Today after opening way down yet again, Europe’s exchanges have clawed their way up. London is positive, Paris is 0.5% down with only Frankfurt still down 2,5%. While in America futures have been up and down faster than a whore’s draws. Which is most un-pc but chosen advisedly. Because that is how the markets see […]

Just a few quick observations on the day. I find it interesting that when you look at the European exchanges they stack up like this – London              -3.39Paris                  -4.68Frankfurt           -5.02Milan(MIB)      -2.35Madrid(IBEX)  -2.44 While in the

According to Bloomberg, The Euribor, the European equivalent of the Libor (remember that from 2008?) is locking up as banks decline to lend to each other. Those European banks that do have money are putting it in the ECB overnight in preference to lending it to the European banks that desperately need it – such

On this morning’s Today Programme (Radio 4) there was a spokesperson for one of the UK banks (Stephen Hester of RBS), discussing the current economic turmoil in Europe and the US. Essentially the message from the contributor was that the banks are just innocent victims in all this! The gist of the claim is that

The UK taxpayer owns about 84% of RBS. We didn’t ask to own it we had that money forcibly taken from us. That 84 % is around 90.6 billion shares.  We paid about 50 pence per share for them, meaning you and I had around £45 billion of our wealth expropriated for the sake of

Our European leadership, the Eurobureau, is worried that the debt crisis ‘might’ spread from the nations they like to call peripheral, to those regarded as central – France, Spain, Italy and Germany. Please file that one under ‘No Shit Sherlock.’ Who would have guessed? But while attention is finally, months too late, finally focused on

Two days of accelerating global sell off and the learned fools are once again falling over themselves to give us the benefit of their wisdom. I heard a BBC Radio Four interview with one monumental tool,  Jonathan Portes, who is the Director of an independent think tank called the  National Institute of Social and Economic Research. Which

So the ignoble wrangling over the American debt ceiling is over. An agreement is reached and the market reaction was to promptly sell everything. The Dow fell 2.19, the Nasdaq fell 2.75 and the S&P fell 2.56. So that’s what ‘victory’ over the debt ceiling looks like. Both sides were after all claiming a victory

The first casualty of war is the truth. The second – in our present war, the war of the financial elite and banks against nations and their citizens – seems to be the rule of law The robo signing scandal in America is like an efflorescence of fungus covering and rotting civil trust and accountability

The news of the last week or so has been full of Ratings Agencies downgrading banks, bonds, debts and even entire nations. So now seems like a good moment to look at what it is the Ratings Agencies, Moodys, S&P and Fitch, actually rate? What do they consider in coming to their conclusions and can they