Zopa Abandons Listings
Basically, Zopa had two different forms of lending; markets and listings.
Markets work by lenders getting together to fund loans to borrowers. All is done automatically by the computers and risk assessors in the middle.
Listings are best defined like this.
In a nutshell, they work just like an online auction, except that the ‘price’ comes down instead of going up.
Once a listing becomes 100% funded, you’ll see that the overall interest rate will begin to fall as lenders compete with each other to be included in the loan.
I never used them. And as they weren’t as popular as markets and were quite expensive to administer, Zopa have now dropped them.
Would Any Sane Person Buy Into the Greek Privatisation?
Let’s say you are the CEO of a utility company, which has a good record of managing water supply in say, Britain, France or Germany.
If you were asked to participate in the buy-out of a Greek water company would you be interested? Given the feeling in Greece and the attitudes of the workers to the proposed privatisations to help bail the country out, I think you would probably say no, as you value your health and you don’t want to be fired by the shareholders of your company.
I suspect very few companies will actually get involved in providing the finance, unless the prices are so low. But then if that is the case, Greece will not be able to meet its debts.
So are we back to square one with the Greeks?
No! Square zero maybe or even square minus one!
On the other hand consultancy about the privatisations might be a nice wheeze! But who will pay you, if no-one will provide the finance.
How To Fund A Dog Wash!
The Times today has an article about peer-to-peer lending by Alexandra Frean.
In it she describes how a guy called John Good from Davison, Michigan got the money to expand his car wash into the clean dog business by using a loan from Lending Club.
It’s all good stuff and just shows how the banks are missing the peer-to-peer lending market, which I think will be one of successes of the next ten years or so and probably much longer.
In the United States the systems are different to the UK, but it doesn’t totally stop them having successes. I myself use the peer-to-peer lending site, Zopa, as my deposit account as even if I run it conservatively, it gives me upwards of six percent before tax. There is risk and I have had 3 contracts out of 2359 go bad, which have cost me £322.60 or 0.6 percent of my total investment. Alexandra’s article quotes returns of 9 percent net of defaults and charges in the United States.
I could probably make a higher return, if I upped my rates, but then I’d get a higher rate of default, as I’d probably attract more risky borrowers.
I also think I’m benefiting because I’ve been lending money for some years now and have a strong feeling about how you arrange the rates to get the best value.
Are Pensions Just An Enormous Ponzi Scheme?
The title of this post was suggested by someone who I know well, who works in the City.
He has a point, as once people stop joining and contributing, it all goes belly up.
Think about it! And think too about all the rules brought in to protect the early joiners in the scheme and also to make sure that advisors get their part of your hard-earned pension pot!
It’s All Greek To Me!
I like Greece and the Greek people for that matter, even if they do smoke too much!
I also like the euro and on the whole think it is a good thing and we should have joined, just like we should have joined Schengen.
The trouble with Greece is that they don’t like rules and especially those imposed by others on their economy. One Greek told me that’s why they all smoke in restaurants despite it being against the law.
So perhaps their economy wasn’t strong enough for Greece to join the single currency, but for a few years it gave them a lot of cheap money, just as it did Ireland. So now that the lenders want it back, there’s problems all round. Robert Peston of the BBC analyses it all here.
I’m no economist, so where it will all end, I do not know. But I am a qualified control engineer and I do know that the Greek economy has all the stability of a bicycle with the handles stuck either turning to the left or right.
Just like the bicycle, the Greek economy will have an awful crash.
The villians really are not the Greeks here, but the politicians who wanted a single currency and didn’t really think through about how to make it work properly. If the right rules had been in place from the first day, then there would have been no need for a bailout of Greece, Ireland or Portugal.
I suspect now, that if it was that stable, then we would have joined the euro. Or we would have at least tried to!
Would Anybody Ever Use Western Union?
I had four spam e-mails this morning with a title of “You have $250,000.00 Lodged in our Western Union” and a body of “RESPOND FOR DETAILS”
I like the fact that they call it our Western Union!
Does it mean they own it or there’s another one, we don’t know about? The e-mails came from a supposedly Peruvian .pe e-mail address.
Western Union’s name is now so discredited that I and I suspect any serious person, who uses the Internet, would ever use it. I have never used the company in the past and probably never will in the future.
Although looking at the financial results of the company, they seem to be doing quite well.
A Thought About Pensions
Are the Unions attacking the wrong target in the Government over pensions?
If I look at my pension, it’s not as big as it could be and that is probably because the advice I’ve received over the years about it could have been much better in places. It has been managed by three or four providers, a couple of whom have been taken over. It is now being managed by a friend, who works for a respected institution, but getting it there involved large amounts of paperwork and slowness on the part of the previous company.
But I’ve been lucky compared to some of my friends, who have suffered downright incompetence, or were unlucky enough to have chosen the likes of Equitable Life.
So is the problems with paltry pensions, not so much the rules, but the management by the companies and individuals involved? I know this doesn’t apply to pensions provided by the government, but poor private pensions, must mean that there is pressure for everybody to come in line.
Remember too, that when pensions came in, it was expected that those receiving them would only live a couple of years at most. Now most live a lot longer.
But if you think the problems are bad here, then just look at some European companies, where pensions are funded totally from taxation.
Am I About to Pay for my Olympic Tickets?
When I log in to my Visa account, transactions don’t appear immediately. I do find this a bit strange, but it is the way it happens. After all if I draw money out of a cashpoint and then look at my account on-line, you can see the transaction virtually immediately.
So this morning, it would appear that there are some transactions to be processed on my Visa account for about £800. I did order about £3,300 of Olympic tickets, which may seem a lot, but I’ll never see another one and I knew I’d only get a percentage. So it looks like I may get about a quarter!
Strauss-Kahn is a Disgrace
The Times today carries an article under the title of Love bomb that failed to go off, which describes in detail how he pursued a French reporter working in London. I’m not quoting from the article, as it is copyright and although it is in a respectable newspaper, it might not be 100% true. I’m no lawyer, but I would feel that Strauss Kahn did enough to fall foul of The Harassment Act.
If I or any other person, behaved like the article alleges, I would certainly have had the police at my door.
If he is that desperate for women, then he can always phone up and get one delivered on a plate wrapped to whatever taste he prefers.
Type “Strauss Kahn escort” into Google and you find this.
On a positive side perhaps Strauss Kahn and Fred Goodwin should form themselves a bank called the Wunch Bank. They deserve each other.
Those That Live By The Shredder Die By The Shredder
It is often said that everything comes to him who waits. The partial lifting of the so-called banker’s, Fred Goodwin‘s super-injunction, shows that no matter how tight you jam the lid on a can of beans, eventually the pressure builds and it blows up in your face.
There are some choice headlines.
- Daily Mail – Sir Fred, adultery and the public interest.
- Independent – Goodwin’s affair at bank exposed after peer breaks gagging order
- Daily Mirror – No good in these gags
- The Sun – Fred the Bed
There’s a lot more.
The tone is set by this from the Daily Mail.
While RBS was undergoing the biggest collapse in British corporate history, he was busy carrying out an extra-marital affair with a senior colleague involved in the strategic direction of the bank.
Truly, there can be no doubting the public interest in disclosing Sir Fred’s conduct. The collapse of RBS, under his control, led to a £45billion bailout by taxpayers.
Thousands upon thousands lost their jobs and businesses in the financial devastation which followed.
If Fred had had an affair with a Page 3 bimbo, that wouldn’t have mattered so much to the bank and in the end UK taxpayers. The tabloids might have made us laugh as they did years ago with Ron Halpern, a long forgotten businessman in the 1960s or 1970s, but because he had an affair with a senior executive, it meant that his crazy policies were able to get through board and other meetings. I had problems years ago with a company, where I served on a technical committee that had a husband and wife on it. We all had to convince two people who slept together of the correct course of action. It was not easy and the company suffered.
Two people having a relationship in an organisation is rarely a good idea!
Fred Goodwin was knighted in the 2004 Queen’s Birthday Honours List for his services to banking. So at least we can’t blame that one totally on Prudence, as he wasn’t Prime Minister until four years later. It will be interesting to see in twenty or so years time, when the details of Sir Fred’s knighthood are released, what dicussions took place on his suitability for such an award.
If ever there was a case for a knighthood to be taken away, then Sir Fred is at the top of the list.
The Anonymous Widower 