Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

Here's another one for you both to comment on:

Saudi Arabia could be bankrupt within five years, IMF predicts
Saudi Arabia generates 90 per cent of its income from oil - a commodity which has recently plummeted in value

The Independent (Adam Leyland)
24.10.2015 (circa 11am)

Saudi Arabia’s cash reserves are in free-fall and the country could have only five years of financial assets remaining due in large part to the fall in oil prices, according to a report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

In its World Economic and Financial Surveys, released every October, the IMF said that the kingdom will suffer a negative 21.6 per cent “General Government Overall Fiscal Balance” in 2015 and a 19.4 per cent negative balance in 2016, a massive increase from only -3.4 per cent in 2014.

Saudi Arabia currently has $654.5 billion in foreign reserves, but the cash is disappearing quickly.

The Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency has withdrawn $70 billion in funds managed by overseas financial institutions, and has lost almost $73 billion since oil prices slumped, according to Al-Jazeera. Saudi Arabia generates 90 per cent of its income from oil.

Earlier this year the kingdom doled out a massive $32 billion spending spree distributed to the public, to celebrate the coronation of King Salman Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.

In 2015 Saudi Arabia also bypassed Russia to take over the world’s third spot in military spending, with a defence budget of $80.8 billion. Meanwhile the war in Yemen, being carried out mostly by the kingdom, shows no sign of abating.

The country is now expected to run a deficit of more than 20 percent of GDP in 2015, according to the IMF.

Masood Ahmed, the IMF’s Middle East director, told reporters in Dubai that the fall in oil prices amounted to a ‘staggering $360 billion this year alone’.

Because the oil price drop is likely to be large and persistent, the kingdom is expected to join other oil exporters and make substantial budget cuts, Al-Jazeera wrote.

But even this may be counter-productive if consumers and companies decide to hold back consumption and investment in response to the cuts.

A more sensible evaluation:

October 23, 2015 2:11 pm
Portugal faces months of political upheaval
Peter Wise in Lisbon



http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d41a28ac-7972-11e5-933d-efcdc3c11c89.html


Wilson led a minority government in 1974 and it had been done on other occasions.

How Wacky Dave Counts his toes.

of course minority gov'ts can survive, as you rightly point out

the confusion arose in part because of my misunderstanding of the poll result in portugal

i don't know about the rest of portugal, but on the basis of my brief visit to lisbon and chatting to a very knowldgeable local guide, the incumbents look to be have done a very good job indeed in reviving the (local) economy
much had been revitalised in the city centre and there was considerable building work and repair of neglected residential and small biz blocks ......

this latter had come about because of the lifting of the long-running rent freeze/controls ..... while rent control may look to be good for tenants, and in some ways they are (eg for small artisan businesses and the lower paid), in practice it meant that landlords did not find it worthwhile to maintain their assets other than in the most basic condition ..... thus, in the longer term, both sides lost out

In Portugal, those must be some of the reasons the right wing have lost control to the left wing.

Perhaps, the poorer see a reversal of expectancies compared with the "elite" of the Salazar period.

I suggest you widen your travels in Portugal.

i've no idea but the present gov't is actually centre-right and nowhere near what you choose to imagine
as you're politically minded, try the following interesting read ..... http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21672748-cobblers-are-prospering-and-voters-arenot-too-angry-why-did-portugal-re-elect

frankly, when i'm on holiday, i am there to relax and to spread largesse among good hostelries .... political investigation is of no interest to me at all

Glad you are on holidays.

How do you tell the difference?


The following may be above your wit and probably you should not listen to it.

You may be further misled!


http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06k9syt#play

no hols for me until christmas though am already planning next year's cycle ride through southern brittany

Martin Amis: Jeremy Corbyn is undereducated and slow-minded

After Mr S’s colleague Harry Mount argued in the Spectator that the Labour party ‘has had a brain transplant’ under Jeremy Corbyn with a purge of the Oxbridge set, Martin Amis has accused the new Labour leader of being undereducated.

Writing for the Sunday Times, the best-selling novelist has launched a verbal attack on Corbyn over his ‘slow-minded rigidity’. The life-long Labour supporter — who says he found himself ‘close to the epicentre of the Corbyn milieu’ in his twenties when he worked for the New Statesman — has criticised Corbyn for his lack of educational achievements:

‘He is undereducated. Which is one way of putting it. His schooling dried up when he was 18, at which point he had two E-grade A-levels to his name; he started a course at North London Polytechnic, true, where he immersed himself in trade union studies but dropped our after a year. And that was that.’

All leading Amis to conclude that Corbyn is rather small-minded:

‘In general his intellectual CV gives an impression of slow-minded rigidity; and he seems essentially incurious about anything beyond his immediate sphere.’

Amis also takes issue with how serious Corbyn is, claiming that he lacks a sense of humour; ‘the humourless man is a joke’. He adds that the appointment of Seumas Milne as Corbyn’s new director of communications this week, suggests that Corbyn is unlikely to improve his electability anytime soon:

‘It is far easier to imagine a Labour party that devolves for now into a leftist equivalent of the American GOP: hopelessly retrograde, self-absorbed, self-pitying and self-righteous, quite unembarrassed by its (year-long) tantrum, necessarily and increasingly hostile to democracy, and in any sane view undeserving of a single vote.’

While it seems Labour may have finally lost Amis’s vote, he won’t be joining the other side anytime soon. In an interview with the Telegraph in 2013, Amis said that he would never be able to support the Conservatives. ‘It’s bred in the bone for me that I could never vote Conservative,’ he said. ‘I just couldn’t do it.’ Mr S suspects that Tim Farron could do worse than to give the author a call.

Was Amis drunk when he wrote the above and were you sober when you read it.

Good luck to you, if you believed what you pasted!

I would prefer a person to think slowly and surely and then come to the right conclusions,rather than a knee-jerked creep who relies on his inbred reflexes and blames others for his failures and U-turns.

i would prefer that labour had a credible leader and thus led much needed opposition

as it stands, and i accept that certain factions of the media will try to promote same, the labour party is looking more and more likely to fracture or even splinter

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/10/25/public-view-tax-credit-cuts-unfair-and-painful-pot/

Public view on tax credit cuts: unfair and painful, but potentially necessary

Tax credits from what I understand (probably little) are simply a way of keeping costs down for the big-ish employers.

They can call on a large ready made workforce, without the burden of actually committing to the underlying costs.

ie:

The supermarkets rely on flexi staff, without having to guarantee anything. There are instances of people being told to be available, without any idea of whether they will be employed that day or not, or for how long...sometimes having to turn up to the place of work hoping for the best.


imo, you would be better off being a mrs mop. people are willing to employ peeps to clean their houses, so many hours a week, every week for x number of quids. You see the ad's all over the place.

With this arrangement, both sides of the deal have to keep to the contract, or it falls apart.


I know which way I would choose if presented with no alternative.

Very strange things going on in Polish elections. The eurosceptic, pro NATO, anti Russia Conservative party may win. They are also anti austerity.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/25/szydo-beata-szydo-polands-putative-pm-emerges-from-obscurity

Lisa Jardin snuffs it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Jardine

Always liked listening to what she had to say on a variety of subjects, and did not sound as though she was in her 70's.

the whole of Europe is fcuked up big time poverty is going to sweep though Europe
crime is out of control read the press in Germany france Belgium . it is all bad news

lets have the vote now and get us out of the stinking rotten eu
it is finished close our borders and move migrants out .
if the lords vote out the tax credits today the gov should take action and remove the
non elected scum .

ever one I speak to wants out of the eu get us out now

Had a good break then Tanks?

stan , yes 7 days in Ibiza then to Germany for two nights then Austria then Sweden
what a shit hole Sweden is now restaurants terrible dirty myself or my wife goes to the toilet before ordering our food we walked out of 4 of them if the toilets are unclean then
walk out because the kitchen will be the same .

off to the sun again next month .