Early Repayment Rules for Student Loans
Traditionally, there has generally been a penalty for early repayment of loans, but some of the new ethical online loan companies, like Zopa use no penalty as a selling point. So do Wonka, who I wouldn’t normally describe as ethical. Even Nationwide charges an extra 30 days interest if you settle your loan early.
So for the student loan companies to charge would be going against what is now accepted as normal and back to the bad old past, where early repayment was a major part of a loan company’s profits.
As this seems to have been a Liberal Democrat idea, who are supposed to be forward thinking or at least not backward, you can read what you like into the proposal.
I don’t need to borrow money, but if I did, I would always do it from a reputable company, that had no penalty for early repayment.
Rangers in a Pickle
Glasgow Rangers went into administration yesterday and it looks more than your average mess, if you read this article on the BBC.
If you read the comments in the BBC article, they are blaming everybody.
I suppose that as it’s the HMRC that has caused the club to go into aministration, then the UK government will get the blame.
Is the Glasgow Premier League Going to Get Smaller?
It has been reported this afternoon that Glasgow Rangers may be going into Administration, so if they did, it would affectively leave Glasgow Celtic as the only major club in Glasgow.
So does this mean the end for Rangers?
The major creditor is reported to be HMRC, who lately have demanded their money.
But whatever happens they’ll get a ten-point deduction, just as Portsmouth will in England, who’ve also gone into administration.
It is also been reported that Celtic’s Chief Executive is not worried if Rangers folds. That in my view is not a very charitable altitude.
QE is Bad For Your Pensions
I don’t mean dear old Liz, as I think the longer she lives, the better it will be for the economy and my pension. But the link is the opposite with Quantitative Easing, which according to several commenators will mean that long-term annuity rates will fall. This article is from CityWire. Here’s an extract.
On the one hand there has been uproar from some experts about the impact on people’s pensions. This is because QE is used to buy back government bonds, or gilts, which reduces their yields and in turn lowers annuity rates, which are linked to gilts and which determine the amount of pension many people receive.
However, others argue that annuity rates were already dropping before QE begun; that while we are hostage to the broader economic backdrop which includes QE, the eurozone crisis is what really matters. ‘It’s the broader backdrop that is most relevant,’ said Tom McPhail of Hargreaves Lansdown.
It doesn’t look good does it. I suppose I could put in a stove that burned paper and just put my pension in it, a bit at a time. I would at least be warm.
On the other way, I’ve sort of created my own annuity using Zopa, where I put the money I got from selling C’s Boxster.
Transparency International and the Blackrock Sovereign Risk Index
I’d never heard of Transparency International until yesterday, when it was interviewed about corruption in Moscow and the problems of investing there on the BBC.
They publish a Corruption Perception Index for around 180 countries world-wide. The link points to their data for 2010. It is interesting reading.
The Blackrock Sovereign Risk Index does what it says on the tin and says how dodgy it is to deal in sovereign risk for various countries.
I wonder if the two are related, in that is a country low on the Country Perception Index, high on the Blackrock Sovereign Risk Index?
I shall be doing some investigating.
Where is the Wunch Now?
So Fred Goodwin has got his comeuppance, but do you ever wonder where all the others, who are part of the same wunch of bankers as Fred, who got us into the financial mess are?
I am indebted to Citywire for the details.
It is interesting reading.
Scotland on Sir Fred
Whilst searching for Scotland’s reaction to Sir Fred’s fall from grace, I found this page in the Glasgow Herald.
There are some funny bits, including one, about how you toast a haggis if you’re teetotal.
But this bit on Sir Fred’s Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh is priceless.
After The Herald revealed that disgraced banker Sir Fred Goodwin may have his Fellowship from the august Royal Society of Edinburgh removed, reader John Duffy in Edinburgh suggests: “Could they not just downgrade him to an Associate, just for the pleasure of seeing a more appropriate set of letters after his name.”
I’m not sure if he’s actually lost his Fellowship.
Bob Diamond Has Kept Quiet
In all the pontifications about Stephen Hester of RBS, I can’t find anything that Bob Diamond of Barclays has said.
Perhaps he’s just being sensible or he has not responded to any journalist, who’s asked what he thinks!
could it be a pointer to something? Or if he says nothing, then he won’t have to refute what he said or change his mind.
Who’s To Blame for the Eurocrisis?
I just found this rather deep and thorough approach on the BBC.
To summarise, it says that because France and Germany cooked the books, with Gordon Brown’s help, to get round the Maastrict rules, that it is now acceptable for anybody to overspend.
What Do You Get When You Cross Good Engineering With Good Financial Skills?
February’s Modern Railways magazine has an interesting article about how a whole new lengthened set of trains are being created to work the South West London services for South West Trains.
Currently these services are worked by 4-car Class 458 and Class 450 trains.
For various reasons South West Trains want to go to a 10-car railway, which would mean the simplest solution would be to lengthen the Class 450s to 5-cars and run them in pairs as required. But this would require upwards of about a hundred new carriages and typically these cost about a million pounds each.
But then Porterbrook’s engineers and managers got involved and suggested using the redundant purpose built fleet of 8-car Gatwick Express Class 460 that were surplus to requirements to lengthen the Class 458’s to 5-car trains. This is possible as both sets of trains were built by Alstom to a common design.
So South West Trains will get what they want at a lesser cost and probably earlier too.
The irony is that Porterbrook, is basically a train leasing company and not an engineering one.
So next time you ask, what have bankers done for us, look at a clever piece of work like this. But then it was probably led by engineers who understood money, rather than bankers who understood engineering.
All of the best engineers I’ve worked with always understood the monetary implications of what they did! Some also understood marketing too!
The Anonymous Widower 