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Even if Brexit happens it's not like people are suddenly going to think the UK is more attractive as a holiday destination than Europe. So as long as EasyJet have hedged the currency (the pound-Euro rate) for the next 5 years then things shouldn't deteriorate in terms of their current forecasts. However, given the number of companies going bust: Debenhams, Patisserie Valerie, Carillion, Interserve, FlyBe etc etc etc (there have been many many more the past few years) then who knows? I mean the bankers seem to be trying to get rid of all debt in UK companies except for the housebuilders and banks - well as every company has debt, and nearly all of them have net debt, then one can imagine a decimation of the stock market if the bankers continue to refuse to roll over bonds and demand the BODs to wipe out the shareholders and to hand ownership of these private companies to the banks themselves

It's not finished woodstock - it's up to everyone to save it. If you are watching Question Time and expecting that to do as much good for the UK economy as if you'd created a new cryptocurrency and encouraged all your friends to use it then I think that maybe part of the issue. Until every single person in the UK asks themselves what they can do to make the UK great - and actually stops watching TV and eating junk food - and starts to get out and retool the economy for the future then the UK will just continue to flop limply along.

All the pound has done since 2008 is to fall against the dollar. Down from 2.05 in 2007 to 1.28 as of today - pretty steady trend down over the past decade. So Sterling has lost about 40% of its value against the Dollar since the global financial crisis - and yet is response to the financial crises the US Federal Reserve expanded its balance sheet to $4.4 Trillion and the US government has allowed its debt to race to over $21 Trillion. Hence how the pound could have performed more weakly than the Dollar over this period seems hard to believe - as a currency weaken when the amount in circulation has been increasing at an above average rate. Well it's the number of dollars in circulation which have been increasing at an unprecedented rate since 2007 - so how come the pound has performed far worse than the dollar over this same period? (The pound having weakening about 40% against the dollar since 2007).

Fed up on London listed companies seeing their equity wiped out or diluted down to a tiny fraction of what previous investors paid. This sort of thing has been happening to a very high proportion of companies over the past five years. It's very frustrating to think that some people are jacking up prices and creaming off millions in profits before their trading relationship with a company ends. Meanwhile the listed company is the one left with debt levels the city isn't comfortable with and then wipes out the equity holders before handing the debts (and the company) to the banks as collatoral for rolling over the previous banks loans to the company. However, if the bankers aren't happy with the debt they should have done a better job of picking the management and the company's strategy the last time they rolled the debts over and thus had a say in the matter of the future vision for the company.

Something is going wrong somewhere as it's hard to believe the sheer number of equity holders who are losing money is not the fault of poor management or of previous poor guidance by the banks in terms of setting the future strategies of the companies they were willing to finance. Equity holders can't actually control the strategic direction a company takes, nor the execution of this, however equity holders tend to invest in ideas .... and it's hard to believe the idea of holidays (including package holidays) is an idea whose time has passed - so really it is poor management and poor banking which is causing the huge losses to the share holders.

The Federal Reserve increased their debt from about $1.4 Trillion in 2006 to $4.4 Trillion by 2014.

And the US government more than doubled their debt over the same period from about $9 Trillion to $18 Trillion.

These are trillions we are talking about - not billions.

Each Trillion is one thousand lots of one billion.

And each billion is one thousand lots of one million.

And each million is one thousand lots of one thousand.

And each thousand is one thousand lots of one dollar.

So anyone who says "the debt is really concerning me" should be saying this about US Treasuries.

Can we really worry about the debts of BP, Royal Dutch Shell, HSBC, Lloyds, Centrica, Amazon, Marks and Spencer, Taylor Wimpey, or any other listed company (they all have billions of debt if not tens of billions - Vodafone being about $40 billion in net debt for example).

So can we really say the debt of any company is worrying when the US government prints dollars like they monopoly money and it is probably the debt of the US government that is unsustainable and should worry us more than getting out hair in a twist about individual companies.

Sooner or later the world may well switch to Bitcoin or even a composite currency comprised of 1/3 reminbi, 1/3 ruble, and 1/3 a mixture of various South East Asian and Middle Eastern currencies - this would make geopolitical sense because why the economies which rely on Russian oil or which trade mostly between Asia and the Middle East would want to use the US Dollar is a mystery to me - why would you want to trade in a currency that isn't even based in your military sphere of influence now that China is strong enough to at least inflict inprecedented casualities on the US military should the US start unjustified (economically based) military action within 2,000 kms of China's borders.

But employment is not the only thing …. you have to consider the value added to citizen's lives by the specific types of employment opportunities available.

Also, globalisation is associated with larger companies becoming larger - and this tends to reduce the number of employees they need to produce the same quantity of goods as they did before.

Hence it's far too simplistic to just talk about employment percentages and associate with this with a healthy economy. High levels of employment could actually be generated by an unhealthy economy if many of the jobs add very little value to the quality of the citizen's lives!

But employment is not the only thing …. you have to consider the value added to citizen's lives by the specific types of employment opportunities available.

Also, globalisation is associated with larger companies becoming larger - and this tends to reduce the number of employees they need to produce the same quantity of goods as they did before.

Hence it's far too simplistic to just talk about employment percentages and associate with this with a healthy economy. High levels of employment could actually be generated by an unhealthy economy if many of the jobs add very little value to the quality of the citizen's lives!

Musk could be paid more than the entire market capitalisation of Lloyd's bank if he hits his performance targets over the next decade !!

Why didn't Lloyd's invest in Tesla? What has Lloyds done since 2007 for long-suffering UK shareholders? -
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-seeks-dismissal-suit-challenging-193056560.html

Now we find out that a single man may earn more from the US financial system over the next decade than the entire market capitalisation of Lloyds. Isn't this just quite a bit too ridiculous?

Also it begs the question why hasn't Lloyds got a significant holding in the shares of Tesla, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, and all the other US companies which have done amazingly well since 2007. Where was out stake as Lloyds management should have spread the money around the most promising investment opportunities in global markets during the period of 2004-2007 - and this ought to have included picking up stock in all of the above companies. So what went wrong? How could these bankers who say they are the best talent and need to be paid millions have missed out on investing some of the money Lloyd's controlled at the time (on behalf of Lloyd's stakeholders) into the companies whose market valuations would multiple many times over the next decade to a total combined valuation of over $5 Trillion by 2019 - and yet Lloyds can't have invested significantly in any of them unless the Lloyd's market cap would be far more than a tiny fraction of what any of these companies (Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, etc) are valued at by the global financial markets.

Musk could be paid more than the entire market capitalisation of Lloyd's bank if he hits his performance targets over the next decade !!

Why didn't Lloyd's invest in Tesla? What has Lloyds done since 2007 for long-suffering UK shareholders?

Now we find out that a single man may earn more from the US financial system over the next decade than the entire market capitalisation of Lloyds. Isn't this just quite a bit too ridiculous?

Also it begs the question why hasn't Lloyds got a significant holding in the shares of Tesla, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, and all the other US companies which have done amazingly well since 2007. Where was out stake as Lloyds management should have spread the money around the most promising investment opportunities in global markets during the period of 2004-2007 - and this ought to have included picking up stock in all of the above companies. So what went wrong? How could these bankers who say they are the best talent and need to be paid millions have missed out on investing some of the money Lloyd's controlled at the time (on behalf of Lloyd's stakeholders) into the companies whose market valuations would multiple many times over the next decade to a total combined valuation of over $5 Trillion by 2019 - and yet Lloyds can't have invested significantly in any of them unless the Lloyd's market cap would be far more than a tiny fraction of what any of these companies (Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, etc) are valued at by the global financial markets.

Yes but there net debt is many multiples higher than Centrica's net debt.

Hence personally I'm not concerned about CNA's net debt (although I am concerned about how they waste money by over-paying landowners when they need to access land to repair infrastructure - for flip's sake the landowners benefit from the infrastructure more than anyone - so really they shouldn't be employing solicitors/lawyers to force up-and-up the compensation from having a few vehicles/workmen temporarily on their land for a few days - this is like holding someone to randsom who can't pay and yet if you have to kill them (to show you words weren't meaningless) then the person that suffers most is going to be yourself) - this is madness and which is why CNA need to reduce these costs they are paying landowners for access to their own pipelines and pylons - obvious fair compensation is fine - but some of the stories I've heard first time are suggesting that landowners are putting in requests for £15,000 for compensation when actually the real damage/disruption was less than £1,000. And yet CNA won't fight it because they can't see society is changing and they shouldn't keep spending other people's money in this way when the country is going through an unprecedented economic crisis (the UK that is).

Anyway, I don't know about whether BT have their costs under control - but their net debt is over £12 Billion from memory while Centrica's net debt is less than a quarter of this at circa £3 Billion. Hence if posters are blaming the 50% share price fall from the recent placing price at CNA on the level of net debt - then those same poster must logically believe that BT wouldn't even be a bargain at 10p per share (never mind 205p per share, the current price).

You canney worry about a tiny little debt of $3.5 billion when BP has net debt of circa $48 billion and Royal Dutch Shell has net debt of circa $76 billion, and Petrobras has net debt of circa $95 billion (or is it over $100 billion now?).

Health risks of 5G do concern me as it's very easy to roll out new technology without taking the time to do enough research - it may be that the health risks are very small - but the numbers of people who would be affected as very large as Vodafone has over 700 million customers globally. Hence one would like to think Vod would spend money properly investigating the effects of microwaves on the human body as humans will be exposed to these microwaves from routers for most of their lives (70+ years) which is a heck of a long time. And even a ratio of 1 per 10,000 excess serious ill-health issues due to 5G would result in 70,000 serious health issues as a direct consequence. And over a lifetime of 60-70 years exposure I suppose it would be quite hard to even detect an ill-health rate of 1 per 10,000 as a consequence of 5G - yet although hard to detect in the short-term it would result over the long-term in 70,000 serious excess health issues for Vodafone's customers - which I feel is far too high a number to just write off as a human cost worth paying for slightly faster internet.

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/vodafone-offloads-zealand-business-brookfield-infratil-164137004--sector.html

On the positive side I think the selling price achieved for their New Zealand business was slightly above previous expectations. Hence at least Vod now have $2.3 Billion of extra cash with which to pay down their debts and /or to lower prices for consumers!

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/feds-revive-proposal-oil-gas-222916752.html

Hope BP have got a stake in this new acreage which the state of California has opened up for drilling !

You never know what lies beneath the surface until you look .... offshore California was an absolutely prolific oil-and-gas play which spewed out oil for about 60 years at incredibly low costs. Perhaps the basin was in two parts and the other part lies under central California ... who knows .... anything is possible until you drill .... hope BP has picked up some of this acreage ... sometimes it pays to gamble if the costs of going a wildcatting aren't too high .... and onshore wildcatting is extremely low cost nowadays in the USA compared to historically (due to much better drilling technology and the fact there are now 1,000 experienced drilling crews operating land-based rigs 24-7 in the USA - and more could be hired from Canada where there has also been a boom in shale-oil exploration in the Bakken).

If it was down 7,000 it wouldn't exactly be under-valued!

But is AB the great businessman - he allowed the founder, James Buckee, to buy over £2 million of shares at 34p per share (or above) - and then he goes and does a placing at 21p per share - if that's how you treat the former founders of the business/your friends then they aren't going to think well of you. He should of at least protected James Buckee's buy-in price of 34p per share - because by all accounts without decades of hard work by James Buckee - Enquest wouldn't have existed in the first place for AB to slip into the CEO's seat.

It is indeed poor form to take their bonuses this year when the share price has collapsed from an average of 300p between 2008 and 2014 to about 90p now!

First the EU wants less competition and allows lots of mergers to consolidate the sector.

Then it fines a major company for the obvious consequences of having less competition.

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/how-the-worlds-biggest-brewer-stopped-drinkers-getting-cheaper-beer-133804392.html

You literally could not make it up. If you didn't want anti-competitive practises then you shouldn't have allowed lots of large breweries to buy up other large breweries and eventually form just a handful of mega brewing global conglomerates - still selling hundreds of individual brands - but all owned by the same parent company.

I'm glad the UK has Metrobank. Rather than mortgage lending I hope it is lending to entrepreneurs and new businesses - so many sectors of the economy need some fresh competition to drive up standards and to drive down costs whilst increasing consumer choice!

First the EU wants less competition and allows lots of mergers to consolidate the sector.

Then it fines a major company for the obvious consequences of having less competition.

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/how-the-worlds-biggest-brewer-stopped-drinkers-getting-cheaper-beer-133804392.html

You literally could not make it up. If you didn't want anti-competitive practises then you shouldn't have allowed lots of large breweries to buy up other large breweries and eventually form just a handful of mega brewing global conglomerates - still selling hundreds of individual brands - but all owned by the same parent company.

I would agree that the country has little appetite to be led by Jeremy Corbyn - although I don't think there is much appetite for TM either - and neither do I think anyone except perhaps Mao ZeDong can be described as a Marxist. And even Mao ZeDong was a Western-educated intellectual! I'm just making the point that unless someone has an unusually low IQ it is mostly not even partially accurate to try and characterise them with a single word, or even a single sentence. People are formed by their life experiences and hence all people who can learn, reflect, and assimilate masses of outside information, are extremely complex beings in my opinion! Hence whenever a journo describes a politicians as left or right - hardline or a softie - I know to take it with a pinch of salt and to look at the party's manifesto as that will contain at least 50 or 60 pages of in-depth views probably backed up by countless documents prepared by the civil service of actual number crunching trying to quantify the economic effects of the proposed policy. Hence, most politicians end up going for some kind of tweaking of the status quo as this is just the path of least resistance (when guided by the civil service who are themselves guided by a philosphy of not rocking the boat it seems to me) - or that's how I see things at least. Hence I think whether Labour or Conservatives win the next election, and whoever is their respective leader, that not a lot will change regarding the economic incentives in the UK (even if change is badly needed it probably won't happen as they have dragged out not making a decision on a third runway at Heathrow, or on the Thames estuary, for the past 15 years! Likewise they dragged out making a decision on new nuclear power stations for the past 20 years and now the Japanese have walked away because the UK government were 15 years late in getting around to giving the project the go-ahead).

And my prediction for the euro elections are.
Brexit party 45%
Labour 23%
Conservatives 16%
Lib Dems 5%
Others 11%.

Will be interesting to see the results of the Euro elections - once you see them BoomerBower I think you may be quite sizable increasing the chance you assign to Labour winning the next general election!