Kiwisavers: lookout! When one learns of another New Zealand finance company going bust leaving 9,000 investors out of pocket, thoughts must surely turn to the Kiwisaver "market" said to worth over $5,000 million.
Investments made with these funds intended to provide money for pensions can sometimes not deliver what governments promised.
The London Sunday Times [25-4-10] reports how money invested by a 87 year old woman who now has Parkinson's disease has gone. Yes, gone. In 1997 she invested £19,000 in a long term care bond to meet cost of care fees in old age. Now she needs the money, but it isn't there. It has disappeared in the markets.
She started off losing as the financial adviser took 6.5% of the initial sum as his fee and the investment company 1.5% as an annual fee.
By the time 2010 had arrived, the old lady was in financial need, but the care bond is now worth only £3,000.
I wonder how many Kiwisaver pension investors will reach retirement age and find that most of their savings have gone. After all, the scheme does not have a government guarantee.
UK General Election: why Labour lost
The news media concentrated their efforts in reporting the election on the three main parties in all of the UK. The main party in Scotland seldom had a look in. The bogeyman in all the endeavours were "the markets". Threats were made, to garner votes of course, that if the people did not elect a Conservative Party government then the power of the money industry would descend with a terrible vengeance. No one seemed to have grasped the fact that those with the ability to create money from nothing could have their power taken from them and instead have the power used to help people. All parties in the news media spotlight sounded like some wobbly lemon jelly cowering to the finance industry and bank owned credit ratings groups.
An American observer [ Sunday Times 18-4-10] gave his opinion of one of the three "leaders" in so called television debates-no debating just platforms for expounding well known "policies".
He was clearly told to smile; and he did, but with a slightly disconcerting regularity, unrelated to anything he or anyone else was saying. It happens when someone actually doesn't have a sense of humour, doesn't get along very well with others, and has a reputation for being aloof.
The keep-smiling strategy rarely works -human beings are genetically programmed to tell a fake smile from a real one- but the attempt is always made.
Failed government
It was just not this insincerity, but the fact that Blair and Brown promised enormous changes in education, the National Health Service, employment and social equality. And they failed to deliver,despite 13 years of massive expenditure. Unemployment is up,social inequality hasn't narrowed,education is worse and one hospital even turned away a woman in labour.
More important, the supposedly brilliant Brown failed in his unsophisticated promise to put an end to boom and bust: instead we have truly frightening debt, thanks to his splurge. He,of course, would blame every economic ill on a "global " crisis.
What has been particularly shocking about the banking crisis is the fact that most governments did not know about the risks the money men were taking; they barely understood what the money men were doing and, nor, apparantly, did some of the money men themselves.
[Minette Martin London Sunday Times 25-4-10]
And of course to mention the issue of open door mass immigration, which none of the three main parties rarely did, and yet if it was not the main issue it was the second, was to suggest that the person was a "bigot".
Ambition yet to be fulfilled
The reason why I want to be in politics is to create jobs.
British Labour Party leader, Gordon Brown BBC Television 29-04-10.
They are the some of the ones to blame
Is it possible to read a book about the men who profited from the financial crisis and enjoy it so much that you laugh out loud ?
That's what John Arlidge asked in his Sunday Times [28-3-10] review of Michael Lewis's The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine.
Lewis explained what went wrong on Wall Street showing how mortgage companies, homeowners, ratings agencies and traders created a system that encouraged them to cheat to get rich on bad debt and then consciously ignore the inevitable losses. His language is always acccessible. "A society with deep, troubling economic problems had rigged itself to disguise those problems. and the chief beneficiaries of the deceit were its financial middlemen."
Most of these financiers are so socially dysfunctional they are the kind of folk you would actively avoid. But Lewis has affection for these misfits. He likes them partly because they were on the right side of the best bet in the history of modern finance and made multi-million-dollar fortunes when the sub-prime housing market imploded, writes Arlidge.
Lewis also apportions blame for the crunch. He lambasts bankers for creating flawed mathematical models that most executives did not fully understand themselves.
Unemployed and ashamed? Don't be!
The following are extracts, and a resume, of an enlightened article by Roland White [Sunday Times March 2010]
Obsession with work is a modern idea. According to Aristotle "leisure is the end towards which all action is directed."
Nobody wishes to be unemployed, which is to be engaged in the painful search for paid work in a world where such work often defines who we are.
Economic inactivity is a different matter. It doesn't have to be unemployment in disguise.
...employment is no longer a way to make a living: it has become a compulsion.
The biggest reason why women are eco-inactive is that they are "looking after home and family". Yet modern culture dictates that this is not enough: for true fulfilment these women must look after home and family while also running a FTSE 100 company. Work, work, work.
..when somebody next asks what it is you do, wear your economic activity with pride: Aristotle would have been so proud.
Keen to be somebody
British Gas sought applications for 600 gas fitter apprenticeships. Each apprenticeship pays $10,500 a year to train plus expenses. Of course, with the huge price of gas supplied to people, BG can well afford it.
Of the 65,000 applicants, most were aged between 20 and 26 and included graduates, with debts.
Water privatisation is a licence to print money - not to provide service or efficiency
Britain's "water rats" - the giant utility companies -have been given permission to carry on polluting beaches. The Labour government's Planning Inspectorate has rejected an attempt by the Environment Agency to impose regulations on 4,200 outlets that pump raw sewage into the sea and rivers.
It means the water companies -which together recorded profits of $3,870 million in 2008-09- have again escaped attempts to make them clean themselves up. The Environment Agency said "the water companies have had 20 years of privatisation to sort out this issue."
[London Sunday Times 25-4-10]
- contributed by Colin J Whitmill, DSC's UK correspondent