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.

.

Haze,

Is this the man haunting you?

Saudi Arabia posts $98B deficit, raises petrol prices
Originally published December 28, 2015 at 5:25 am Updated December 28, 2015 at 11:32 am

By ABDULLAH AL-SHIHRI
AYA BATRAWY
The Associated Press

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) — Saudi Arabia on Monday said this year’s budget deficit amounted to $98 billion (367 billion riyals) as lower oil prices cut into the government’s main source of revenue, prompting the kingdom to scale back spending for the coming year and hike up petrol prices.

A royal decree announced that petrol prices would go up by 50 percent effective Tuesday. Even with that jump, Saudis will pay just 24 cents (0.90 riyals) for a liter of 95 octane gasoline, less than a dollar per gallon. The Saudi-based Jadwa Investment estimates the government spends around $61 billion on energy subsidies annually, almost $11 billion of that on gasoline alone.

For two consecutive years the kingdom has posted a deficit, and it is planning for another budget shortfall next year, projected at $87 billion (326 billion riyals).

The deficits represent a sharp turnaround from just a few years ago, before oil prices tumbled in mid-2014. Instead of cutting oil production to drive prices up, Saudi Arabia has aggressively kept its production levels high in what analysts say is an attempt to keep its market share and stymie the reach of U.S. shale producers in the global market.

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The Saudi government has been digging into its large foreign reserves, built up during years of higher oil prices. To cover the difference between its spending and revenue over the past year, Saudi Arabia has drawn its reserves down from $728 billion at the end of last year to around $640 billion.

The Saudi fiscal budget is being watched closely by investors to see how the kingdom plans to consolidate after years of heavy spending when oil prices were more than double what they are now. Benchmark U.S. crude was trading Monday at $37.46 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

One area where the government is not cutting back is defense and security, where it allocated $57 billion (213 billion riyals) for 2016. Saudi Arabia has been leading a coalition against Shiite Houthi rebels in Yemen since March and is a member of the U.S.-led coalition battling the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq.

The government said it is anticipating $137 billion (513 billion riyals) in revenue for the coming year, around $26 billion (95 billion riyals) less than the total for 2015. As is typical for the published version of the budget, it did not include a projected oil price.

Next year’s budget suggests Saudi Arabia is basing its revenue on an even lower price of $40 a barrel for export crude, if production remains at 10.2 million barrels per day, said Fahad Alturki, chief economist and head of research at Saudi-based Jadwa Investment. That’s less than the $56 per barrel priced into the projected 2015 budget.

In the 2015 budget, oil revenues accounted for 72 percent of total revenue as opposed to 87 percent in 2014. Coinciding with that drop, non-oil revenues rose by almost $10 billion from 2014.

Saudi Arabia and its Arab Gulf neighbors have been working to diversify their economies and decrease their dependence on oil, and to support the private sector to absorb the millions of young people coming into the workforce.

Saudi Arabia says it expects to spend $224 billion (840 billion riyals) in 2016, which is $5 billion (20 billion riyals) less than what had been projected for this year. However, the government has also put aside $49 billion (183 billion riyals) in discretionary spending to use on infrastructure projects if oil prices improve.

Nearly half of this year’s spending, or around $120 billion (450 billion riyals), went to wages, salaries and allowances. The budget revealed that the kingdom spent $30 billion more in 2015 than it had initially planned, reaching $260 billion (975 billion riyals) in total expenditures largely because of financial handouts King Salman doled out to the public when he ascended the throne earlier this year.

“There hasn’t been any major overspending, which shows the government’s determination to rationalize spending,” Alturki said. “I think it’s a positive signal.”

The London-based research consultancy Capital Economics said in a report issued this month that the Saudi budget takes on additional prominence because it is the first under the new monarch. The budget is also being heavily scrutinized as it was prepared under the guidance of a newly-formed Council of Economic and Development Affairs, which is headed by the king’s 30-year-old son, Deputy Crown Prince and Defense Minister Mohammed bin Salman.

This is not the first time for Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing Gulf countries to run budget deficits. When oil prices steeply dropped in 1986, Saudi Arabia ran a budget deficit for some 15 years, significantly increasing public and external debt until oil prices finally recovered in the 2000s.

__

Batrawy reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
ABDULLAH AL-SHIHRI
AYA BATRAWY

Jeremy Corbyn's enemies are dead men walking

Moderates in the shadow cabinet can’t be surprised that Corbyn has decided to seek revenge on them




By Dan Hodges

5:52PM GMT 28 Dec 2015


Did you have an enjoyable and festive Christmas? Yes? Then it’s a safe bet you’re not a member of the shadow cabinet.


“Our Christmas was ruined”, one shadow minister told the Telegraph. Burnt turkey? Fell asleep in front of And Then There Were None before the first murder?



Nope. Jeremy Corbyn has been playing The People’s Grinch again. “There’s a level of fear within the party that’s worse than anything I’ve seen since the 1980s. It’s insidious. We [moderate members of the shadow cabinet] feel as if we have targets on our backs.”


Those of us who have spent the last couple of days dodging a fusillade of Nerf bullets know how they feel. But apparently this wasn’t a reference to the awesome firepower of the new Millennium Falcon, this season’s must-have gift. Instead, it was a response to reports that Labour’s leader is preparing a new year’s “revenge reshuffle”. Hilary Benn. Angela Eagle. Rosie Winterton. They are just three likely targets of the proposed purge




More good news here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/Jeremy_Corbyn/12071763/Jeremy-Corbyns-enemies-are-dead-men-walking.html

While Canute Cameron invests in his future.






Hear that he is popular in the Thames Valley.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=

I wonder, if he and his fractious party, after exiting the EU, devolving Scotland
will he devolve the North of England and N.I..

A new domestic abuse law comes into force today. The College of Policing says the new law presents "challenges". I'll say. It appears to be a recipe for making a bad situation worse.
Domestic abusers who control victims via social media or spy on them online could face up to five years in prison under the new law.
The new offence criminalises patterns of such behaviour against an intimate partner or family member. So the kids dont like you viewing their facebook pages? Will you be hauled down to the police station for a formal interview? How are trivial complaints screened? By the police? Aren't they short staffed as it is?

Just a load of waffle, you only have to look at the number of knife carriers who have been let off.
2517

Your future is safe in his hands!

The thing is that the rivers need to be dredged properly as rainfall increases....and steel shuttering needs to be put in place on approaches to every bridge,...buildings close to riverbanks in the UK.....it's a massive task and has to be future proof !.....priority to areas that have been badly affected by this terrible flooding....the flooding is not just a one off....the seas are rising in global warming across the world.....not an easy task ahead....

Not an easy task at all rf, but if some of the foreign aid budget/foreign climate change budget money was used for UK flood defences then the relevant barriers could be installed much quicker.
2517

dutch flood defenses
as most of you already know, much of NL is below sea level
when they had very serious flooding in the 90s, i recollect that they abandoned the idea of ever higher dykes, and gave back much land to the sea - rather as they did in somerset flats

==============

personal debt
there was a moderately interesting prog on the wireless this morning about personal debt
almost without exception, the callers blamed the advertisers, the gov't or indeed anyone else but themselves
it is now almost unheard of for people being told very firmly that they have to accept the responsibility for their actions

One shouldn't trust the media or the lenders!

a propos of what?

Well I hope 2016 is better than 2015...what a rotten year we've just had.....

==-===--==

I see the Goebbels of the New Neo-fascist party has been knighted!

It's a hard life.....



David Miliband is paid a staggering £425,000 as boss of New York-based refugee charity

By Sebastian Shakespeare for the Daily Mail

Published: 00:23, 31 December 2015 | Updated: 08:07, 31 December 2015






When Ali G star Sacha Baron Cohen and his actress wife Isla Fisher donated $500,000 to the International Rescue Committee this week, they wanted to help desperate refugees fleeing conflict in Syria.

But what the generous couple may not have known is that their donation will not even have been enough to pay the salary of the American charity’s boss, David Miliband.

I can disclose that the Blairite former Foreign Secretary, was allocated a staggering $600,000 [£425,000] per year by International Rescue.

It dwarfs the $413,000 paid to his predecessor, George Rupp, and is almost three times the £142,500 paid to our Prime Minister.

Miliband’s pay has been declared publicly for the first time at the Charities Bureau in New York, where International Rescue is based.

It says he works 37½ hours a week, but the charity could not be reached for further comment.

If he were still Foreign Secretary, he would be paid a relatively lowly £134,565.

The charity cash is not Miliband’s only income, however, as he is thought to have rented out his £3 million home in London’s Primrose Hill since moving to New York in 2013 with his wife, American violinist Louise Shackelton, and their two adopted children.

The couple could expect to receive £6,750 a month, or £81,000 a year, in rental.


More socialism here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3379572/SEBASTIAN-SHAKESPEARE-Revealed-David-Miliband-paid-staggering-425-000-boss-New-York-based-refugee-charity.html

Good old Labour type ...

He would fit in nicely with UKIP or the Neo-cons.

Mind it is a little like a con artist MP who claimed moat cleaning on his expenses has been handed a peerage!

It is a wonder that IDS isn't calling for a prison sentence for a social scrounger.

(I am forgetting he is an old tory.)

The smell of Downing Street is spreading.

Mind Max, Manuel and Jb might define it as "nice work if they could get it".

We really need to get this story about rivers and flooding straight

From: http://www.adamsmith.org/
Written by Tim Worstall
Tuesday, December 29th, 2015



That there’s terrible flooding in the North of England is true. But before we decide what we’re going to do about prevention in the future we do need to work out why there is terrible flooding. And here there’s two very different tales. One is that this is climate change and so we had all better stop driving anywhere and huddle in the gloaming of low wattage lamps as we proceed, full speed, to the middle ages. The other is that the bureaucrats have been deliberately designing the flow of rivers so that floods do occur.

We are not so cynical that we would insist that the second explanation must be true just because bureaucrats. We are sufficiently cynical to think that it could be the correct explanation.

Here is one such bureaucrat on the BBC:

Speaking to Radio 4’s Today programme, Mr Rooke said the UK was moving from a period of “known extremes” of weather to one of “unknown extremes” – something which a government review of flood defences would consider before reporting next summer.

Asked if the UK needed a new response to flooding, he said: “I think we will need to have that complete rethink and I think we will need to move from not just providing better defences – and we’ve got a £2.3bn programme to do that over the next six years – but also looking at increasing resilience.”

This would mean “when properties do flood, that they have solid floors, waterproof plaster, more electrics up the wall – so that people can get into their houses and businesses more quickly”.

Quite clearly, more flooding because climate change and we’d better just make waterproof houses and just live with it. There’s also someone called Gaia Vince (surely a spoof name, this is Mr. Cable in retirement, no?) in The Guardian telling us much the same thing. We’ve also a Dutch expert telling us that we should be changing what we do with rivers:

When more than 1,800 people died in the wake of the 1953 North Sea flood in the Netherlands, the national reaction was: never again. The resulting Delta programme to close off the south-western river delta from the sea was so bold that its name became synonymous with dealing with a crisis. If an issue needs a major response, you can be sure that a Dutch politician will call for a “Delta plan to tackle X”. It is time that the UK took some of that attitude and got a Delta plan to tackle flooding.

Sounds like a plan really. We’re on board with it. And then comes this, about the earlier Cumbria floods:

Amid all the devastation and recrimination over the floods in Cumbria hardly anybody mentions one factor that may not be the sole cause, but certainly hasn’t helped.

That is the almost complete cessation of dredging of our rivers since we were required to accept the European Water Framework Directive (EWF) into UK law in 2000.

Yet until then, for all of recorded history, it almost went without saying that a watercourse needed to be big enough to take any water that flowed into it, otherwise it would overflow and inundate the surrounding land and houses.

Every civilisation has known that, except apparently ours. It is just common sense. City authorities and, before them, manors and towns and villages, organised themselves to make sure their watercourses were cleansed, deepened and sometimes embanked to hold whatever water they had to carry away.

Christopher Booker and Owen Paterson have said much the same thing about the Somerset Levels floods of a couple of years back: given that that area is below sea level drainage and pumping is really rather important. So what’s changed?

But all this changed with the creation of the Environment Agency in 1997 and when we adopted the European Water Framework Directive in 2000. No longer were the authorities charged with a duty to prevent flooding. Instead, the emphasis shifted, in an astonishing reversal of policy, to a primary obligation to achieve ‘good ecological status’ for our national rivers. This is defined as being as close as possible to ‘undisturbed natural conditions’.

‘Heavily modified waters’, which include rivers dredged or embanked to prevent flooding, cannot, by definition, ever satisfy the terms of the directive.

So, in order to comply with the obligations imposed on us by the EU we had to stop dredging and embanking and allow rivers to ‘re-connect with their floodplains’, as the currently fashionable jargon has it.

More at the link above - together with lots of comments too!