Roundtable Discussion; The Future of Mineral Sands. Watch the video here.
Not when the payment is a secretive bung that enables access to those in power and £400,000,000 of Covid relief money. In this instance, it is purely an entry fee, concealed and not decided by market forces. In the case of Grealish, the signing will lead to shirt sales, ticket sales, and possibly success on the pitch. There will be a calculable economic benefit to compare against cost. Although I despise the financing of football and consider it to be a game run by, owned, managed, and administered by crooks you cannot draw a comparison with the underhand and thoroughly disgraceful behaviour of our former PM who has single-handedly made the expenses scandal look like a storm in a tea cup. Surely our elected officials, who enter office to serve, must be held to higher standards of probity than footballers. Or do you believe that Cameron's behaviour was above board and acceptable?
All this concern about a penny here and there while our former Prime Minister quietly trousers £10,000,000 plus for a part time job over two and a half years that gave him access to the corporate jet when he fancied a junket. And who was this worthy representing at enormous expense to the British tax payer? A dodgy Australia mountebank who claimed to be reinventing invoice discounting by concentrating risk, using other people's money, bribing influential people, and advancing funds against bogus invoices. The plot reads like Trollope, particularly Augustus Mellmote in the Way we Live Now. Politicians are simply prostitutes for hire. Our current PM is keen to tread the same path as Messrs Blair and Cameron. We imagine the game is winnable but clearly the odds are fixed in favour of those that make the rules. What chance Lloyds?
RE: 48p this week ?Today 10:15
I feel a new list evolving lol......At what SP will you sell up -
Walkerworld - 54p
Baffled 55p Ex Div
Sam-the-man - 55p
Brixton - 99p
A1 - 135p
Victor Blank. To infinity and beyond
SCB - 51p exit - buy back below then ride to 55p.
Falky - Current trading holding(s) - 55p+.
Falky - Core holding - 60p - 70p Range.
Learning, agreed the word value is bandied around far too carelessly. According to my concept, value is an opinion of an item's worth, either tangible or incorporeal, expressed by an individual, or group of individuals, which is time specific, using a metric other than the subject item i.e. one thing expressed in terms of another. Commonly we use money as the metric, however we can employ alternative scales; 'worth its weight in gold' or not 'worth a light' even a 'King's ransom'. In this light, value is simply a ratio. In theoretical terms value can only be established via markets (implying exchange), cost (accounting methodology), income (discounting future flows), deprival (what one would pay to have a thing returned). There is also a notion of intrinsic vs emotional value. How can we price things of sentimental value?
In a world where a cretin from New York spent a year recording flatulence to sell for $100 each as NFTs and there was an outcry when a visitor to a modern art exhibition stepped over the rope cordon and destroyed the $250,000 artwork by eating it, aka a banana duck taped to the wall. Luckily the Artist agreed to reproduce his masterpiece for a fee. The world has gone utterly mad and the most confused are those who believe it rational. Value is in the eye of the beholder. GLA.
Hey RR that's my investment strategy. Seriously, shares are designed to confuse and infuriate. All sensible metrics such as PE, profitability, and debt have been abandoned in favour of fairy tales. Welcome to the parallel universe of Tesla, Bitcoin and Monzo.
The world is completely insane. Somebody has to create content even in a self-obsessed easily distracted world. There is only so much narcissistic posing, porn, sports bloopers and cats playing pianos a sane mind can tolerate. ITV can create content that the platforms need to remain relevant and monetise its archive. This share will surely recover.
While releasing people with Covid back to care homes was inevitable, given the scale of infections, it must also be remembered that avoidable deaths also greatly reduced the cost of elderly care for a cash strapped government. Han**** lied through his teeth repeatedly and rightly lost his job.
Guess the divi' competition?
Teej - 0.75
Baffled - 0.85p
A1 - 1.2p
helu 1.25p
bobf 2,2p
ill go for 44 p please
RW I love that coincidence. What a beautiful irony. I guess we should celebrate our similarities rather than our differences. I have always been perplexed by myopic Little Englanders who use football as a pretext to bond, identify, hate, insult, and physically attack their neighbours. However, they join forces when faced by a superior mutual enemy on foreign shores i.e. Germany. Sworn enemies embark on a folie a deux in the name of patriotism, usually in a Mediterranean drinking resort. Within weeks of returning home they are back at each others throats. Human beings are curious creatures although similar analogies can be drawn between Athens and Sparta at Marathon and Thermopylae.
Rosewall, I admire your cussedness but do you ever reflect that this battle cannot be won? You seem to be either on the offensive or defensive every day. Those with open minds need no convincing, while others will never view the world as you do. We cannot revisit Culloden but I applaud your belligerence nonetheless.
The problem is not local. The Scots hate the English, their National Anthem is essentially a war cry. The English respond in like manner. The later verses of our National Anthem are deeply antagonistic to the Scots. Meanwhile in a parallel universe China uses up all the oxygen, the EU implodes, inflation hits 20%, the pandemic re-emerges in a dreadfully fatal mutation, central banks default on debt obligations, and America invades somewhere as a distraction technique. I don't hate anybody other than liars, cheats and liberty takers. GLA and try to avoid all the mindless name calling please.
Rosewall, I understand that you feel animosity towards the English but, as a Yorkshireman, I would point out that the North of England has more in common with Scotland than metropolitan elites of London. I would also say that in Scotland Glasgow hates Edinburgh, Catholics and Protestants are at each others throats, and the Highlands are distrusted by the Lowlands. Let's avoid the Campbells to further muddy the waters. This island is and always was deeply divided. What none of us can abide is being told what to do. Vivre independent thinking!
Oops I think I may have accidently now made 3 guesses and one was a typo. I thought I had typed 47. Please disregard the last 2 and use the first. Memory not quite what it once was. GLA......London (reference to Father Teds).
71.00
please put me down for 46.95
The figures are massaged. Check out John Williams Shadow Stats site. Using the previously employed metrics Williams calculates inflation at a much higher level than the one officially stated. Are you familiar with the concept of 'hedonic adjustment'? Do you seriously expect governments not to tinker when train fares, pensions and more importantly government borrowing and debt are calculated with reference to these vectors? Has the scandal of Libor been forgotten when numbers were manipulated but no banks were lending to each other and real rates would have been enormous? Reflexivity, a concept beloved of George Soros, explains how authorities can steer opinion and influence the future. Forward guidance is exactly that, an attempt to create expectation and thereby mould reality.
Previously George Osborn included the proceeds of crime, prostitution and drug dealing within the GDP figures to suggest that the UK economy was growing. It is entirely rational to have profound doubts about the validity of numbers produced by government departments and quangos without first questioning cui bono. Do you recall the farce of daily testing figures that Mr Han**** presided over last year and how he falsely claimed to have achieved the 100,000 target by including postal tests? Inflation is higher than the current quoted figures and will continue to rise because there is no alternative.
Smithy, I saw an interview with Paul Tudor Jones yesterday in which that was exactly his thesis hence his recent investments in inflation hedges including gold and Bitcoin. However, the situation with UK equities is far more muted than the US. We are only marginally ahead of our position 21 years ago whereas the US markets have quadrupled since the 2008 crash. Re interest rate hikes I doubt there will be any significant move in that direction because it would crush the housing market and adversely affect the government's cost of borrowing. I still see a great deal of value in UK stocks which have been hammered by Brexit and are unliked internationally; BP, RDS, GSK, BAT, IMB, AVIVA, BT, UU et al.
The RICS is perhaps not the bastion of professionalism you imagine. I have received awful advice from surveyors. Some don't know the law and fudge it. Re house rebuild prices; there is a systematic problem of over estimation in the UK because homeowners wrongly conflate market value with rebuild cost i.e. ignore the land value. The basic rule of thumb is to multiply the square footage by the cost per square foot, generally 60-100 GBP depending on location, age, and type of property. However, materials costs are rising rapidly which may also be reflected in labour rates shortly. Watch this space.
Re Inflation it is here already only the stats mask reality. CPI and RPI are manipulated. A weekly shop is far more expensive and you get less. Insurance and travel costs have shot up and don't get me started on housing. The economy will be allowed to run hot because it is the only way the government can relatively shrink its unpayable debt. Inflation is taxation without legislation (Friedman). Re jobs: Wids is correct there are far too many pointless jobs. I went to the Hepworth Gallery recently and there were 20 or so staff sat on their behinds or wandering around aimlessly. Witness any major hole in the road and there is one bloke with a shovel while five watch and a further two play on their phones; the Great British workman hard at rest. An academic called Creber wrote a book called "B*llsh*t Jobs" which highlights the proliferation of occupations that serve no productive purpose. How many dog walkers, oven cleaners, personal shoppers, car valets, window cleaners and gardeners is enough? Add in the 1.7 million directly employed in the NHS, a similar number in the teaching profession, the police, civil service and armed forces and what is left to support the superstructure? The future demands a change since stasis is unsustainable. My local council is a joke. They could not run a bath yet the tax goes ever upwards. End of rant.