Mots perdus

https://on.ft.com/2PNZrYD

Melanesian 25 minutes ago

Virtually none of the salaries in professional jobs have changed materially in a decade. I started on 27k in London at a big four grad in 2012. This was virtually unchanged since 2005 and it’s still less than 30k. Yet my rent for comparable property has gone from 700 to 1400 in the six years since I graduated.

I now make 71k base salary which is the same as I’d be expected to make in my current role as someone in 2001 In London per my research. Kind of takes the shine of the favourite stealth brag of everyone i work with over 35, that they have “done well out of property”. Well well done you mini Warren Buffett you! Well done indeed!

https://www.ft.com/content/639ff0de-ba92-11e8-94b2-17176fbf93f5

PwC, the accountancy firm, plans to hire significantly more graduates and school leavers outside London in response to growing concerns among job applicants about the cost of living in the UK capital and high student debt. Kevin Ellis, chairman of the firm, which is the UK’s largest private sector graduate recruiter, said on Monday that he expected roughly half of the workforce to be based outside London “by the end of this month”.

https://hbr.org/2009/11/is-it-fair-to-blame-fair-value-accounting-for-the-financial-crisis

When the debt markets froze during the fall of 2008, FASB released a staff paper clarifying the application of fair value accounting to illiquid markets. That paper emphasized the flexibility of standard 157 and made companies aware that they could reclassify trading assets from Level 2 to Level 3 as markets became more illiquid. FASB also stressed that companies did not have to use prices from forced or distressed sales to value illiquid assets.

However, these rulings did not provide enough comfort for bankers watching the market value of their toxic assets plummet; they complained loudly to their elected representatives, who threatened to legislate accounting standards unless FASB provided more relief. As a result, in April 2009 FASB quickly proposed and adopted a new rule, which detailed criteria for determining when a market is illiquid enough to qualify for mark-to-model valuation.

The rule was designed to allow more securities to be valued by bank models instead of by market indicators. On the same day, FASB issued yet another rule on how to account for securities when they were permanently impaired. The rule said that only the credit-loss portion of such impairments would affect a bank’s income and regulatory capital, with the rest (such as unrealized losses related to illiquidity) going into the special account for other comprehensive income.

https://www.ft.com/content/c85b9792-aad1-11e8-94bd-cba20d67390c

Beyond finance, it seems ever clearer that protection of intellectual property has gone too far. Also, why not shift taxation on to land? Why are we letting the taxation of capital collapse? And why are we not trying to revitalise antitrust?

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/09/the-war-on-raspberries/

My whole adult life has been defined by the changes initiated by Thatcher and continued by Tories and New Labour. It is hard to remember now the world where your employer could not, by law, sack you just because they wanted to, and where you could get state protection from rapacious landlords charging unfair rents.

https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-news/cornwall-second-poorest-region-northern-1977843

Northern Europe's top ten poorest regions

West Wales UK

Cornwall UK

Durham and Tees Valley UK

Lincolnshire UK

South Yorkshire UK

Shropshire and Staffordshire UK

Lancashire UK

Northern Ireland UK

Hainaut Belgium

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/09/01/tadaos-war-memory-manga/

Until the late Sixties, such informal labor markets (known as yoseba) were also where blood banks like the one where Tadao worked went to recruit when supplies were low. They were where major corporations like Toyota scouted men to work their assembly lines, usually on grueling shifts and under dangerous conditions for terrible pay.

Corrupt day-labor markets were also where the fledgling nuclear power industry and their yakuza go-betweens went to find short-term janitorial and maintenance workers, to be shipped off to places like the Fukushima Daiichi station (already notorious as a dirty and dangerous facility in the 1970s) to wipe up radioactive spills and remove radioactive corrosion from valves and vents, so that Japan’s nuclear power plants were clean enough to pass inspection and reopen with tolerable efficiency and without too great a risk of accident.

https://on.ft.com/2x8JeoX

Maybe the report should look at the quality of the existing social housing stock. Loads suffer with damp and are in a far worse state of repair. The problem is complex but ultimately comes down to low levels of housing benefit and majority of benefit tenants being a pain in the neck.

I do not allow housing benefit tenants, unless I brought the property with them in it. HB tenants spend too much time in the house wearing out the carpets and anything else they can wear out. Professional people in my experience spend most of the time working and are out most weekends. Carpets not worn out and they pay more rent.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6620825-beckoning-frontiers

Mariner Eccles, "Beckoning frontiers", 1951 (Knopf)

https://discussion.theguardian.com/comment-permalink/120230245

MadriMaraff 3h ago 3 4

The problem Labour has is that whatever one thinks of Jeremy Corbyn, I do not hear him trying to win over the middle-class, leafy suburbs . If you look at where the battleground, swing constituencies that decide elections it's places like these. It's great that JC wants to improve the lot of the poor, but it will be at the expense of the better-off. And decreasing the gap between rich and poor doesn't just involve raising one group without lowering another.

https://discussion.theguardian.com/comment-permalink/120231565

wilfulsprite 2h ago 7 8

For those who push Blairism because 'he gave us the minimum wage': Like tuition fees, the minimum wage was one of the biggest cons pushed on us by Blair, because it was set far too low (in order to protect big business, as usual). It was set at £3.60 an hour, at a time when factory and warehouse workers were earning £5-7 an hour, giving plenty of room for wages to be forced down when the mass surplus of labour occurred. The latter also caused the disappearance of overtime, shift allowances, attendance allowances and unsociable hours pay, and drove full-time workers into welfare dependence and zero hours contracts.

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2018/09/06/a-plan-for-a-new-economy/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Fleet

At this stage, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Alan Brooke wrote:

ttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/28/housing-crisis-not-solved-speculation-alone-ippr-land-prices

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/28/housing-crisis-not-solved-speculation-alone-ippr-land-prices

https://www.ft.com/content/c85b9792-aad1-11e8-94bd-cba20d67390c

https://www.ft.com/content/d27b000e-6810-11e8-8cf3-0c230fa67aec