That's fucking stupid

Archive for the ‘Banking’ Category

I received this by email today, it would appear it’s doing the rounds again:

Spot the Odd Man Out …. WHO IS THE ODD MAN OUT – and more importantly – WHY?? Lord Stevenson: former chairman, HBOS Sir Fred Goodwin: former chief executive, RBS Andy Hornby: former chief executive, HBOS Sir Tom McKillop: former chairman, RBS John McFall MP: chairman of Treasury Select Committee Alastair Darling: Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown: Prime Minister and former Chancellor Sir Terry Wogan: ex-presenter of Radio 2’s Breakfast Show You’re probably thinking Terry Wogan. You’re right. However, the reason may surprise you……….. Terry Wogan is the only one out of this motley crew who actually holds any formal banking qualification!

What, pray tell, is a banking qualification? As far as I know the only qualifications on offer are for advisory roles (mortgage advisor, insurance advisor etc) and most of them are specific to a particular bank and their particular product set. How does that make someone better at the sort of macro economic roles that are listed above? Sure you can join the Chartered Institute of Banking in Scotland and do one of their courses but will that make you better at running RBS, will it bollocks.

How about we leave running companies to people who have a track record of running companies and leave counting change and stamping paying in slips to people who’ve done an NVQ in banking.

Holy shit, it feels like ages since I got really really angry with something and felt the need to vent my rancid bile on here. Unfortunately I have not really been outraged much recently despite lots of things happening which would make me outraged if I could be bothered to break my new policy. I now officially don’t care about anything which I have either a) not witnessed or which b) does not have any effect on my life.

So let’s see what’s been going on…

1. Postal strike – Fuck ‘em. I use email, telephone, SMS and even a fucking fax to stop me having to queue up with all the Jeremy Kyle addict job seekers and piss drenched pensioners to buy a stamp. Although I order quite a lot online it is all shipped by couriers who deliver shit when they say they will and don’t run my packages past sniffer dogs.
2. Cock eye the racist man on Question Time – Didn’t watch it because it was entirely the most predictable thing ever. Had they had my choice of panelists (Germaine Greer, Stephen Fry, William Hague and the now embalmed late Lord Sutch) then I would have watched it because it would have been fucking hilarious. To all the dicks that protested outside the BBC – well done you cocks for making more people watch that sideshow freak be verbally abused by Jack ‘twat’ Straw, you cheapen everything my making a Labour Politician look good. Incidentally I don’t like Wonky Eye because he’s a grubby little herbert who would have been buggered senseless if he’d gone to my school but I do quite like the BNP; not because their policies have any sense whatsoever, more because they make the Conservatives look quite reasonable and middle of the road.
3. Jan Moir – Does anyone with an opinion worth caring about actually read the Daily Mail? It’s entertaining but surely nobody actually confuses the scribblings of their lunatics as news. So some cow hates gays – newsflash at 10. Worse things are written in public toilets and yet they are still a more legitimate news source than the Daily fucking Mail.
4. We’re still in a recession – no shit, Sherlock. I still have a job so I don’t fucking care. I also don’t have massive debts or a crippling mortgage because I haven’t spent the last ten years being a cunt. It’s not like we didn’t see this coming; anyone who has read anything about the last time Labour fucked up the country by spending more than they had should surely have known that it was all going to go very very wrong.

So there you go: fuck all of interest is going on. Go back to enjoying your pleasant little life in a bubble and feel free to ignore the self important media types who keep telling you to be outraged about stuff which really doesn’t matter because it won’t stop your Saturday lie in or your [insert whatever the hell it is that makes your life bearable] from being really really fucking great.

If you want to know what 15 year olds think about technology, don’t ask a badly coiffured BBC hack, ask a 15 year old. Mind you, if you are prepared to base your banking business on the views of one 15 year old intern who is stating the obvious rather than a controlled study of a few thousand teens … oh fuckit, you know the rest.

The UK’s Nationwide building society is going to be offering (to a few select customers) mortgages of up to 125% of the value of a property.

Technical bit for mortgage nerds like me: 95% LTV on a new property while carrying over up to 30% of the value of an existing property, with a 7 or 8% fixed rate for the first 3 or 5 years respectively.

Let’s look at the facts, shall we?

• UK house prices are slowly falling
• The customers they are targeting are in negative equity (i.e. the amount they owe the bank is more than the value of the property they’re in)
• If a borrower simply waits for the housing market to settle down (and pays off the mortgage as usual), then the equity will eventually sort itself out. This requires patience.
• UK consumers have no patience.
• Whenever a bank arranges a new mortgage, they earn an arrangement fee.
• Whenever a bank arranges a new mortgage, they get to set a new higher profit interest rate. Which means that the borrower will not owe more money, but they will have to pay back more money.

Trebles all round, eh?

Lord Myners, Financial Services Secretary:

There is still the option for Sir Fred to do the right thing

Yes, yes there is. There is also still the option for criminals to hand themselves in, benefit cheats to hand back the cash, Gordon Brown to resign and George Bush and Tony Blair to set themselves on fire in downtown Fallujah.