Here’s an example of a bond issue backed by rents, the key financial component of the Simple Plan. It’s got to be better than this: This is what 9% average price growth looks like across the whole distribution of London house prices. pic.twitter.com/2kiyArRi9h — Neal Hudson (@resi_analyst) October 21, 2013 Or waiting for dead men’s…
Read More Some simple plan linksSo, back in March we were transitioning towards a low-trust society via the phenomenon of the bogus hairdresser. I identified a maximum at the chilly limit of 1.16 million people who might be kept off the official unemployment number via Work Programme wipe-your-own-arse classes, zero wage placements, or bogus hairdressing. I didn’t believe it was…
Read More The missing millions, found hairdressingFrom Crooked Timber: Speaking of hypocrisy, what of the revelations (big surprise) that CIA had been briefing Pakistan govt on the drone strikes, while the latter was simultaneously denouncing them? From the blog, December 2012, I point out that the CIA and the Pakistanis were evidently cooperating in so far as they coordinated their use…
Read More No surprise bloggingI’ll be having more to say about the latest Snowdonian revelations as they apply to macro-politics, probably at the Fistful. In the meantime, the document at Le Monde is interesting from a technical point of view. They mention attacking a PBX – quite a common issue, because a lot of them are proprietary and not…
Read More The problem: the US can’t promise information security to anyoneErik Lund blogs about the P-51 Mustang and wonders why the British bought so many aircraft from US West Coast companies. Well, he should read back through his own blog and remember that the Liberator worked when Curtiss-San Diego built it and the problems began when Ford tried. But anyway. Lund: It is a little…
Read More I happen to have the book here.The Royal African Society’s African Arguments blog is superb. Being Burundi’s chief inspector of taxation. Why are there riots in Sudan, and what’s likely to happen? Nigerian jihadis attack schools. Rwanda doesn’t like the ICC very much but did recently help it arrest Bosco Ntaganda. Why? “That something will try to discuss the nuclear dimension…
Read More Links, globallyFrances Coppola’s fine blog points out that Will Hutton is wrong, and so is George Osborne. Letting Chinese banks trade in the UK as branches of the parent company (like: Bank of Ireland), not subsidiaries (like: Bank of Ireland (UK) Ltd), may perhaps get the UK taxpayer off the hook should they go bust but…
Read More We don’t need two kinds of bank, “bank” and “bank(if you dare)”This here is quality from Agata Pyzik. The minor detail that there is no evidence any central bank actually uses the famous Taylor rule, and the somewhat less minor one that using it requires making a priori decisions about two of its parameters as well as the inflation target itself. I occasionally wondered precisely what…
Read More LinksOK, a book. British Generals in Blair’s Wars (Military Strategy and Operational Art), available from the book company. Recommendation from Tom Ricks. I’ve not finished the book yet, but the big stand-out issue here is: Why is nobody responsible? Hardly anyone sees Iraq as anything other than a disaster. Meanwhile, the British armed forces have…
Read More It’s nobody’s fault and nobody is sorry.I just needed to look up something in Wikipedia. My last six Wikipedia articles were: Peter Hook. Cockroach. Madagascan hissing cockroach. Jimmy Carter. Linus Pauling. List of pigs. The possibilities are endless.
Read More Project for the world’s worst dinner party