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UK PoliGAF: General election thread of LibCon Coalitionage
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avaya said:
Do you really think that these speculators are anti-government anarchists, or is that just a result of their misdeeds? Personally i do not believe that some cartel has formed with the express intention of bringing down the world economy, though that may be the end result. Quite frankly though, credit default swaps and the like are way over my head and i daresay beyond most of the posters here. I would be grateful if you could go into more detail over the threat of such instruments.
travisbickle
Member
Raydeen said:
Bail out.gif
phisheep
NeoGAF's Chief Barrister
Dambrosi said:
I've done a bit of digging on that, and it looks like there probably is a real effect.
Bit of background. Random stranger violence is actually pretty rare. the headline violence is street gangs and pub brawls - though these are probably under-reported in the BCS because (a) they're not the sort of people who answer survey questions and (b) often they don't actually think of it as a crime either. The biggest chunk of violence in the stats is domestic. There is some tendency to under-report domestic violence in the BCS because it arbitrarily caps the number of times you can be counted a victim at five a year, but it is still a big chunk.
I suspect that the availability of ASBOs and the increased use of exclusion orders by the courts will have made a real difference to the domestic violence figures. It may even have reduced the usual unwillingness of victims to give evidence as well.
electroshockwave
Member
Raydeen, do you really think that if it had been a Conservative government in power instead of Labour that they wouldn't have tagged along with America into Afghanistan and Iraq? Or that they would have somehow foreseen and prevented the financial crisis that other governments didn't?
electroshockwave said:
That's the whole point (bangs head). I'm not being pro conservative, I'm pointing out Labour were supposed to be different - I'm not fapping for Cameron, I just can't believe the teary, misty eyed reminisance for Brown I'm seeing on NeoGAF. I'm in public sector, I work fucking hard for my money, and now because of this economy disaster, aided by a man who was supposed to be a financial wizard, I could well lose my job when the savage cuts start falling. As for Afghanistan, look it's a Guardian story! http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/13/afghanistan-iraq-bill-british-military Get out of Iraq...get out of Afghanistan, but we should never have been there in the first place. Britian needs to stop thinking we can solve the worlds problems.
travisbickle said:
While most of that post is tabloid nonsense, there is probably a larger threat from home-grown terror than from that based abroad. Chris Morris was saying recently how frightening it was that since 7/7 the image of an Islamic terrorist in the UK has gone from a Bin-Laden style cave dweller to a normal bloke with a Bradford accent. Look at the pathetic attempted bombing in New York recently, the prime suspect is an American citizen. Security is so high nowadays that something like 9/11 would be extremely unlikely.
killer_clank
Member
:lol Do they really need the bit at the right?
:lol :lol
sohois said:
They are not for anything. They are not anti-government. Some are nsane but that is their public face, they are booking huge wins. The heads of PIMCO for instance have been pining for crises and will talk shit to take us there. Speculators working together to break countries is will documented over the past couple of decades. The last big game was the Asian crisis.
The vast majority are hedge funds looking for a quick buck. Speculation is a necessity in free markets but giving speculators the ability to take positions for chump change is absolute madness.
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/ji...n-create-shorts-faster-europe-can-print-money
Margin Trading
You have to understand margin trading first. When you buy stocks for £10,000 you pay £10,000 for that exposure. When you want to take that exposure on margin, of say 10%, you will only put up 10% of the £10,000 i.e. £1,000. Your initial obligation was a fraction of the physical requirement to get yourself that exposure.
Margins can go as low as 0.5%. Pay £50 for a £10,000 exposure.
This initself is not bad. Well it is, when you get into the high-frequency trading world and is a big reason for the market free-fall last Thursday (it was NOT a trader error). But that is another issue.
Naked Positions
A naked derivatives position is one where you do not own the underlying instrument. Buying/writing an option on a share by itself without owning the share is a naked position. So when speculators buy a CDS on government debt in the vast majority of cases they do not own the reference asset.
It's easy to fix a lot of this in an instant. Just push through new collateral requirements for OTC products. One of them would be no naked positions with CDS!
It has to be international though since derivatives are not beholden to boundaries. Why? A CDS only has to reference the underlying instrument it's based on. You want to bet that the risk of default on a gilt is going to go up? Fine, ask GS to novate and you have your position in place. It's between you and another party. You don't even need to touch the gilt. The best thing about it? You have a very large exposure for very little cost. You and a bunch of friends all start doing the same thing? Self-fulling prophecy.
electroshockwave
Member
Raydeen said:
OK, I understand how you might be annoyed by "misty eyed reminiscence" but I still don't see the point of saying good riddance to Brown then listing a bunch of issues where things wouldn't really have been any different under his successor.
Gary Whitta
Member
I knew this would happen :lol
killer_clank
Member
A few weeks ago the righ wing press were trying to bring up shit about Clegg, no matter how bullshit it was. Now he's Ant, from Ant and Dec.
How times change...
How times change...
Gary Whitta
Member
In case anyone missed it, The Sun is calling Cameron and Clegg the new JFK and RFK.
firehawk12
Subete no aware
Ashes1396 said:
Damn, stole my line. :lol
NekoFever
Member
Mecha_Infantry
Banned
Glad to hear one thing they agree on is getting rid of the Naitonal ID cards, AND (this is the most important part) the database of emails, SMS, phone calls and logged websites people visit 
blazinglord
Member
Well I can honestly say, what a breath of fresh air this new government is so far. I'm glad that this government is going to focus on the long-term issues and roll back the intrusive state presided over by Labour. Hopefully the new Labour leader will embrace this 'new politics' rather than oppose for opposition's sake and defend their indefensible 13 years on civil liberties.
blazinglord
Member
Well as the saying goes - lies, damned lies, and statistics. Everyone (well nearly) knows that crime statistics are not reliable. That there is some serious massaging of figures going on, that some areas are omitted from the overall count and that police officers, under pressure to meet targets, are liable to perhaps understate the true picture of crime.avaya said:
However I am not going to argue with you about statistics, but on the point of broken Britain it means far more than an alleged increase/decrease in crime. It is about the depravity of crime, it is about the lack of moral compass in sections of society that exists out of welfare dependency. Three examples - Baby P's mother, Shannon Matthews' mother and the two young boys aged 10 who raped an 8 year old girl. All these people's existence have been create out of welfare dependency culture where there is ignorance and a sense of entitlement. Broken Britain is really about the underclass that has no contributive value to society - not just massaged crime statistics that point to one direction or the other. I doubt DC's plan for the voluntary national service will do much to lower crime, nor is its intention to do so - it is about creating a more cohesive society where people have respect each other. Where the underclass can get out of the downward spiral and play a full part in British society. Whether it will work is another issue altogether, but you can't blame DC for trying. It's better than putting an ASBO order on some young hooligan and sticking him in some forgotten sink estate somewhere.
I'll readily admit I don't know a lot about economics and I'm not going to pretend otherwise, but what I don't understand is why you think you know more than the governor of the bank of England with his assembled economists behind him and HM Treasury with their array of experts? I don't think you can blame anyone who decides to take the advice of the aforementioned rather than take the economic advice of Labour politicians who are motivated for political reasons.avaya said:
Well there will always be cynics, but I think the coalition government should be given a chance. It's certainly better than the alternative anyway.Salazar said:
blazinglord said:
Someone on the London Review of Books blog was saying, not without persuasive force, that if there had been a box for 'Tory and Lib Dem Coalition, with a somewhat cautious Tory economic program and the Lib Dems as a subordinate partner angling social policy', they would have ticked it.
blazinglord
Member
How uninspiring if David Miliband wins. He will be a continuation of New Labour, when really what Labour needs is a complete makeover, to get think tanks involved for new ideas, have a completely new manifesto word for word. I might be proved wrong, but I don't think Miliband has the charisma nor does he have the advantage of being *new* to allow him to reshape the party like Blair in 1994 or Cameron in 2005.PJV3 said:
phisheep
NeoGAF's Chief Barrister
PJV3 said:
Well, that's welcome of course, but Labour has lost a lot more than it realises here. It has lost trust. It is all very well saying now that they will repeal those laws, but it isn't all that long ago - a few weeks - they were saying it was essential for our security, that they knew best having blatted this stuff through against the will of Parliament, against the good of the people and with the complicity of those enticed by shady backroom deals. Why should anyone believe them this time round?
I don't take any pleasure in saying that. Labour has done a lot of good things in the past (NHS, Open University, Bank of England independence, Human Rights Act, Freedom of Information Act to name but a few), but on civil liberties they have lost it big time.
And I can't at the moment see anything but bad coming from this leadership contest - being held, as it will be, against a background of deep cuts in government expenditure, probably public sector strikes and all sorts of hoohah about supporting government employees in preference to all the rest of us including the very poorest.
My grandmother, who was a properly progressive Labour councillor in the postwar period, will be spinning in her grave.
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=21253817#post21253817
new thread is up. still work in progress.
new thread is up. still work in progress.
Nicktendo86
Member
Raydeen said:
I always knew IDS was a dirty bastard.
Gary Whitta
Member
:lol Could someone please cut out Cameron's head and put a colored line around it?Ghost said:
dr_octagon
Banned
Subliminal
Member
dr_octagon said:
:lol :lol
Gary Whitta
Member
LOL, thank you!
Subliminal
Member
Bye Bye Election Thread!
Gary Whitta said:
Do the Sun and Sky get together to figure out 'their line'? I think it was Adam Boulton who came up with that bullshit.
I liked Clegg's tie today. Green...the mix of blue and yellow. At this rate, the Lib Dems will fold themselves into some kind of new conservative party by the end of these five years.
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