The Royal Bank Of UK Taxpayers Posts Another Big Loss
Gordon Brown’s folly of rescuing Scotland’s failed bank is now becoming more than a millstone around the neck of everybody in the UK.
So the loss of £5.2 billion, works out at nearly £67 each for every man, woman and child in the UK.
I think I’d have had more fun taking a few notes and setting fire to them in a branch of the Royal Bank of UK Taxpayers.
It would be a lovely way to get arrested!
Seriously though, the bank is the deadest of dead parrots and keeping it alive is a fraud on the UK Taxpayers and most of those that appear to work for the bank. If it had been a manufacturing company or a retailer, it would have been liquidated years ago!
PPI Pests Annoy A Lift
W all hate those callers trying to sort out our non-existent PPI problems. If I get one, I give them the number of the mini-cab firm, that fills up my letter-box with junk, as obviously they deserve each other.
according to The Times and The Telegraph, they are even calling the emergency line in the lift at Secure Trust Bank. Here’s the story in the Telegraph.
The ISA Rip-Off
It’s the cash ISA time of the year and I’ve just been looking at the rates. As to what an ISA is, it’s probably best summed up by this page in Money Saving Expert. Here’s the first paragraph.
A cash ISA is just a tax-free savings account. You don’t need to lock the cash away, many are easy-access. Each tax year EVERY person over 16 in the UK can put a new £5,640 in these accounts that pay up to 2.8%. And once in there, the money stays tax-free, year after year.
The rates are derisory and are very poor compared to what I get from Zopa.
Admittedly, there are tax advantages, but why can’t I get those with a peer-to-peer lender if I agree to lock my money away for several years?
Santander: The Worst Bank?
This headline is in the Money pages of The Times.
I can’t judge them, as my only dealings with the bank are the occasional cash machine withdrawal and money sent to my account from people who have accounts there.
But they do fit my great friend’s David’s criteria of someone you don’t bank with! And that is they are not head-quartered in the UK. Or the last time, I looked Spain wasn’t part of the UK.
That doesn’t make them the worst, but it does mean, I’m never ever going to find out.
The Enforcer From The World Bank
Thirty or so years ago, I was going to San Jose from San Francisco airport in a limo. There were four of us sharing and one was one of the most dodgy guys I’d seen in some time. He was tall, fit, tanned and about sixty, with a long grey pony-tail, wearing cowboy boots, immaculate blue jeans and a black shirt. His only luggage was a battered brown leather hold-all. He looked just like a Columbian drug baron straight out of Central Casting. But from his accent, we could tell he was an American.
One of the guys politely asked him what he did. It turned out he’d been a US Army Colonel and he’d been recruited by the World Bank to look after projects in the rain forest. He was absolutely fascinating as he told about his work. He said that if you slash and burn the rainforest, you make just a few thousand dollars an acre, but if you harvest it selectively using the local Indians, you make many times more. He told how trees would be left until maturity and how many of the plants were collected for pharmaceuticals, leaving enough behind to collect in following years.
But he said to do this properly you needed to make tracks, which of course allowed the slash and burn merchants access to the jungle.
He also said that a lot of the problems were down to money lenders and corrupt operators, who drive the eco-system for their own selfish ends.
It was an amazing education in a limousine.
Will The Next World War Be Fought On The Internet?
If you think it won’t, just read this article on the BBC’s web site.
The Chinese will increase their hacking over the next few years and many of us will get compromised, no matter how careful we are. And let’s face it many of us don’t even have basic virus protection.
I can think of scenarios that might happen to say a fully-compromised banking network, that will make the problems of the banking industry of the last few years, seem like a children’s tea-party.
An Aussie Take On Banking
This is a must read article on the way banking is going. This is a flavour.
Apple has 400 million account holders holding an Apple Store or iTunes account, that’s more than the top 3 banks in the world have in retail banking customers. Starbucks, which processes more than 2m transactions every week in the US, took in deposits of $US3 billion on their in-store App-based debit or gift card this year. That puts them ahead of the 6,985 smaller institutions in the US who on average did around $185 million in deposits in 2011, and the 440 midsize institutions who averaged $2.6 billion in deposits. Imagine that! A coffee company that is better at taking deposits than 95 per cent of the FDIC insured banks in the US, and they don’t even have a banking license.
So are Apple and Starbucks, the next Barclays or Visa?
Traditional banking is dead!
Crowd Funding For Research
I sometimes get involved in helping research projects at Liverpool University and I will also lob small amounts of funding towards projects I think are worthwhile.
I also look into innovative ways of raising funding for individuals and businesses, like Zopa and Funding Circle. I also loan money to the Developing World using Kiva.
So can their methods be used to raise funding for research projects.
Let’s take a researcher interested in how patients manage with the gluten-free diet, they need for coeliac disease. They perhaps want to interview as many patients as possible and produce a report that highlights both the problems and the successes, possibly on a regional basis.
So they have two needs.
A small amount of money is probably required, the size of which would depend on the size and scape of the project.
The second thing, that many projects, like the mythical one I outlined, often need subjects for the research.
Surely, a properly designed system could do both.
Similar things have been done under the general heading of crowd funding. There’s more here on Wikipedia.
How would such a system work? I would steal some of the methodology from sites like Zopa and Kiva.
The on-line system would be uploaded with suitable research projects, which borrowing from Zopa’s methods, would be checked as to the veracity of the researcher.
Prospective funders and participants would join and then search for projects, they might like to support, just like you search for suitable borrowers on Kiva.
Obviously, you could also rate researchers, just as you rate buyers and sellers on eBay.
There are some obvious winners, if this could be made to work!
I know from those in Universities, I’ve talked with, that getting funding for small projects is difficult and a lot of time and money is wasted.
Are there going to be any losers? Not directly, but I suspect some charities and their inefficient structures might be by-passed.
I will probably not develop the system, but someone will! On the other hand, if anybody wants to, I’ll be happy to advise.
Zopa Do Shorter Term Loans
Zopa’s minimum loan term has generally been three years, since I have used their web site to save and invest money.
They’ve just announced that they are now going to give shorter term loans of twelve months.
I’m not sure how this will work out for lenders, but it might attract those borrowers with good credit limits, who need tiding over. It might also attract a borrower, who has never used the system and only needs a small sum for a short time and is just trying it to see if borrowing from Zopa is for them.
I wonder if Zopa are going to allow shorter term loans to be effectively rolled on. I suppose the simplest thing to do, would be to pay off the first loan and then start another. But that would be two administration fees.
The Star That Is ARM
I am linking to this article, which has the full speech of ARM’s CEO’s statement giving the Q4 2012 Financial Results. It is a full nine pages long, so it won’t be an easy read. This statement from the first page is very telling.
So let’s start off with the highlights for Q4. Well, Q4 was a fantastic finish to 2012. We saw our continued momentum in licensing and sold 36 licenses in the last quarter. That’s another year of over 100 licenses in the full year.
As someone, who used to put his own intellectual property on someone else’s hardware designs, this number of licences is a significant number, as obviously, the more licences the company signs, the more money it will earn.
I don’t know anything about the technicalities of what ARM does, but judging by the company’s success, it must be pretty damn good. But to me, just as it was for Metier Management Systems with Artemis, when we owned the company, the managers have got the marketing and revenue model right.
In fact, I might argue, that getting that right is more important than getting the product to a hundred percent of your design aims. As obviously, if you are generating lots of money, it is easier to close that last gap in your designs.
So often, I’ve seen wonderful ideas fail, because their revenue model wasn’t designed well enough and doesn’t feed itself back strong enough into product development.
There is another thing that ARM and Metier had in common. ARM is and Metier was considered a almost a crusade or political movement by those that started the companies and those that worked there. The companies that I’ve dealt with or know of, that have had that zeal are hard to come by. My short list would include Apple, Dyson, Rolls-Royce and Zopa. Although, there are one or two architectural or construction companies, that in a few years time, might join them. And don’t underestimate other companies in all sorts of high-tech fields, using an ARM-style of cash-flow model, based on a group of individuals having a unique idea and the determination to see it through.
I can also think of several companies that had everything and then blew it! You could say we did that with Metier by selling out and a lot of other high-tech companies have done the same. And then there’s some that have just lost their way like IBM and Automony.
The Anonymous Widower 