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.

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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.
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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.

Well said George.

Last Saturday I attended the local Politicians speakers corner in Beverley, East Yorks. Since I had a 20 minute debate with the potential Labour candidate a few months ago, he now avoids me at all costs, probably because I won more points that he did, with a gathering crowd listening. So I had to except a debate with one of his supporters, who on a few points did a far better job than his boss in defending their case, although I still disagreed on said points. So I was enjoying the exchange until it came to immigration.
The exchange went something like this.
Q What is your party going to do about immigration.
R In what way.
Q As the UK is slowly sinking with over population are the numbers going to be cut.
R We are nowhere near sinking.
Q So how many more can we take.
R We can take indefinite numbers (Yes he used the word indefinite).
Q Say our population doubled, surely you would say then we were over populated.
R Not at all.
Q Then lets use ridiculous numbers, say 200,million.
R We can take indefinite (that word again) numbers.
Q So there is no limit to the numbers we can take
R No.
Q But where would they all live.
R We would take some of the green belt.
Q So you would concrete over even more fields.
R Yes as many as needed.
Q So you would be happy if we ended up like you see in science fiction films where we all live in concrete jungles with no natural open areas.
R I believe we should allow free movement and allow as many people to come to this country as wish to, so yes.
He then went on to say that I was forgetting that we have migration as well, although I had repeatedly stated that NET immigration was increasing the UK's overall population.
At this point I could not continue with the debate as believe it or not, he was being serious.
I concluded by saying that, I am now even more certain that the Labour party hate this country and are doing everything possible to destroy it, especially the countryside.
I would have liked to put the point re what effect even more immigration would have on the infrastructure of, Schools, Health, Social Benefits and the like but I was too annoyed.
I appreciate that all labour supporters are not to the extremes of this idiot I spoke to, but how could any political supporter be so stupid as to tout this rubbish, especially with a crowd watching/listening.
As to Gordon Browns gaff, I do appreciate we all say things in private what we would not dream of saying in public, BUT the comment he made proves that he believed this woman was a 'bigot'. No doubt then he feels that anyone who questions immigration or even mentions race issues is a bigot.

regards Greek (Obviously in Gordon Browns opinion, a 100% bigot).

Fred,

I feel the media would have jumped in with relish, no matter what political leader had made the comment, even more so regarding the BBC which is very pro Labour.
You can not get away from the fact that GB said it as he finds it. Anyone who mentions immigration/race even in general tones/debate is in his opinion, a Bigot.

lol fred, you really do go around with blinkers on.

It isn't that he was stupid enough to leave his microphone on, it's that it shows what the man is really like underneath the veneer of interest and empathy for the people. The latter being fairly essential perhaps to a labour party leader, irrespective of what other parties might or might not do to them?

I suppose some people might be tempted to vote for Labour without Brown, but there is no such option on the ballot paper. Unless Brown resigns before the election, but that is very unlikely unless he has a nervous breakdown in from of viewers on TV tonight.

Kayak.

W&S.

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Fred----Had GB not made that remark then the media would have reported/recorded a PM doing what they and other MP's do at election time ie, cosying up to members of the public for photo shoots in order to portray themselves as being in touch with the people. What GB did was show his real feelings towards the people, whether they vote for labour or not makes no difference to him, his contempt encompasses all.

Mrs Gillian Duffy is obviously not one of the electorate more tolerant of the stupidity of leaving his microphone switched on, as apparently, she is not voting labour, having been a labour voter all her life. It's possible that many undecided voters will not now vote for labour as well.

Kayak is right, you really do need to take the blinkers off, you are so quick to berate the tories. Had that gaff been made by DC would you have still been one of the tolerant electorate willing to pass it off as the stupidity of leaving his microphone switch on. I think not.
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