WHILE THE CAT'S AWAY..

Now that Mini-Polko has been dropped at school for the week Polko is having a week without Mrs Polko.. Jetted off to the Canary Islands for a well earned week of sun with Sister Polko she has (well if it keeps 'em happy)..

Not quite alone, and not quite while the cat's away though.. Cat Polko is at home with me too..

Polko is however, also not really working hard this week. A Three Day Week again for me. The way it should be. So, I'm catching up on a whole heap of things I like to do. Playstation 3 online gaming (NHL'09 has just been released.. yay-hey!), mp3 sifting and sorting and re-tagging (the Nerd in Polko strikes again!), fixing up the bathroom, manning the phones, taking long breakfasts in the village coffee shop, finishing three books that are half read, mailing out 300 flyers and, last but not least, cooking up some experimental recipes for Sister Polko and Mrs Polko to try on their return. Life at Polkosville goes on much the same in the correct relaxed fashion.

Now, while we're on the subject.. I'd like to provide a quick list of some mp3's that I've been playing around with / including some bands that I've under-rated for too long..

1. Simple Minds. Just playing through New Gold Dream (one of my favourite 80s albums) but then I also selected some of their greatest hits stuff... and now I realise I really really like Waterfront as a power track. I know it might not be trendy to like this band, but damn they're good. And my first band to see live too - when they weren't famous.. so that counts for something?

2. Braintax. Pure UK consciousness. Those that know Polko know of his admiration for the lyrics this particular lad from Leeds has been pumping since 1991. Pity he's now had enough of fighting the greyness around us and slotted off to Australia to live forever and ever. Amen. I'll be following (not necessarily to the land of Wallabees however!) in 8 more September's after this very one. Nice.

3. Blancmange. Neil Arthur. Pure idiocy and pure brilliance all rolled into one songwriter. I mean, their first release was called Irene and Mavis ??? Check out What's Your Problem if you get a chance for a slice of Blancmange. Only 2 downsides to this band - they're from London (someone has to have the misfortune) and they signed to London Records (the gits who took over Factory Record's catalogue) :-)

And I will also leave you with one of life's imponderables (which in itself is a great word for any Monday?).. why do I always cut one slice of sweet potato thicker than the rest and have to leave it in the pan one minute more?

hmmm.....

ROLE OF GOVERNMENT - PART 4.... and counting

I'll let the image do the talking on this one..


Those who have read or spoken to me on the "role of government" and/or other public sector bodies will know what I think of any policy that attempts to interfere unnaturally in order to provide a "more equitable distribution" of University undergraduates..

I leave you with this series of questions..

what is equity? should it be based on parental income? on what your background is? which postcode you use on your application form? or should it perhaps be based on how intelligent you are.. maybe?

I for one hope the Vice Chancellor of Cambridge's views (second clip above) will become more widespread in the academic community..

PRE-SEASON EXCITEMENT

Today is the first game for the Montreal Canadiens in their 100th year of NHL hockey playing. Not the first real game so to speak, but the first of their Pre-Season series, 9 games to warm them up starting with a Boston Bruins match up at home..

This year, all fans are hoping for their name on the Stanley Cup. It's been a while and it's a special year! Polko is aiming to attend a few games early in 2009.

The first game of the season proper is October 10th with their first test against ultra-rivals Toronto Maple Leafs on Saturday October 11th.. Of one thing I am sure. You'll be hearing more about their progress from time to time during the year among my blog posts.


And onto something else...

I run two installs of Media Monkey and from time to time like to take a look at what I've been sub-consciously focusing on in my listening habits. This is my current top ten albums list from my work computer, which is always very different to my home PC given that I don't have access to my full mp3 drive at work and the fact that several other people have access to, and therefore mess with, my home PC mp3/Media Monkey playlist. It helps to juggle things up a bit and I get to listen to things I probably wouldn't otherwise.


No surprise to see a fair bit of hip hop (real hip hop that is, not shit-hop) in my daytime/work playlist. Rhythm based tracks tend to get me typing faster! Braintax is always lurking around there in the top three or four as are the Pet Shop Boys - their particular brand of gay-disco-pop works well when you are concentrating not on the music but on something else (sorry boys!).

One surprise though is the rapid ascent of Dub Pistols on my playlists of late. They are a brilliant example of how the best UK music takes a range of multi-cultural/multi-national influences and re-creates that form of music to a higher level. If you've not listened to any of their tracks take a peek at The Hype Machine or similar. Apart from 6 Million Ways To Live which is my personal favourite, they also produced some good cover tracks recently (2007?) including The Stranglers' Peaches (with Rodney P - one of the UK's finest rappers and Terry Hall of The Specials aka etc etc), Gangsters (again with help from Terry Hall) and even Blondie's groundbreaking white-rap Rapture.

They rent MySpace space at http://www.myspace.com/thedubpistols.

Soul shaking.

Oh yes.

POLKO'S BOWL...

currently contains a whole load of Crunchies!

and it's not even a Friday!

HOW DO THESE PEOPLE GET THERE?

Nick Candy interviewed recently at a Residential Propertry Developers Conference... tell us something we didn't already know Nick!

click and watch the video if you've ever wondered how some people make money despite themselves.

This man was reputedly worth £_m last year.

This is their entry in London Evening Standard's London's 1000 Most Influential People

Nick, 32, and Christian, 34, Candy
London's "brothers bling" with £9bn of developments in London including One Hyde Park, with its record-breaking £5,000 per sq ft cost, and the Middlesex Hospital site and Chelsea Barracks. Their main backer is Sheik Hamad bin Jabar al Thani, Qatar's foreign minister. Mystery shrouds their dealings and they are touchy about criticism.

AND ON A DIFFERENT NOTE

Polko is now getting bored of posting pessimistic doom and gloom related to the financial world.. to be quite honest, I don't care, can't do anything more about it, the sun is shining making it a great September morning out there on the hills and I've just noticed the heather on the moors outside is turning my favourite colour of the year - a patchy darkish red. I used to live in the city and would like to think I was always slightly connected with my surroundings, but where I live now has somehow heightened my senses and perceptions of the changing moods of nature.

Life's great when you forget what you can't affect and add up all the little things that are happening around you.

So, to kickstart a different topic and (slightly) lighten the subject matter..
a press clipping.

The people responsible for this type of reporting need to take a look out of their window and smell their morning coffee...


I didn't quite understand at first, what was the relevance of the number 5 being African-American? Then I twigged what was going on here.. Would it really offend anyone if they simply reported that the team wore a Black 5 on their arm for a few games and a Black Armband instead of a very clumsy to read "a African-American armband"?

Political Correctness gone mad.. now back to my morning coffee..

GREY TUESDAY

The day the FTSE 100 tested 5000..







closing at 5026. Effectively taking the index back three years or so.

Where we're eventually going nobody knows, but I'm sure glad I switched my pension funds to cash last month! Timing Polko, timing..

BLACK MONDAY 1987

I remember 1987 well. I left a job in the City in September, heading back home from the bright lights and pavements of gold of London to start an Economics Degree. One of my senior brokers had simply told me if I wanted to last in the future that I’d be better off with something under my belt. Wise advice indeed.

So, one month later I was back in the safety of my home town (more on where that's gone in a later post), there were storms heading in from the Atlantic, literally and financially, and the UK was hit over a weekend by severe winds and rain. This caused much of the telecommunications links in the South East of the country to break apart.. But, things were about to get much much worse for a lot of people..

Come Monday (October 19), global financial markets dived in value. Everything suffered, commodities, shares, currencies. 23% was taken off the US stock market index in one day - the worst day of trading in history. In the UK many were frustrated by the lack of telecoms links to their brokers. People were stuck longer than they should have been in a declining market.

Once the dust settled it was clear that a whole range of capital values had been over-inflated relative to what the economy was really doing across most of the Western world (and Japan). Heightening unemployment and problems with currencies trading at too high values (hence export sales suffering and more job losses) meant the reversal was imminent. Thousands of job losses followed in the City, I would have probably been one of them, and the UK plunged into a period of massive bankruptcies, property repossessions and all round malaise.

Almost none of that time period’s problems exist today - though unemployment is now rising and property prices have been running at historical (hysterical?) highs.

So key question #1 today is “What is different from 20 years ago?”

The markets reliance on automated technology,

the raised speed at which end users (investors) can react,

the increased levels of information they can get their hands on,

and probably most worrying of all, the greater integration between financial markets and parts of the globe.

Here’s the link for a recap of 1987

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55hUK2DWyps&feature=related

Things aren’t all that bad yet. It’s more a grey type of Monday that we’ve just had rather than a black one.

DISMAL? HOW DARE YOU?

On the BBC's website today a small throwaway remark at the end of a piece on global economic slowdown says, "economists.. ..have also been among the winners from the credit crunch. In demand for their expertise and forecasting skills, they have gone a long way to proving that their calling is more of an important skill than a dismal science. "

You know what I think?

Read on.. next post coming up..

ONE DAY WONDER..

Point A on chart - announcement of US government take over of 2 large mortgage underwriters to "provide stability"
Point B on chart - stock markets drift back to pre-announcement levels.
Time taken - 4 trading days.



Any 1 week stock market chart says the same - by the time of writing the FTSE100 was at 5,335 points, marginally lower than the closing price of 5,362 on Thursday 4th September (i.e. one week ago) folllowing a few days of slightly better performance. The US stock indexes have followed a very similar pattern.

The much heralded support for the market provided by the US government's actions over last weekend have amounted to not a lot in market terms. True, it's early days yet.. but the market has little or no medium term memory. It reacts, it evaluates fundamental strengths and weaknesses and moves on. Fast.

When I used the phrase 'short term' in my last post I meant a little more than a week's worth of reprise.. Yet another proof that modern government's need to re-appraise what exactly their role is in the modern world.. A quick leaf through Adam Smith's 1776 Wealth of Nations and other older economics writings might provide a useful guide.. This is highly unlikely given that said books won't also provide help on how to get voted in, or how to put spin on otherwise terrible public sector performance.. For that, the government must turn to consultancy advice.

FREDDIE AND FANNIE, THE NIGHTMARE ON WALL STREET..

Today the US government seems to have provided what might be a short term rally to the financial markets - just when the savings and loan problems were largely swallowed and discounted into the lower price of shares - by announcing a takeover of two large American mortgage lenders, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae (you couldn't make it up if you tried!). My main concern is that the UK government don't see this as a rally call for themselves to do something similar in the UK!

As a consequence the UK stock exchange index has started with a 3.6% rise this Monday morning..



But, wait and see the impact over the time period it takes for the market to work out just exactly what difference a government, even the US government! can make to international capital markets??? Later chart planned for posting on Tuesday or in a week's time..

Remember the Northern Rock indecisions?

Please Gordon & Co. in the words of Grandmaster Flash 'don't do it!'

A DELIGHT TO BEHOLD!

It might not get better than this?

THE BUY TO LET MIDDLE CLASSES GET A KICK IN THE ARSE!

Today the Royal Institution for Chartered Surveyors (RICS) published a paper titled:

Government must act on property market now
RICS Proposals for the Housing Market

Now don't get me wrong, some of the content makes a lot of sense, but I take real exception to the idea that it is down to the UK government to sort out the housing market mess that this country currently finds itself in. It's not like the government have caused this particular problem now is it?

The paper calls on the Government to adopt a ‘comprehensive set of measures which will both kick start the market now and significantly improve the consumer’s experience of buying, selling and occupying property in the future’.

What on earth role of government is being thought up here to support the view that the government should be playing a part in helping consumers of the property market - when the naked greed of many consumers (and sheer ignorance of others) and the greed of the suppliers of various products should really be the centre of attention as the housing market slows down and reverses itself. Just list what you know about poor value for money housing units - sorry apartments - higher and higher risk mortgages over longer and longer terms, highly geared buy to let loans based on over-valued new build stock, the hard sell of equity release schemes and financial planning that basically ignores the individual's ability to pay to see what I mean. These individuals and organisations and not the government are largely the ones to blame for the mess we are in right now..

So, here's Polko's take on how the consumer could have significantly improved their experience of property ownership in those very same three areas mentioned by RICS in recent years:

buying: for those buying to live in, think about what you are buying rather than getting caught up in some dream of how fast the value is going to change, and above all ignore the pitfalls of 5%/10% deposit paid by the developer deals - all that they have done is got a dodgy (and sometimes not so dodgy but certainly inexperienced) surveyor to over-value the property in the first place.

selling: stop being greedy, sell the house at its true worth rather than asking too much for too little. This also goes for investor sales at auction and sales triggered by house repossesions - just look at the % unsold at auctions in the last 2 years..

occupying: if you are buying a new build property realise that it is built to a profit (the developer's not yours!) and not a price or value, and that new housing units are essentially designed to be renewed/refurbished on a faster schedule than something built in the pre-War period - hence, if you pay too much for it you are going to have to borrow again to refurbish it later (this kettle of cod hasn't even set into the woes of the housing market yet - but for evidence look at all that grey concrete, glass and fancy cladding at an apartment block near you now - not weathering very well in the UK climate is it? Then inspect the insides of a new build property and see how generally poor quality the internal wall structures, plasterboarding and finishes are.. more expenditure coming to a town near you soon - and it's not the developer that's going to pay second time around but the owner).

If you are an occupier don't be tempted by all those juicy equity release schemes until you have truly evaluated what you are going to do if the value of your home goes down or stays the same rather than increases... and keep in mind it is never an attractive option to borrow on a 20+ year loan to go on holiday or buy a depreciating asset like a new car. Your neighbours might like the new car but you're going to pay dearly for it in the long run.

Rant over. Hope you agree (at least a little bit?).