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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Mrs May’s weird plot to make Gavin Williamson her successor is

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  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 51,601
    TGOHF said:

    Can I have 8-8.15 in the “Brexit caused Carillion to go bust” sweepstakes ?

    What makes you think Brexit caused it?

    I just thought it was common or garden corporate greed in a company that cannot even make money out of PFI.
  • AlistairAlistair Posts: 23,670

    RPI yes, CPI no.
    Yes, it's 50 billion using CPI.

    I've seen this claim about rock bottom inflation before but it's simply not true. Inflation spiked at 5% at one point over the last 10 years.

    Not as bad as in the past obviously but not nothing.
  • Scott_PScott_P Posts: 51,453
    TGOHF said:

    Can I have 8-8.15 in the “Brexit caused Carillion to go bust” sweepstakes ?

    Sorry...

    @BBCNormanS: Carilion going bust "the first Brexit economic scalp" say @BestForBritain blaming Brexit related slowdown in orders
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 45,535
    Sandpit said:

    Good to hear, yes there’s usually a lot that goes on behind the scenes in the run up to this sort of announcement, the business department and DoH don’t want anything critical interrupted even if (like with the banks) they have to underwrite things for a short while.

    Yes, interesting accident, possibly a nose wheel steering failure or something wrong with throttles and/or thrust reversers that caused asymmetric thrust at low speed. They would normally make a u-turn on the runway at that point, first turning towards the sea then back around to the right. 737 by the way. Sadly a Turkish plane crashing in Turkey means we’ll never get an accident report worthy of the name.
    I did hear engine failure reported, but nothing official.

    I did wonder how they're going to recover it. With a crane in two or three big pieces, probably: I'd think the crash has rather eaten into the plane's fatigue life ... ;)
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 55,327
    Foxy said:

    What makes you think Brexit caused it?

    I just thought it was common or garden corporate greed in a company that cannot even make money out of PFI.
    It looks like a classic pre crash model with the balance sheet loaded up with debt so that the return on the limited equity is multiplied on the back of what was thought to be a fairly secure cash flow. Unfortunately, their cash flow as they expanded into the middle east did not prove as predictable as their debt covenants required. With that amount of debt on the balance sheet things can unwind fairly quickly even if individual contracts are, on paper, profitable.

    From the government's point of view many of these PFI management contracts were pretty poor value for money and liquidation brings them to an end. Not saying the government didn't try pretty hard to keep Carillion going, clearly they did, but the outcome may not prove to be particularly damaging to the taxpayer in the medium term whatever the cost of keeping essential services going is in the short term.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 51,601
    DavidL said:

    It looks like a classic pre crash model with the balance sheet loaded up with debt so that the return on the limited equity is multiplied on the back of what was thought to be a fairly secure cash flow. Unfortunately, their cash flow as they expanded into the middle east did not prove as predictable as their debt covenants required. With that amount of debt on the balance sheet things can unwind fairly quickly even if individual contracts are, on paper, profitable.

    From the government's point of view many of these PFI management contracts were pretty poor value for money and liquidation brings them to an end. Not saying the government didn't try pretty hard to keep Carillion going, clearly they did, but the outcome may not prove to be particularly damaging to the taxpayer in the medium term whatever the cost of keeping essential services going is in the short term.
    Yes, leverage works in both directions and it seems they leveraged their losses. It does seem a good opportunity for the government to nationalise their PFI contracts at a knockdown price.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 127,581

    National Insurance raising £125 billion a year sounds impressive if you don't think at all about it.

    If healthcare, pensions and unemployment combined cost less than £125 billion you might have a point that we should spend it all on those areas. Except ...

    Healthcare costs £119 billion a year
    Pensions cost £96 billion a year

    Even without considering unemployment you'd need to slash healthcare and pension expenditure by nearly half to fund it just with National Insurance contributions. So you are completely wrong.
    No, as this hypothecation would be for the increase in the NHS budget, not the entire NHS budget.

    So again, you are wrong
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