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.

Greek,

An ancestor of mine was, 'Vlad the impaler'

Not certain about "was".

I thought you must have been the gent in blue I met the other night!

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

One difficulty with preventing immigration, is how to deal with "holiday" visitors and "students" and "business" visitors, who can disappear into to populace.

To prevent this one needs to have ID cards, which have to be carried at all times and the development of a Police State. (Stop and search, with road blocks etc,.)

ID cards could prevent "false" social service claims and reduce fraud in general.

The police state would probably be unacceptable to the majority of people in this country and when I spent 3mths in a police state, in my younger days, found it fairly easy enough to "work" round.

I cannot see the difference between holding the information on an ID card and data base and holding Name, Sex, Age, DOB and Address etc. on a data base.

(Some of this information is already on records of Birth and Deaths data bases.)

Again, I can't see the fuss about keeping DNA information. To me, it is no more infringing of liberty than having Blood groups, Names etc. on GP and Hospital records.

I think and amnesty on immigrants may be helpful and cutting down various forms and abuse and crime.

Nickname,

Perhaps, Inspector Clusso!

Bit below the belt FredI would go as far as to saya bit below the socks?

.

No wonder their shares are up today :-) We've just been to Debenhams for a bra fitting!

NM,

Cheer up.

You may have Cameron, Clegg or Brown as the next Dear Leader!

As I am retired, I want longer holidays.

I will have this on my manifesto.

.

Fred,

Fully agree with DNA. I would like to see a DNA sample taken within the first week of birth (a mouth swab). This would result within a few years of most criminals being identified by their DNA, but even more important cutting crime due to the risk of being caught as long as the sentences also became a deterrent.
Almost every week we hear of 'cold cases' including murders, rapes and other very serious cases being solved by DNA.

Of course the main fear that people have is that the government of the day, would mis use the data base, and as I would not trust our leaders as far as I could spit, I can see their point of view.

Note....As a fan of The Pink Panther, I would have no problem with Insp Clouseau, (but not now Cato). As to 'Sleekman', trying to loose about 7lb, so would not quite fit.
If it assists to suggest an alternative, I am a 6' tall, blond, Greek looking god, with the sexual prowess of a full blooded stallion.
Good job MoneyAm is not linked up to a Video Link, I might just frighten off those with a fragile disposition.

Hey Greekman - you sound charming. Fancy going out for a drink? Just the two of us?

;-)

G

Sorry Gausie,

I have just read your profile and it said something about 'Swing trades'.
No offence, but anything to do with swinging scares me off a bit, still each to their own.

Greek there are many on here that would love him to swing!

High and low.

Tabby - for info, swing trading means buying low and selling high - like some of us did with BPRG/Meldex.

Perhaps you could try it for a change!

I see that the US has declared war on Iceland. Apparently they are accusing them of harbouring a weapon of ash eruption.
It was the last wish of the Icelandic economy that its ashes be spread over Europe.
Iceland goes bankrupt, then it manages to set itself on fire. This has insurance scam written all over it.
Iceland, we wanted your cash, not your ash.
Waiter, there's volcanic ash in my soup. I know Sir, it's a no-fly zone.
Richard Curtis is working on a new rom-com about people stuck in an airport who fall in love. The working title is "Lava Actually".
I came out my house yesterday and was hit on the head by a bag of frozen sausages, a chocolate gateau and some fish fingers. I realised it must be the fallout from Iceland.
Volcano in Iceland. What next? Earthquake in Asda? Sandstorm in Sainsburys?
Woke this morning to find every surface in the house covered in a layer of dust and a foul stench of sulphur in the air. No change, Ive been married to that bone-idle slob for 20 years.

I watched seven hours of the Senate Committee yesterday afternoon and evening grilling GS top traders and management[I knowsad muppet] if ever there was any doubt about MMs manipulating marketsI think the Holy Grail of Banking has put that to bed.GS had incentives to misprice credit125% mortgages thrown at the lemmings that had 22 carat blinkers onthe design of mortgage backed securities sorted and selected into no-hopersthen convincing the agenciesby whatever means? ..to give triple A ratingthe birth of collateralised debt obligationswhatever that means?the greedy Bankers could see an opening that was about to cause devastation:-
Instruments designed by Goldman and others to short the sub-prime market had the effect of multiplying the losses in mainstream banking and insurance, and thereby made the financial maelstrom a good deal worse than it might otherwise have been.
The charitable way of looking at these creations is that they were systemic madnesses that simply got out of hand a sort of collective insanity for which no one bank can be reasonably held accountable. . Yet there has always been a suspicion of deliberate deception and that's what this case, and others like it that will surely follow, must attempt to establish.
There is nothing much wrong with traditional mortgage backed securities (MBS or ABS), manufactured by pooling groups of mortgages together and then slicing and dicing them into higher and lower risk tranches, or bonds. Where it went wrong was when bankers began bundling together the higher risk tranches and then re-packaging them into collateralised debt obligations (CDOs). High risk CDO tranches were then sometimes bundled together all over again to create a CDO squared, and so on into the ultimate piggie-backed absurdity of a CDO quadrupled.
Crazy though the process became, it might have been containable but for the emergence of those who saw how profoundly the market was being mispriced and wanted to find ways of shorting it. Traditionally, it has been virtually impossible to short debt, but where there is a will in financial markets, there is always a way. The derivative instruments of choice were credit default swaps (CDS), essentially a form of insurance against default. For a small premium the buyer would get the full price of the asset back in the event of it imploding.
The seller of the CDS would thus assume liability for the entire risk, as if he held the underlying asset outright. Pretty soon, the swaps were themselves bundled into synthetic CDOs that would replicate the performance of real ones, thus creating an insatiable demand to write mortgages for the sole purpose of shorting them. The effect was substantially to multiply the scale of the losses among the organisations that assumed the liability.
The swaps and synthetic CDOs also infringed two of the basic principles of insurance that you must own the asset you are trying to insure, and what's more that you can only insure it once. Through swaps it is possible both to insure assets you don't own and insure them multiple times over, thus creating a direct incentive to burn the house down.
Hedge fund managers such as John Paulson who made fortunes betting against sub-prime, tend to be depicted as all American heroes who saw the crisis coming. In fact they were as much a part of the bubble as those they were betting against, for by adding extra liquidity to an already overheated market they made a bad situation very much worse.
For bankers, there is no allegation so bad as to be accused of deceiving your own clients. Banks are built on reputation and trust; once that goes, they are finished. Andersen, the accounting giant, was utterly destroyed by client desertions after being charged over the Enron collapse.
GS will obviously escape with the minimum of fussit has to be that way but if a Bank with the reputation of Goldman can slime to these kind of lowswhat must have gone on in the real Mafia Banks?And what will Governments now do to punish all Banks?not a sector I wish to be inthey maintain that there was no conflict of interestyer right.about the same as Alex Ferguson refereeing his home game with Man Citydo me a favour Goldmanyou have been caught! Take your punishment and shut the fcuk up!!!!

Tabasco,

Good write up. You say, "What will Governments now do to punish all Banks?not a sector I wish to be inthey maintain that there was no conflict of interestyer right.about the same as Alex Ferguson refereeing his home game with Man City"

Surely you are not implying that our "honourable" (sic) members of government put their own greed before the welfare of the country. Next, you will be saying they are corrupt.
Several months ago I read a comment from a third world country dictator, I think it was an African State but not sure. This person was asked about the corruption in his country. He replied, "at least we are openly corrupt and admit to being so, not like many western countries". No one could argue with that!
Says it all really. Of course we are nowhere near as corrupt as many countries, but we are far whiter than white (no pun intended).
See you on the barricades!

If there was any doubt what our unelected leader, and many of his close cabinet colleagues thought, of the millions of ordinary hard working people of this country, then those doubts have surely been dispelled now. The arrogance of the man beggars belief. Too many of labours hierachy have shown their contempt for the very people they rely on to put them in power again, and power is what they crave.
2517

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25,

If "the millions of ordinary hard working people of this country" are treated badly by Labour, god help them under a tory party if they were to get in.

NM.

The media leapt with relish on the Brown remark, and has been whipping it up since then, with delight, but I think the electorate are a little more tolerant of the stupidity of leaving his microphone switch on.

(I must admit, that I wouldn't like to have any of the reporters as friends, as I wouldn't like to be watching my back all the time. But, I suppose they are reporting what their bosses want them to print and some of that some of the public like to read.)

Not sure which group has the rings in their noses.

Also, not certain, that the incident will weigh to much in the overall result.

Don't arrange a party yet.