feared. “If” doing a lot of work there, I accept, but good news for travelling flint knappers.
I think there's something that the UK does much, much better than the US (and, I suspect, continental Europe), which doesn't get brought up much:
Lateral flow tests.
In the US, they are extremely rare. I went to my local pharmacy to get one, and they said "Nah, don't have any. We get a couple every few days. Call back tomorrow."
What this means is that people in the UK can check that they are not highly contagious before meeting friends or vulnerable relatives. When we were in the UK, we tested ourselves every day. And, yes, sure, they aren't perfect. But they're pretty good at identifying the most infectious and limiting their likelihood of spreading Covid to others.
We've got four boxes, can I sell them on US ebay?!
Bondholders should also have been wiped out and the carcass of RBS asset stripped and sold for whatever it was worth. I'm not saying it should have been a disorderly collapse, more that the company should have ceased to exist on the administration process with shareholders and bondholders all taking the full hit.
Either the government takes on all liabilities or it doesn't. If it doesn't, immediately, you get the disorderly chaos I described. If it does, bondholders (who are, after all, just creditors like RBS clients were, and who comprised other banks, companies, and pension funds) can't be excluded from the guarantee, and nor would you want them to, because many of them will go bust in turn if they are excluded.
Tbh, that's a consequence of throwing their lot in with a bank that was running at 70:1 leverage 🤷♂️
And then a bank with 40:1 leverage goes because it has a counterparty with 70:1 leverage. And then one with 30:1. And then one with 20:1. And then one with 10:1...
I'm not disagreeing with you that these institutions should probably have been properly shut down. But I do think you grossly underestimate the consequences of a disorderly insolvency process.
I'm not sure that having the whole sector come crashing down wouldn't have been an overall good. I also wonder whether the likes of Barclays, Lloyds (had it not been forced down the aisle) and others would have been able to go to their shareholders and raise the cash to avoid that fate once the government made it clear that any bank that ends up insolvent will be shut down with only the depositors protected at 100%.
Both RBS and HBOS should have been put out of the nation's misery. That they still exist is a national failure.
The problem is that there lots of edge cases, with real world consequences.
So, depositors are protected.
But do you keep RBS up and running while its customers are moved over to a new bank? How do you manage the fact that Hoare's can't accept a million new customers today?
And let's not forget that handing over depositors is handing over liabilities. Is the government going to step in immediately and hand over a equivalent amount of cash? (And bear in mind that even if the government did, you would still have just hammered the new owner of those deposits with a big increase in capital requirements, because it is now twice as big.)
And what of - for example - a business that is currently overdrawn. Is the new owner of that account required to extend an equivalent overdraft?
And what of the impact of removing 90% of the capacity from the mortgage market?
The point is that you need to decide what will happen with all these in advance. And we hadn't done that.
It's quite simple, the Gov't takes over the overdrafts, bank guarantees, letters of credit, cross guarantees and all that good stuff. Banks counterparties would be fine with "This is now a UK Gov't obligation."
Regarding mask wearing, every time I think masks are pointless and decide to not wear one I remember that idiots like Piers Corbyn are anti mask wearing and that pushes me back in the pro mask wearing camp.
A look at all the heroes who voted against the Government today does it for me.
Bondholders should also have been wiped out and the carcass of RBS asset stripped and sold for whatever it was worth. I'm not saying it should have been a disorderly collapse, more that the company should have ceased to exist on the administration process with shareholders and bondholders all taking the full hit.
Either the government takes on all liabilities or it doesn't. If it doesn't, immediately, you get the disorderly chaos I described. If it does, bondholders (who are, after all, just creditors like RBS clients were, and who comprised other banks, companies, and pension funds) can't be excluded from the guarantee, and nor would you want them to, because many of them will go bust in turn if they are excluded.
Tbh, that's a consequence of throwing their lot in with a bank that was running at 70:1 leverage 🤷♂️
And then a bank with 40:1 leverage goes because it has a counterparty with 70:1 leverage. And then one with 30:1. And then one with 20:1. And then one with 10:1...
I'm not disagreeing with you that these institutions should probably have been properly shut down. But I do think you grossly underestimate the consequences of a disorderly insolvency process.
I'm not sure that having the whole sector come crashing down wouldn't have been an overall good. I also wonder whether the likes of Barclays, Lloyds (had it not been forced down the aisle) and others would have been able to go to their shareholders and raise the cash to avoid that fate once the government made it clear that any bank that ends up insolvent will be shut down with only the depositors protected at 100%.
Both RBS and HBOS should have been put out of the nation's misery. That they still exist is a national failure.
The problem is that there lots of edge cases, with real world consequences.
So, depositors are protected.
But do you keep RBS up and running while its customers are moved over to a new bank? How do you manage the fact that Hoare's can't accept a million new customers today?
And let's not forget that handing over depositors is handing over liabilities. Is the government going to step in immediately and hand over a equivalent amount of cash? (And bear in mind that even if the government did, you would still have just hammered the new owner of those deposits with a big increase in capital requirements, because it is now twice as big.)
And what of - for example - a business that is currently overdrawn. Is the new owner of that account required to extend an equivalent overdraft?
And what of the impact of removing 90% of the capacity from the mortgage market?
The point is that you need to decide what will happen with all these in advance. And we hadn't done that.
It's quite simple, the Gov't takes over the overdrafts, bank guarantees, letters of credit, cross guarantees and all that good stuff. Banks counterparties would be fine with "This is now a UK Gov't obligation."
Had rbs been nationalised with 100% haircuts for all unsecured creditors (ex retail depositors), could the government have faced legal action on the basis that its own regulatory failing led to the collapse of the bank?
Bondholders should also have been wiped out and the carcass of RBS asset stripped and sold for whatever it was worth. I'm not saying it should have been a disorderly collapse, more that the company should have ceased to exist on the administration process with shareholders and bondholders all taking the full hit.
Either the government takes on all liabilities or it doesn't. If it doesn't, immediately, you get the disorderly chaos I described. If it does, bondholders (who are, after all, just creditors like RBS clients were, and who comprised other banks, companies, and pension funds) can't be excluded from the guarantee, and nor would you want them to, because many of them will go bust in turn if they are excluded.
Tbh, that's a consequence of throwing their lot in with a bank that was running at 70:1 leverage 🤷♂️
And then a bank with 40:1 leverage goes because it has a counterparty with 70:1 leverage. And then one with 30:1. And then one with 20:1. And then one with 10:1...
I'm not disagreeing with you that these institutions should probably have been properly shut down. But I do think you grossly underestimate the consequences of a disorderly insolvency process.
I'm not sure that having the whole sector come crashing down wouldn't have been an overall good. I also wonder whether the likes of Barclays, Lloyds (had it not been forced down the aisle) and others would have been able to go to their shareholders and raise the cash to avoid that fate once the government made it clear that any bank that ends up insolvent will be shut down with only the depositors protected at 100%.
Both RBS and HBOS should have been put out of the nation's misery. That they still exist is a national failure.
The problem is that there lots of edge cases, with real world consequences.
So, depositors are protected.
But do you keep RBS up and running while its customers are moved over to a new bank? How do you manage the fact that Hoare's can't accept a million new customers today?
And let's not forget that handing over depositors is handing over liabilities. Is the government going to step in immediately and hand over a equivalent amount of cash? (And bear in mind that even if the government did, you would still have just hammered the new owner of those deposits with a big increase in capital requirements, because it is now twice as big.)
And what of - for example - a business that is currently overdrawn. Is the new owner of that account required to extend an equivalent overdraft?
And what of the impact of removing 90% of the capacity from the mortgage market?
The point is that you need to decide what will happen with all these in advance. And we hadn't done that.
It's quite simple, the Gov't takes over the overdrafts, bank guarantees, letters of credit, cross guarantees and all that good stuff. Banks counterparties would be fine with "This is now a UK Gov't obligation."
Had rbs been nationalised with 100% haircuts for all unsecured creditors (ex retail depositors), could the government have faced legal action on the basis that its own regulatory failing led to the collapse of the bank?
I thought Northern Rock shareholders tried that line and failed?
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of pressure from Hannan and others , in 2004 , to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
Under the previous regime where the Chancellor was directly responsible for monetary policy it would have been much harder to pretend that astronomical increases in house prices could be safely ignored because 'boom and bust' had been abolished.
Very good figures, same day last week comparable are: 42484/165/768
And Starmer just now saying the measures do not go far enough
For all his faults, and he has many, I am pleased Boris is PM at this moment and not Starmer
They have both rolled the dice today and both are potential hostages to fortune. Johnson for Christmas WON'T be cancelled and Starmer for stuff like 8 day isolation for inbound travellers etc, etc. It all depends on events.
For what it's worth I hope Johnson's gamble pays off. If it doesn't we are all up the creek. If Starmer is wrong it matters not one way nor the other, he is in oopposition. Remember, no one blames the Conservatives for invading Iraq.
Very good figures, same day last week comparable are: 42484/165/768
And Starmer just now saying the measures do not go far enough
For all his faults, and he has many, I am pleased Boris is PM at this moment and not Starmer
They have both rolled the dice today and both are potential hostages to fortune. Johnson for Christmas WON'T be cancelled and Starmer for stuff like 8 day isolation for inbound travellers etc, etc. It all depends on events.
For what it's worth I hope Johnson's gamble pays off. If it doesn't we are all up the creek. If Starmer is wrong it matters not one way nor the other, he is in oopposition. Remember, no one blames the Conservatives for invading Iraq.
Although we should, at least to some extent. Had Iain Duncan Smith had the brains to ask the right questions he could have stopped British involvement dead in its tracks.
A real tragedy Kenneth Clarke, who was asking the right questions and noticed he was getting all the wrong answers, was not Leader of the Opposition at the time.
Does anyone know why someone's cancer treatment might be delayed because of Covid-19? I can't think why Covid-19 is automatically more important than other medical cases.
Regarding mask wearing, every time I think masks are pointless and decide to not wear one I remember that idiots like Piers Corbyn are anti mask wearing and that pushes me back in the pro mask wearing camp.
A look at all the heroes who voted against the Government today does it for me.
In which direction?
Which direction? Hard right!
I meant for or against masks!
I haven't seen the division lists yet.
Against masks. Chope, Davies, McVey, Francois, Bridgen...
I was very pleased with my hard right quip under the circumstances!
Does anyone know why someone's cancer treatment might be delayed because of Covid-19? I can't think why Covid-19 is automatically more important than other medical cases.
Lack of available staff, it has been issue for a while but Brexit and Covid-19 has made a poor situation very bad.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
Very good figures, same day last week comparable are: 42484/165/768
And Starmer just now saying the measures do not go far enough
For all his faults, and he has many, I am pleased Boris is PM at this moment and not Starmer
They have both rolled the dice today and both are potential hostages to fortune. Johnson for Christmas WON'T be cancelled and Starmer for stuff like 8 day isolation for inbound travellers etc, etc. It all depends on events.
For what it's worth I hope Johnson's gamble pays off. If it doesn't we are all up the creek. If Starmer is wrong it matters not one way nor the other, he is in oopposition. Remember, no one blames the Conservatives for invading Iraq.
Although we should, at least to some extent. Had Iain Duncan Smith had the brains to ask the right questions he could have stopped British involvement dead in its tracks.
A real tragedy Kenneth Clarke, who was asking the right questions and noticed he was getting all the wrong answers, was not Leader of the Opposition at the time.
IDS was a hard man who needed to out-hard Blair.
Blair takes the spoils as the war criminal, IDS just a sorry footnote.
Something odd going on with omicron. The anecdotal evidence doesn't really fit with the initial idea that a virulent variant kicked off midweek last week in Botswana. The nine Scottish cases have no link to southern Africa and, more likely, got it at COP26. All 44 cases found in the EU are mild/asymptomatic.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
A better example might be Black Wednesday. Brown was a full-throated supporter of the ERM long after it had become obvious even to Major and Lamont that we would have to withdraw. But nobody ever holds that against him even though had he been in charge things would have been fifty times worse.
Similarly it was as well for George Osborne's reputation, such as remains, that he wasn't in charge when Lehmanns went belly up. Mouse in the headlights would describe his demeanour quite well.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Useless regulation was the principal failing. Brown was responsible for that in the UK.
The regulator became bigger and entirely pointless.
Money laundering and insider trading became huge, and yet all the money spent achieved nothing. In fact some of the big beasts just did exactly that for fun.
Stability... not a bean spent, nor a thought given.
Regulation (and therefore Brown) was the main culprit? Nope. Not having it. Culture trumps systems. There is so much evidence for this in so many areas. But where I concede is on the point that it happened on Brown's watch. That's a fact and in politics it's rightfully important. My argument that it would have happened just the same - or maybe worse - under the Tories is rock solid but it's not that thrilling.
Well it's an impossible argument to have. However you in part suggested what I meant anyway with the culture trumps systems idea. There was the wrong regulation. The BoE used to fill a good supervisory role. They did so well, and with small cost. Since such times regulation has been poor and at high cost.
Yes, fair comment. I'm just saying the old ways couldn't co-exist with the new culture.
Does anyone know why someone's cancer treatment might be delayed because of Covid-19? I can't think why Covid-19 is automatically more important than other medical cases.
There's a lot to it, a multitude of reasons.
For one bed capacity as many people having cancer surgeries obviously require beds afterwards. Some may end in ICU afterwards and a lot of units across the land are struggling with Covid patients taking up beds.
The backlog is real as well in terms of scanning and diagnostics which help identify the best courses of treatments going forward being delayed.
Staff shortages in the NHS is a real problem, lot of staff have left the NHS or are burnt out after a extremely difficult and testing couple of years. Plenty of jobs out there at the moment but vacancies are struggling to be filled (1 million vacancies in the NHS right now).
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
Before Northern Rock, there was 150 years since the last British bank run. A period where the Conservative Party held office the majority of the time. But don’t let that get in the way of your nonsense.
Bondholders should also have been wiped out and the carcass of RBS asset stripped and sold for whatever it was worth. I'm not saying it should have been a disorderly collapse, more that the company should have ceased to exist on the administration process with shareholders and bondholders all taking the full hit.
Either the government takes on all liabilities or it doesn't. If it doesn't, immediately, you get the disorderly chaos I described. If it does, bondholders (who are, after all, just creditors like RBS clients were, and who comprised other banks, companies, and pension funds) can't be excluded from the guarantee, and nor would you want them to, because many of them will go bust in turn if they are excluded.
Tbh, that's a consequence of throwing their lot in with a bank that was running at 70:1 leverage 🤷♂️
And then a bank with 40:1 leverage goes because it has a counterparty with 70:1 leverage. And then one with 30:1. And then one with 20:1. And then one with 10:1...
I'm not disagreeing with you that these institutions should probably have been properly shut down. But I do think you grossly underestimate the consequences of a disorderly insolvency process.
I'm not sure that having the whole sector come crashing down wouldn't have been an overall good. I also wonder whether the likes of Barclays, Lloyds (had it not been forced down the aisle) and others would have been able to go to their shareholders and raise the cash to avoid that fate once the government made it clear that any bank that ends up insolvent will be shut down with only the depositors protected at 100%.
Both RBS and HBOS should have been put out of the nation's misery. That they still exist is a national failure.
The problem is that there lots of edge cases, with real world consequences.
So, depositors are protected.
But do you keep RBS up and running while its customers are moved over to a new bank? How do you manage the fact that Hoare's can't accept a million new customers today?
And let's not forget that handing over depositors is handing over liabilities. Is the government going to step in immediately and hand over a equivalent amount of cash? (And bear in mind that even if the government did, you would still have just hammered the new owner of those deposits with a big increase in capital requirements, because it is now twice as big.)
And what of - for example - a business that is currently overdrawn. Is the new owner of that account required to extend an equivalent overdraft?
And what of the impact of removing 90% of the capacity from the mortgage market?
The point is that you need to decide what will happen with all these in advance. And we hadn't done that.
Don't you have a liability auction? Whoever wants to take on those liabilities at knock down price can do so and the counterparties take the hit for not doing their due diligence properly.
All of this comes down to people not actually doing their homework properly and then dumping that ill behaviour on the doorstep of the taxpayer.
It's created a rubbish moral hazard and opened the door to other bailouts.
You're simply absolving counterparty risk analysts fucking the dog because, yes we think that some banks are too big to fail.
My point is that where we were lacking was in a process to manage the orderly shut down of the banks. And without that, the consequences of inaction were too great. We had led RBS and others become "Too Big to Fail", and that meant that the UK taxpayer didn't really have a lot of choice. Simply, the cascading risks of allowing one of the biggest counterparties in the world go bust were too great.
The job of the Bank of England and the FSA should be to ensure this never happens again, and when banks go bust (and they will), that they can be closed down in an orderly fashion.
PRELIMINARY DATA but good news for your afternoon! Pfizer vaccine’s is only SLIGHTLY less effective in preventing infection with Omicron than with Delta- 90% as opposed to 95%- while it is AS EFFECTIVE in preventing serious symptoms- around 93% – at least for those boosted! There are indications that individuals fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, within six months or with the booster, are also protected against the Omicron variant, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said Tuesday, after another two cases of individuals infected with the variant were identified, bringing the total to four. “In the coming days we will have more accurate information about the efficacy of the vaccine against Omicron but there is already room for optimism, and there are initial indications that those who are vaccinated with a vaccine STILL valid or with a booster, will also be protected from this variant.” In addition, according to the report, the ability of the variant to infect is higher than Delta but not as much as feared- around 1.3 times higher. At the same time, those not inoculated have a 2.4 times greater chances of developing serious symptoms- a significant figure. You can read this and more here: https://jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/covid-1st-data-about-vaccine-efficacy-against-omicron-expected-tuesday-687392
Something odd going on with omicron. The anecdotal evidence doesn't really fit with the initial idea that a virulent variant kicked off midweek last week in Botswana. The nine Scottish cases have no link to southern Africa and, more likely, got it at COP26. All 44 cases found in the EU are mild/asymptomatic.
Has it been around longer than we thought?
Could it have travelled from Scotland to southern Africa, rather than the other way round?
Something odd going on with omicron. The anecdotal evidence doesn't really fit with the initial idea that a virulent variant kicked off midweek last week in Botswana. The nine Scottish cases have no link to southern Africa and, more likely, got it at COP26. All 44 cases found in the EU are mild/asymptomatic.
Has it been around longer than we thought?
I'd be shocked if it wasn't, we've had plenty of direct flights from SA for weeks with only lateral flow tests required. As I said earlier, if it's already here then those doom predictions may be out of alignment with reality. What's more important is to see how it spreads in a population with less overall immunity than the UK. The UK goes into the Omicron wave with a very high levels of national immunity across all age groups and regions. That could be a really, really important differentiator. If people who previously got it or are double/triple jabbed only get sniffles but people with no immunity get the same original symptoms (and this isn't an unlikely scenario) then we as a nation may be in the clear but other countries less so.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
A better example might be Black Wednesday. Brown was a full-throated supporter of the ERM long after it had become obvious even to Major and Lamont that we would have to withdraw. But nobody ever holds that against him even though had he been in charge things would have been fifty times worse.
Similarly it was as well for George Osborne's reputation, such as remains, that he wasn't in charge when Lehmanns went belly up. Mouse in the headlights would describe his demeanour quite well.
You have perfectly explained why contrary to what BigG and Isam are touting, it matters not a jot if Starmer calls Covid wrong today. It is far more important for Johnson to call it right however.
PRELIMINARY DATA but good news for your afternoon! Pfizer vaccine’s is only SLIGHTLY less effective in preventing infection with Omicron than with Delta- 90% as opposed to 95%- while it is AS EFFECTIVE in preventing serious symptoms- around 93% – at least for those boosted! There are indications that individuals fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, within six months or with the booster, are also protected against the Omicron variant, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said Tuesday, after another two cases of individuals infected with the variant were identified, bringing the total to four. “In the coming days we will have more accurate information about the efficacy of the vaccine against Omicron but there is already room for optimism, and there are initial indications that those who are vaccinated with a vaccine STILL valid or with a booster, will also be protected from this variant.” In addition, according to the report, the ability of the variant to infect is higher than Delta but not as much as feared- around 1.3 times higher. At the same time, those not inoculated have a 2.4 times greater chances of developing serious symptoms- a significant figure. You can read this and more here: https://jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/covid-1st-data-about-vaccine-efficacy-against-omicron-expected-tuesday-687392
TLDR Get vaccinated, get boosted.
Looks like fantastic news and a vindication of expediting the booster programme. Fair play to Javid.
Something odd going on with omicron. The anecdotal evidence doesn't really fit with the initial idea that a virulent variant kicked off midweek last week in Botswana. The nine Scottish cases have no link to southern Africa and, more likely, got it at COP26. All 44 cases found in the EU are mild/asymptomatic.
Has it been around longer than we thought?
Could it have travelled from Scotland to southern Africa, rather than the other way round?
Some Netherlands Omicron samples pre-date South African discovery.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
Before Northern Rock, there was 150 years since the last British bank run. A period where the Conservative Party held office the majority of the time. But don’t let that get in the way of your nonsense.
Suggest you get back to your specialist field of flying saucers.
Something odd going on with omicron. The anecdotal evidence doesn't really fit with the initial idea that a virulent variant kicked off midweek last week in Botswana. The nine Scottish cases have no link to southern Africa and, more likely, got it at COP26. All 44 cases found in the EU are mild/asymptomatic.
Has it been around longer than we thought?
"Has it been around longer than we thought?"
I think that sentence could be applied to every variant of Covid-19.
Based on the data I’ve seen so far, and that I’ve highlighted here, I’m more inclined to believe that Omicron began somewhere in Europe in mid-to-late Summer. It then made its way to South Africa, not the other way around.
But let’s keep going…
TL; DR: What I’m seeing in the data suggests that Omicron has flown under the radar for several months. We didn’t realize it was there b/c our testing + sequencing systems are biased toward symptomatic disease, which may be different or less common for Omicron vs. Delta /15 https://twitter.com/DataDrivenMD/status/1465392204365500418?s=20
Something odd going on with omicron. The anecdotal evidence doesn't really fit with the initial idea that a virulent variant kicked off midweek last week in Botswana. The nine Scottish cases have no link to southern Africa and, more likely, got it at COP26. All 44 cases found in the EU are mild/asymptomatic.
Has it been around longer than we thought?
Could it have travelled from Scotland to southern Africa, rather than the other way round?
Yes of course, but no link has been identified that would fit with the originally floated timeframe.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
A better example might be Black Wednesday. Brown was a full-throated supporter of the ERM long after it had become obvious even to Major and Lamont that we would have to withdraw. But nobody ever holds that against him even though had he been in charge things would have been fifty times worse.
Similarly it was as well for George Osborne's reputation, such as remains, that he wasn't in charge when Lehmanns went belly up. Mouse in the headlights would describe his demeanour quite well.
Bondholders should also have been wiped out and the carcass of RBS asset stripped and sold for whatever it was worth. I'm not saying it should have been a disorderly collapse, more that the company should have ceased to exist on the administration process with shareholders and bondholders all taking the full hit.
Either the government takes on all liabilities or it doesn't. If it doesn't, immediately, you get the disorderly chaos I described. If it does, bondholders (who are, after all, just creditors like RBS clients were, and who comprised other banks, companies, and pension funds) can't be excluded from the guarantee, and nor would you want them to, because many of them will go bust in turn if they are excluded.
Tbh, that's a consequence of throwing their lot in with a bank that was running at 70:1 leverage 🤷♂️
And then a bank with 40:1 leverage goes because it has a counterparty with 70:1 leverage. And then one with 30:1. And then one with 20:1. And then one with 10:1...
I'm not disagreeing with you that these institutions should probably have been properly shut down. But I do think you grossly underestimate the consequences of a disorderly insolvency process.
I'm not sure that having the whole sector come crashing down wouldn't have been an overall good. I also wonder whether the likes of Barclays, Lloyds (had it not been forced down the aisle) and others would have been able to go to their shareholders and raise the cash to avoid that fate once the government made it clear that any bank that ends up insolvent will be shut down with only the depositors protected at 100%.
Both RBS and HBOS should have been put out of the nation's misery. That they still exist is a national failure.
The problem is that there lots of edge cases, with real world consequences.
So, depositors are protected.
But do you keep RBS up and running while its customers are moved over to a new bank? How do you manage the fact that Hoare's can't accept a million new customers today?
And let's not forget that handing over depositors is handing over liabilities. Is the government going to step in immediately and hand over a equivalent amount of cash? (And bear in mind that even if the government did, you would still have just hammered the new owner of those deposits with a big increase in capital requirements, because it is now twice as big.)
And what of - for example - a business that is currently overdrawn. Is the new owner of that account required to extend an equivalent overdraft?
And what of the impact of removing 90% of the capacity from the mortgage market?
The point is that you need to decide what will happen with all these in advance. And we hadn't done that.
It's quite simple, the Gov't takes over the overdrafts, bank guarantees, letters of credit, cross guarantees and all that good stuff. Banks counterparties would be fine with "This is now a UK Gov't obligation."
Had rbs been nationalised with 100% haircuts for all unsecured creditors (ex retail depositors), could the government have faced legal action on the basis that its own regulatory failing led to the collapse of the bank?
Some of the RBS subsidiaries - such as aircraft financing - were highly profitable, though. If you lent money to Royal Bank of Scotland Aviation Services, you'd feel pretty pissed about losing all your money.
It's also worth remembering the experience of Norther Rock. When all was said and done, most of the bond holders ended up (and this varies a lot with exactly which bonds they owned) with about 80 pence on the pound. It would have been the same with an orderly dissolution of RBS - most bondholders would have gotten something.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
A better example might be Black Wednesday. Brown was a full-throated supporter of the ERM long after it had become obvious even to Major and Lamont that we would have to withdraw. But nobody ever holds that against him even though had he been in charge things would have been fifty times worse.
Similarly it was as well for George Osborne's reputation, such as remains, that he wasn't in charge when Lehmanns went belly up. Mouse in the headlights would describe his demeanour quite well.
You have perfectly explained why contrary to what BigG and Isam are touting, it matters not a jot if Starmer calls Covid wrong today. It is far more important for Johnson to call it right however.
PRELIMINARY DATA but good news for your afternoon! Pfizer vaccine’s is only SLIGHTLY less effective in preventing infection with Omicron than with Delta- 90% as opposed to 95%- while it is AS EFFECTIVE in preventing serious symptoms- around 93% – at least for those boosted! There are indications that individuals fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, within six months or with the booster, are also protected against the Omicron variant, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said Tuesday, after another two cases of individuals infected with the variant were identified, bringing the total to four. “In the coming days we will have more accurate information about the efficacy of the vaccine against Omicron but there is already room for optimism, and there are initial indications that those who are vaccinated with a vaccine STILL valid or with a booster, will also be protected from this variant.” In addition, according to the report, the ability of the variant to infect is higher than Delta but not as much as feared- around 1.3 times higher. At the same time, those not inoculated have a 2.4 times greater chances of developing serious symptoms- a significant figure. You can read this and more here: https://jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/covid-1st-data-about-vaccine-efficacy-against-omicron-expected-tuesday-687392
TLDR Get vaccinated, get boosted.
If that's true, and I have no reason to doubt Israeli data, then I think the UK is pretty much in the clear, we were already close to the herd immunity threshold with delta, it may mean an extra couple of weeks with higher cases but no more than than I think. I worry for low vaccinated European countries. In winter Omicron could be very, very deadly.
I think it's highly likely Omicron was brewed up in an immunocompromised individual from a richer country. Probably on convalescent plasma and whatnot.
PRELIMINARY DATA but good news for your afternoon! Pfizer vaccine’s is only SLIGHTLY less effective in preventing infection with Omicron than with Delta- 90% as opposed to 95%- while it is AS EFFECTIVE in preventing serious symptoms- around 93% – at least for those boosted! There are indications that individuals fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, within six months or with the booster, are also protected against the Omicron variant, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said Tuesday, after another two cases of individuals infected with the variant were identified, bringing the total to four. “In the coming days we will have more accurate information about the efficacy of the vaccine against Omicron but there is already room for optimism, and there are initial indications that those who are vaccinated with a vaccine STILL valid or with a booster, will also be protected from this variant.” In addition, according to the report, the ability of the variant to infect is higher than Delta but not as much as feared- around 1.3 times higher. At the same time, those not inoculated have a 2.4 times greater chances of developing serious symptoms- a significant figure. You can read this and more here: https://jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/covid-1st-data-about-vaccine-efficacy-against-omicron-expected-tuesday-687392
TLDR Get vaccinated, get boosted.
Looks like fantastic news and a vindication of expediting the booster programme. Fair play to Javid.
Two cardiologists from Sheba Medical Center were verified as infected with the Omicron variant, a spokesperson for the hospital confirmed. He said they were experiencing “very light symptoms.” One of the doctors, in his 50s, brought the variant into Israel on return from a medical conference in London.
Something odd going on with omicron. The anecdotal evidence doesn't really fit with the initial idea that a virulent variant kicked off midweek last week in Botswana. The nine Scottish cases have no link to southern Africa and, more likely, got it at COP26. All 44 cases found in the EU are mild/asymptomatic.
Has it been around longer than we thought?
Could it have travelled from Scotland to southern Africa, rather than the other way round?
Some Netherlands Omicron samples pre-date South African discovery.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
Before Northern Rock, there was 150 years since the last British bank run. A period where the Conservative Party held office the majority of the time. But don’t let that get in the way of your nonsense.
Suggest you get back to your specialist field of flying saucers.
I think it's highly likely Omicron was brewed up in an immunocompromised individual from a richer country. Probably on convalescent plasma and whatnot.
And the Saffas have got the blame for it – because they identified it!
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
A better example might be Black Wednesday. Brown was a full-throated supporter of the ERM long after it had become obvious even to Major and Lamont that we would have to withdraw. But nobody ever holds that against him even though had he been in charge things would have been fifty times worse.
Similarly it was as well for George Osborne's reputation, such as remains, that he wasn't in charge when Lehmanns went belly up. Mouse in the headlights would describe his demeanour quite well.
You have perfectly explained why contrary to what BigG and Isam are touting, it matters not a jot if Starmer calls Covid wrong today. It is far more important for Johnson to call it right however.
It matters in the context of the next GE campaign - The Tories, if Boris is right, can point out they freed us whilst Labour clamoured for lockdown - it is all about the next GE campaign. I was thinking earlier on that pollsters shouldn't ask "How would you vote if there were a General Election tomorrow" but "How would you vote if there were a General Election tomorrow, taking into account there would have had been 2 months campaigning" and "Who do you think will perform better in the Election debates"
Something odd going on with omicron. The anecdotal evidence doesn't really fit with the initial idea that a virulent variant kicked off midweek last week in Botswana. The nine Scottish cases have no link to southern Africa and, more likely, got it at COP26. All 44 cases found in the EU are mild/asymptomatic.
Has it been around longer than we thought?
Could it have travelled from Scotland to southern Africa, rather than the other way round?
My understanding was that the UK was doing more genetic sequencing of Covid cases than almost any country, so if it was here in any great quantity, and it was causing symptomatic cases, then we would have spotted it here first.
Part of the complication here is that Covid spreads quickly and slowly at the same time. You don't go from one case to 10,000 cases in a couple of weeks. The spread can seem very slow when the numbers are small. If there was one delegate at COP26 who brought Omicron into Scotland then it's worth remembering that most of that person's close contact would have been with other delegates, from other foreign countries, rather than with the good people of Glasgow.
It does seem like an obvious explanation. Also, if COP26 played a role in spreading Omicron from its origins to many other countries, then it would help to explain how it had spread all the way from southern Africa to Egypt (or vice versa, or from somewhere else to both) without first causing a health system to collapse on the way.
Alternatively, COP26 may have played the role of a fluke event, that allowed an otherwise relatively nondescript variant to spread more rapidly due to random chance. I guess we'll find out in time.
Maintaining a positivity rate that would make quite a few Western European countries blush...
Not testing much are they and still their positivity rate is only double ours.
And substantially lower than Germany (17.3%), Belgium (15.7%) Switzerland (14.8%) or the Netherlands (13.9%), let alone Poland (24.6%).
There is every possibility that Omicron didn't start in SA but was first identified there.
Starting to look like that might be the case. The Scottish cases had no link to southern Africa, apparently.
Imagine the mild cold that everyone I know has had for a fortnight was Omicron!
Mrs. Fairliered had that mild cold, but our twice weekly LFTs have all been negative.
I had a version of it, although it was anything but mild.
We have had cases at work where people with symptoms have tested negative on LFTs but positive on PCRs, which is why I wasn't allowed back to work without a negative PCR.
Bondholders should also have been wiped out and the carcass of RBS asset stripped and sold for whatever it was worth. I'm not saying it should have been a disorderly collapse, more that the company should have ceased to exist on the administration process with shareholders and bondholders all taking the full hit.
Either the government takes on all liabilities or it doesn't. If it doesn't, immediately, you get the disorderly chaos I described. If it does, bondholders (who are, after all, just creditors like RBS clients were, and who comprised other banks, companies, and pension funds) can't be excluded from the guarantee, and nor would you want them to, because many of them will go bust in turn if they are excluded.
Tbh, that's a consequence of throwing their lot in with a bank that was running at 70:1 leverage 🤷♂️
And then a bank with 40:1 leverage goes because it has a counterparty with 70:1 leverage. And then one with 30:1. And then one with 20:1. And then one with 10:1...
I'm not disagreeing with you that these institutions should probably have been properly shut down. But I do think you grossly underestimate the consequences of a disorderly insolvency process.
I'm not sure that having the whole sector come crashing down wouldn't have been an overall good. I also wonder whether the likes of Barclays, Lloyds (had it not been forced down the aisle) and others would have been able to go to their shareholders and raise the cash to avoid that fate once the government made it clear that any bank that ends up insolvent will be shut down with only the depositors protected at 100%.
Both RBS and HBOS should have been put out of the nation's misery. That they still exist is a national failure.
The problem is that there lots of edge cases, with real world consequences.
So, depositors are protected.
But do you keep RBS up and running while its customers are moved over to a new bank? How do you manage the fact that Hoare's can't accept a million new customers today?
And let's not forget that handing over depositors is handing over liabilities. Is the government going to step in immediately and hand over a equivalent amount of cash? (And bear in mind that even if the government did, you would still have just hammered the new owner of those deposits with a big increase in capital requirements, because it is now twice as big.)
And what of - for example - a business that is currently overdrawn. Is the new owner of that account required to extend an equivalent overdraft?
And what of the impact of removing 90% of the capacity from the mortgage market?
The point is that you need to decide what will happen with all these in advance. And we hadn't done that.
It's quite simple, the Gov't takes over the overdrafts, bank guarantees, letters of credit, cross guarantees and all that good stuff. Banks counterparties would be fine with "This is now a UK Gov't obligation."
Had rbs been nationalised with 100% haircuts for all unsecured creditors (ex retail depositors), could the government have faced legal action on the basis that its own regulatory failing led to the collapse of the bank?
Some of the RBS subsidiaries - such as aircraft financing - were highly profitable, though. If you lent money to Royal Bank of Scotland Aviation Services, you'd feel pretty pissed about losing all your money.
It's also worth remembering the experience of Norther Rock. When all was said and done, most of the bond holders ended up (and this varies a lot with exactly which bonds they owned) with about 80 pence on the pound. It would have been the same with an orderly dissolution of RBS - most bondholders would have gotten something.
Creditors to subs like that would be structurally senior so would have been fine. Whether bond holders to the main financing arms would have got much back is another question. One thing doing aircraft finance, quite another lending to allow the buildup of a banking presence in places like Kazakhstan. Which by the way even relatively inexperienced analysts at the time clocked was built on sand and had all lines pulled before the bang.
If that's true, and I have no reason to doubt Israeli data, then I think the UK is pretty much in the clear, we were already close to the herd immunity threshold with delta, it may mean an extra couple of weeks with higher cases but no more than than I think. I worry for low vaccinated European countries. In winter Omicron could be very, very deadly.
PRELIMINARY DATA but good news for your afternoon! Pfizer vaccine’s is only SLIGHTLY less effective in preventing infection with Omicron than with Delta- 90% as opposed to 95%- while it is AS EFFECTIVE in preventing serious symptoms- around 93% – at least for those boosted! There are indications that individuals fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, within six months or with the booster, are also protected against the Omicron variant, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said Tuesday, after another two cases of individuals infected with the variant were identified, bringing the total to four. “In the coming days we will have more accurate information about the efficacy of the vaccine against Omicron but there is already room for optimism, and there are initial indications that those who are vaccinated with a vaccine STILL valid or with a booster, will also be protected from this variant.” In addition, according to the report, the ability of the variant to infect is higher than Delta but not as much as feared- around 1.3 times higher. At the same time, those not inoculated have a 2.4 times greater chances of developing serious symptoms- a significant figure. You can read this and more here: https://jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/covid-1st-data-about-vaccine-efficacy-against-omicron-expected-tuesday-687392
TLDR Get vaccinated, get boosted.
Looks like fantastic news and a vindication of expediting the booster programme. Fair play to Javid.
Two cardiologists from Sheba Medical Center were verified as infected with the Omicron variant, a spokesperson for the hospital confirmed. He said they were experiencing “very light symptoms.” One of the doctors, in his 50s, brought the variant into Israel on return from a medical conference in London.
When was this chap in London I ask myself? I'll bet it doesn't fit with the original timeframe that this was cooked up in Botswana on Wednesday.
Seriously, if that data from Israel backed up by our own data and the Americans then the mask and isolation mandates should be rolled back. VE for symptomatic disease or 93% is absolutely outstanding.
Very good figures, same day last week comparable are: 42484/165/768
And Starmer just now saying the measures do not go far enough
For all his faults, and he has many, I am pleased Boris is PM at this moment and not Starmer
They have both rolled the dice today and both are potential hostages to fortune. Johnson for Christmas WON'T be cancelled and Starmer for stuff like 8 day isolation for inbound travellers etc, etc. It all depends on events.
For what it's worth I hope Johnson's gamble pays off. If it doesn't we are all up the creek. If Starmer is wrong it matters not one way nor the other, he is in oopposition. Remember, no one blames the Conservatives for invading Iraq.
Although we should, at least to some extent. Had Iain Duncan Smith had the brains to ask the right questions he could have stopped British involvement dead in its tracks.
A real tragedy Kenneth Clarke, who was asking the right questions and noticed he was getting all the wrong answers, was not Leader of the Opposition at the time.
If you rank UK politicians on combined stupidity and nastiness scores Duncan Smith is well up there. The correct position was Yeah we hate dangerous dictators but as Conservatives we do due diligence and rule of law, so no dice till the UN inspector has reported. He illustrates the point that stupidity can become so extreme thyat it counts as a moral, not just an intellectual, fault.
I think it's highly likely Omicron was brewed up in an immunocompromised individual from a richer country. Probably on convalescent plasma and whatnot.
And the Saffas have got the blame for it – because they identified it!
Newcastle down to ten men, so they replace a winger with a Centre Back... fair enough, but why don't Norwich bring on an attacker for a defender? I guess they might after an hour if its still 0-0
Seriously, if that data from Israel backed up by our own data and the Americans then the mask and isolation mandates should be rolled back. VE for symptomatic disease or 93% is absolutely outstanding.
I was wondering what Victory in Europe day has to do with it. Then the penny dropped...
Based on the data I’ve seen so far, and that I’ve highlighted here, I’m more inclined to believe that Omicron began somewhere in Europe in mid-to-late Summer. It then made its way to South Africa, not the other way around.
But let’s keep going…
TL; DR: What I’m seeing in the data suggests that Omicron has flown under the radar for several months. We didn’t realize it was there b/c our testing + sequencing systems are biased toward symptomatic disease, which may be different or less common for Omicron vs. Delta /15 https://twitter.com/DataDrivenMD/status/1465392204365500418?s=20
Although he helpfully does a TL:DR, it's well worth reading the thread. Some interesting examples that he cites.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
Before Northern Rock, there was 150 years since the last British bank run. A period where the Conservative Party held office the majority of the time. But don’t let that get in the way of your nonsense.
Suggest you get back to your specialist field of flying saucers.
You’re a bit touchy.
- You can't go saying I'm talking nonsense when you clearly haven't the first clue about it!
Do I ever tell you you're talking nonsense on the saucers? No, I don't. I read and have a think.
Seriously, if that data from Israel backed up by our own data and the Americans then the mask and isolation mandates should be rolled back. VE for symptomatic disease or 93% is absolutely outstanding.
I think it's highly likely Omicron was brewed up in an immunocompromised individual from a richer country. Probably on convalescent plasma and whatnot.
And the Saffas have got the blame for it – because they identified it!
See also UK and Alpha...
Fauci: "[There's] some suggestion that it might invade some of the protection from monoclonal antibodies or convalescent plasma or even for vaccine-induced antibodies," Dr. Fauci says of new omicron variant of Covid-19.
Can't believe they're still EUAing plasma after it's been known to induce quick mutations >.>
Data isn't from Israel, its from South Africa. It has been passed to the Israeli's to look at, but somebody leaks it to a media channel. Nothing is confirmed yet.
If that's true, and I have no reason to doubt Israeli data, then I think the UK is pretty much in the clear, we were already close to the herd immunity threshold with delta, it may mean an extra couple of weeks with higher cases but no more than than I think. I worry for low vaccinated European countries. In winter Omicron could be very, very deadly.
The unvaccinated are screwed.
To the extent that that is by choice, seriously fcuk em, and yay for the gene pool.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
A better example might be Black Wednesday. Brown was a full-throated supporter of the ERM long after it had become obvious even to Major and Lamont that we would have to withdraw. But nobody ever holds that against him even though had he been in charge things would have been fifty times worse.
Similarly it was as well for George Osborne's reputation, such as remains, that he wasn't in charge when Lehmanns went belly up. Mouse in the headlights would describe his demeanour quite well.
You have perfectly explained why contrary to what BigG and Isam are touting, it matters not a jot if Starmer calls Covid wrong today. It is far more important for Johnson to call it right however.
It matters in the context of the next GE campaign - The Tories, if Boris is right, can point out they freed us whilst Labour clamoured for lockdown - it is all about the next GE campaign. I was thinking earlier on that pollsters shouldn't ask "How would you vote if there were a General Election tomorrow" but "How would you vote if there were a General Election tomorrow, taking into account there would have had been 2 months campaigning" and "Who do you think will perform better in the Election debates"
No it doesn't, unless every couple of months between now and the next GE Starmer keeps calling it wrong and Johnson keeps calling it right, or there is indeed an election tomorrow. Besides which Covid will be just one of a number of GE issues for Johnson to call right by then. Oh, and Johnson won't do the debates he will again use a surrogate.
PRELIMINARY DATA but good news for your afternoon! Pfizer vaccine’s is only SLIGHTLY less effective in preventing infection with Omicron than with Delta- 90% as opposed to 95%- while it is AS EFFECTIVE in preventing serious symptoms- around 93% – at least for those boosted! There are indications that individuals fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, within six months or with the booster, are also protected against the Omicron variant, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said Tuesday, after another two cases of individuals infected with the variant were identified, bringing the total to four. “In the coming days we will have more accurate information about the efficacy of the vaccine against Omicron but there is already room for optimism, and there are initial indications that those who are vaccinated with a vaccine STILL valid or with a booster, will also be protected from this variant.” In addition, according to the report, the ability of the variant to infect is higher than Delta but not as much as feared- around 1.3 times higher. At the same time, those not inoculated have a 2.4 times greater chances of developing serious symptoms- a significant figure. You can read this and more here: https://jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/covid-1st-data-about-vaccine-efficacy-against-omicron-expected-tuesday-687392
TLDR Get vaccinated, get boosted.
Looks like fantastic news and a vindication of expediting the booster programme. Fair play to Javid.
Two cardiologists from Sheba Medical Center were verified as infected with the Omicron variant, a spokesperson for the hospital confirmed. He said they were experiencing “very light symptoms.” One of the doctors, in his 50s, brought the variant into Israel on return from a medical conference in London.
When was this chap in London I ask myself? I'll bet it doesn't fit with the original timeframe that this was cooked up in Botswana on Wednesday.
I think it's highly likely Omicron was brewed up in an immunocompromised individual from a richer country. Probably on convalescent plasma and whatnot.
And the Saffas have got the blame for it – because they identified it!
See also UK and Alpha...
Was that the Kentish Variant that the geographical geniuses on PB described as Cockney Covid? I lose track. In that case, east London got the blame for it!
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
Before Northern Rock, there was 150 years since the last British bank run. A period where the Conservative Party held office the majority of the time. But don’t let that get in the way of your nonsense.
Suggest you get back to your specialist field of flying saucers.
You’re a bit touchy.
- You can't go saying I'm talking nonsense when you clearly haven't the first clue about it!
I think it's highly likely Omicron was brewed up in an immunocompromised individual from a richer country. Probably on convalescent plasma and whatnot.
And the Saffas have got the blame for it – because they identified it!
See also UK and Alpha...
Fauci: "[There's] some suggestion that it might invade some of the protection from monoclonal antibodies or convalescent plasma or even for vaccine-induced antibodies," Dr. Fauci says of new omicron variant of Covid-19.
Can't believe they're still EUAing plasma after it's been known to induce quick mutations >.>
The USA is dancing with the devil here.
Well they can't get so many of their f##king morons to get vaccinated!
Data isn't from Israel, its from South Africa. It has been passed to the Israeli's to look at, but somebody leaks it to a media channel. Nothing is confirmed yet.
Yep. Channel 12 have the leak but the Israeli government will get it tomorrow, is how I understand it.
If a user shares an image or video of another person, that person can contact Twitter to report it was posted without their permission and the social media platform will remove the media in question.
If that's true, and I have no reason to doubt Israeli data, then I think the UK is pretty much in the clear, we were already close to the herd immunity threshold with delta, it may mean an extra couple of weeks with higher cases but no more than than I think. I worry for low vaccinated European countries. In winter Omicron could be very, very deadly.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
A better example might be Black Wednesday. Brown was a full-throated supporter of the ERM long after it had become obvious even to Major and Lamont that we would have to withdraw. But nobody ever holds that against him even though had he been in charge things would have been fifty times worse.
Similarly it was as well for George Osborne's reputation, such as remains, that he wasn't in charge when Lehmanns went belly up. Mouse in the headlights would describe his demeanour quite well.
You have perfectly explained why contrary to what BigG and Isam are touting, it matters not a jot if Starmer calls Covid wrong today. It is far more important for Johnson to call it right however.
It matters in the context of the next GE campaign - The Tories, if Boris is right, can point out they freed us whilst Labour clamoured for lockdown - it is all about the next GE campaign. I was thinking earlier on that pollsters shouldn't ask "How would you vote if there were a General Election tomorrow" but "How would you vote if there were a General Election tomorrow, taking into account there would have had been 2 months campaigning" and "Who do you think will perform better in the Election debates"
No it doesn't, unless every couple of months between now and the next GE Starmer keeps calling it wrong and Johnson keeps calling it right, or there is indeed an election tomorrow. Besides which Covid will be just one of a number of GE issues for Johnson to call right by then. Oh, and Johnson won't do the debates he will again use a surrogate.
You think the only political topics people have talked about for the last two years won't have any bearing on the next GE? Fair enough, agree to disagree
PRELIMINARY DATA but good news for your afternoon! Pfizer vaccine’s is only SLIGHTLY less effective in preventing infection with Omicron than with Delta- 90% as opposed to 95%- while it is AS EFFECTIVE in preventing serious symptoms- around 93% – at least for those boosted! There are indications that individuals fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, within six months or with the booster, are also protected against the Omicron variant, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said Tuesday, after another two cases of individuals infected with the variant were identified, bringing the total to four. “In the coming days we will have more accurate information about the efficacy of the vaccine against Omicron but there is already room for optimism, and there are initial indications that those who are vaccinated with a vaccine STILL valid or with a booster, will also be protected from this variant.” In addition, according to the report, the ability of the variant to infect is higher than Delta but not as much as feared- around 1.3 times higher. At the same time, those not inoculated have a 2.4 times greater chances of developing serious symptoms- a significant figure. You can read this and more here: https://jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/covid-1st-data-about-vaccine-efficacy-against-omicron-expected-tuesday-687392
TLDR Get vaccinated, get boosted.
Looks like fantastic news and a vindication of expediting the booster programme. Fair play to Javid.
Two cardiologists from Sheba Medical Center were verified as infected with the Omicron variant, a spokesperson for the hospital confirmed. He said they were experiencing “very light symptoms.” One of the doctors, in his 50s, brought the variant into Israel on return from a medical conference in London.
When was this chap in London I ask myself? I'll bet it doesn't fit with the original timeframe that this was cooked up in Botswana on Wednesday.
Makes you wonder doesn't it.
Not really, because if you ever thought detected in = cooked up in, in the first place, I doubt anything on earth has the power to make you actually think.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
A better example might be Black Wednesday. Brown was a full-throated supporter of the ERM long after it had become obvious even to Major and Lamont that we would have to withdraw. But nobody ever holds that against him even though had he been in charge things would have been fifty times worse.
Similarly it was as well for George Osborne's reputation, such as remains, that he wasn't in charge when Lehmanns went belly up. Mouse in the headlights would describe his demeanour quite well.
You have perfectly explained why contrary to what BigG and Isam are touting, it matters not a jot if Starmer calls Covid wrong today. It is far more important for Johnson to call it right however.
Indeed. Swings and roundabouts really tbf. Eg if Labour were to benefit from a public perception that Covid was substantially Johnson's fault, ie that if they'd been in charge things would have been miles different and better, even if that might be grossly unfair you wouldn't find me complaining.
PRELIMINARY DATA but good news for your afternoon! Pfizer vaccine’s is only SLIGHTLY less effective in preventing infection with Omicron than with Delta- 90% as opposed to 95%- while it is AS EFFECTIVE in preventing serious symptoms- around 93% – at least for those boosted! There are indications that individuals fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, within six months or with the booster, are also protected against the Omicron variant, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said Tuesday, after another two cases of individuals infected with the variant were identified, bringing the total to four. “In the coming days we will have more accurate information about the efficacy of the vaccine against Omicron but there is already room for optimism, and there are initial indications that those who are vaccinated with a vaccine STILL valid or with a booster, will also be protected from this variant.” In addition, according to the report, the ability of the variant to infect is higher than Delta but not as much as feared- around 1.3 times higher. At the same time, those not inoculated have a 2.4 times greater chances of developing serious symptoms- a significant figure. You can read this and more here: https://jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/covid-1st-data-about-vaccine-efficacy-against-omicron-expected-tuesday-687392
TLDR Get vaccinated, get boosted.
Looks like fantastic news and a vindication of expediting the booster programme. Fair play to Javid.
Two cardiologists from Sheba Medical Center were verified as infected with the Omicron variant, a spokesperson for the hospital confirmed. He said they were experiencing “very light symptoms.” One of the doctors, in his 50s, brought the variant into Israel on return from a medical conference in London.
When was this chap in London I ask myself? I'll bet it doesn't fit with the original timeframe that this was cooked up in Botswana on Wednesday.
Makes you wonder doesn't it.
Not really, because if you ever thought detected in = cooked up in, in the first place, I doubt anything on earth has the power to make you actually think.
What's the play if Omicron has no vaccine escape but is absolutely devastating to the unvaxxed?
An exceptionally tough decision for the PM. An NHS overrun with anti-vaxxers hurts all of us, so do we put then at the back of the queue for treatment? Or do we have to accept a lockdown?
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These big boys and Esther "McCray" are just demonstrating how hard they all are punching against oppressive government and takimg **** off no one.
Not to mention "I got Brexit done, he'd have spent the last 4 years procrastinating over a 2nd referendum", "I got the vaccines done, he wanted to wait for the EMA..."
See the local R number breakdowns, which has Cambridge 9th from the top.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
I haven't seen the division lists yet.
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
For what it's worth I hope Johnson's gamble pays off. If it doesn't we are all up the creek. If Starmer is wrong it matters not one way nor the other, he is in oopposition. Remember, no one blames the Conservatives for invading Iraq.
UPDATE: A total of 42,664 tests were conducted in the last 24hrs, with 4,373 new cases, which represents a 10.2% positivity rate. A further 21#COVID19 related deaths have been reported, bringing total fatalities to 89,843 to date. See more here: https://nicd.ac.za/latest-confirmed-cases-of-covid-19-in-south-africa-30-november-2021/
https://twitter.com/nicd_sa/status/1465727369151459329
Maintaining a positivity rate that would make quite a few Western European countries blush...
A real tragedy Kenneth Clarke, who was asking the right questions and noticed he was getting all the wrong answers, was not Leader of the Opposition at the time.
I was very pleased with my hard right quip under the circumstances!
IIRC only 50% of oncology vacancies were filled.
Blair takes the spoils as the war criminal, IDS just a sorry footnote.
Has it been around longer than we thought?
Similarly it was as well for George Osborne's reputation, such as remains, that he wasn't in charge when Lehmanns went belly up. Mouse in the headlights would describe his demeanour quite well.
For one bed capacity as many people having cancer surgeries obviously require beds afterwards. Some may end in ICU afterwards and a lot of units across the land are struggling with Covid patients taking up beds.
The backlog is real as well in terms of scanning and diagnostics which help identify the best courses of treatments going forward being delayed.
Staff shortages in the NHS is a real problem, lot of staff have left the NHS or are burnt out after a extremely difficult and testing couple of years. Plenty of jobs out there at the moment but vacancies are struggling to be filled (1 million vacancies in the NHS right now).
There is every possibility that Omicron didn't start in SA but was first identified there.
The job of the Bank of England and the FSA should be to ensure this never happens again, and when banks go bust (and they will), that they can be closed down in an orderly fashion.
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PRELIMINARY DATA but good news for your afternoon! Pfizer vaccine’s is only SLIGHTLY less effective in preventing infection with Omicron than with Delta- 90% as opposed to 95%- while it is AS EFFECTIVE in preventing serious symptoms- around 93% – at least for those boosted!
There are indications that individuals fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, within six months or with the booster, are also protected against the Omicron variant, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said Tuesday, after another two cases of individuals infected with the variant were identified, bringing the total to four. “In the coming days we will have more accurate information about the efficacy of the vaccine against Omicron but there is already room for optimism, and there are initial indications that those who are vaccinated with a vaccine STILL valid or with a booster, will also be protected from this variant.” In addition, according to the report, the ability of the variant to infect is higher than Delta but not as much as feared- around 1.3 times higher.
At the same time, those not inoculated have a 2.4 times greater chances of developing serious symptoms- a significant figure. You can read this and more here: https://jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/covid-1st-data-about-vaccine-efficacy-against-omicron-expected-tuesday-687392
TLDR Get vaccinated, get boosted.
I think that sentence could be applied to every variant of Covid-19.
But let’s keep going…
TL; DR: What I’m seeing in the data suggests that Omicron has flown under the radar for several months. We didn’t realize it was there b/c our testing + sequencing systems are biased toward symptomatic disease, which may be different or less common for Omicron vs. Delta /15
https://twitter.com/DataDrivenMD/status/1465392204365500418?s=20
It's also worth remembering the experience of Norther Rock. When all was said and done, most of the bond holders ended up (and this varies a lot with exactly which bonds they owned) with about 80 pence on the pound. It would have been the same with an orderly dissolution of RBS - most bondholders would have gotten something.
He said they were experiencing “very light symptoms.”
One of the doctors, in his 50s, brought the variant into Israel on return from a medical conference in London.
And the Saffas have got the blame for it – because they identified it!
Part of the complication here is that Covid spreads quickly and slowly at the same time. You don't go from one case to 10,000 cases in a couple of weeks. The spread can seem very slow when the numbers are small. If there was one delegate at COP26 who brought Omicron into Scotland then it's worth remembering that most of that person's close contact would have been with other delegates, from other foreign countries, rather than with the good people of Glasgow.
It does seem like an obvious explanation. Also, if COP26 played a role in spreading Omicron from its origins to many other countries, then it would help to explain how it had spread all the way from southern Africa to Egypt (or vice versa, or from somewhere else to both) without first causing a health system to collapse on the way.
Alternatively, COP26 may have played the role of a fluke event, that allowed an otherwise relatively nondescript variant to spread more rapidly due to random chance. I guess we'll find out in time.
We have had cases at work where people with symptoms have tested negative on LFTs but positive on PCRs, which is why I wasn't allowed back to work without a negative PCR.
Do I ever tell you you're talking nonsense on the saucers? No, I don't. I read and have a think.
"[There's] some suggestion that it might invade some of the protection from monoclonal antibodies or convalescent plasma or even for vaccine-induced antibodies," Dr. Fauci says of new omicron variant of Covid-19.
Can't believe they're still EUAing plasma after it's been known to induce quick mutations >.>
The USA is dancing with the devil here.
https://twitter.com/ASPphysician/status/1465747726830915591?s=20
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10259325/Twitter-bans-sharing-photos-videos-people-without-permission.html
This sounds the right to forget rule on steroids.
An exceptionally tough decision for the PM. An NHS overrun with anti-vaxxers hurts all of us, so do we put then at the back of the queue for treatment? Or do we have to accept a lockdown?