It's not big and it's not clever, it's just a Brit in Hong Kong writiing (mainly) about Hong Kong
Paul Pong, the SCMP’s brilliant stock picker, has come up with a new prediction:
Though the global economy looks gloomy, the stock market may rebound first. I predict the HSI will rebound to 25,000 next year, though that may sound unrealistic given the current sentiments.
Unrealistic? Of course not. With Paul Pong’s record I’m sure it must be true!
Watching Cable TV news tonight is franky a bizarre experience. Gordon Brown seems to be the hero of the day, and thus we get to see the highlights of his political life, including the time his best mate Tony Blair bought him an ice cream (I guess you had to be there…).
Just a few weeks ago the very same Gordon Brown was the most unpopular prime minister in the history of prime ministers (well, at least since Tony Blair, or maybe John Major), so this is rather an unexpected development. I’m sure he can find plenty of ways to make himself unpopular again before the next election, so I hope he enjoys it whilst it lasts.
The British plan will result in the government owning about 60% of RBS and 40% of the merged Lloyds TSB and HBOS:
BBC business editor Robert Peston said the announcement would “count as perhaps the most extraordinary day in British banking history” and was “an absolute humiliation” for the banks.
Management shake-up
As part of the banks’ announcements:
- Lloyds and HBOS said they had renegotiated their merger, reducing the number of Lloyds TSB shares that HBOS shareholders will receive.
- RBS said chief executive Fred Goodwin was quitting with immediate effect – without a severance pay-off. He will be replaced by British Land boss Stephen Hester. RBS chairman Tom McKillop is to retire.
- HBOS chief executive Andy Hornby and chairman Lord Dennis Stevenson said they would stand down from their posts.
- RBS and Lloyds TSB/HBOS will return mortgage and small-business lending to 2007 levels, which is much more than they are currently lending.
Ho hum. The curse of ABN Amro strikes again – Fortis had to be rescued last week, and now it’s RBS. How sad it is to see bankers humiliated…
Surely Braun are having a laugh when they claim to offer a 2 year guarantee on their Oral B battery-operated toothbrushes . In my experience they become hopelessly unreliable after only a few months of usage. Yes, you can fiddle around with them and prolong their life for a few more weeks, but after that you might as well throw them away.
I console myself with the fact that if you subtract the cost of the brushhead and the two batteries, the tube of plastic and the motor don’t really cost that much.
One day I’ll keep the receipt and try to return one of them when it stops working after 8 months. No, I won’t, will I? I’d probably have to return it to a Service Centre in Mong Kok or Kowloon Bay and queue up to take it back, and then go back and queue up again to collect it again when they’ve repaired it. Too much trouble, lah.
The Sunday Morning Post has been running a column on the back page that was supposed to offer investment advice. It’s written by Paul Pong of Pegasus Fund Managers, and features a hypothetical portfolio of Hong Kong and China equities.
Today they announced that the column is to cease because “the amount of trading in the portfolio has increased substantially and this could create conflicts of interest with his obligations as a professional fund manager.”
So, nothing to do with the fact that the value of the portfolio is down 44.19% in the ten months that the column has been running?
I know nothing about typhoons, so can anyone explain why the Observatory think that this one is heading for Hong Kong? Surely it could end up anywhere?
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that I already have a device that can record digital TV. It’s the Now TV/DVB combined set-top box that can receive Now HD and terrestrial digital channels. All you need to do is add an external disk through the USB connector, and off you go.
Admittedly the functionality is rather basic and the user interface is fairly horrible, but it does the job. The most annoying feature is that you can only set it to record something from the EPG, and that is only available 7 days ahead. You can set it to record at the same time every week, but it’s not clever enough to work out if the time changes, and there is no facility to add a few minutes at the start or end of the programme – and there appears to be no way to amend the start or end time manually. So my reccording of Saturday morning’s Presidential debate ends before the programme ended.
It does keep the subtitles with the programme, and the quality appears to be the same as the original (which is it as it should be with a digital device). It’s also possible to record one channel whilst simultaneously watching another digital terrestrial channel in the same frequency range (e.g. TVB Pearl and ATV World) or anything on Now TV.
The weirdest limitation is that it’s not possible to record programmes from Now TV. Seems kinda obvious that a Now box with recording capability would allow you to record Now channels, but no that definitely isn’t included.
What they are offering is a facility to record programmes on to a central server to watch later, but this currently only applies to their own News & Business News channels, and EPL games. I’m having trouble trying to imagine why anyone would want to record news or business news, but the facility to record an EPL game could be attractive – though some games are already available as part of their on-demand service, which is bundled with Now Sports, whereas this new facility costs HK$15/month.
Let me know when you have it available for other channels, and then I’ll consider it.
I’m still recovering from the shock of discovering that government has done something sensible for once.
They have increased taxi fares for short journeys and reduced them for long journeys, as The Standard reported on Wednesday:
Passengers who take short- or medium-distance trips – about 80 percent of the total number – will pay on average about 7.8 percent more while those traveling distances in excess of 12 kilometers could save up to 20 percent.
This adjustment follows one in February, when the government raised the flagfall from HK$15 to HK$16. The new flagfall, effective on November 30, will be HK$18 while the incremental charge will increase from HK$1.40 to HK$1.50 up to a distance of 9 kilometers, when the total fare reaches HK$70.50. After 9km, the incremental charge will be only HK$1.
In real terms, a trip of 4km will cost HK$33 against the current HK$30.
How bizarre that they can write this story without actually mentioning that the flagfall covers the first 2km, and the “incremental charge” is per 200m. Oh, and on longer journeys you can save more than 20% (though not much more). Ho hum…
It makes sense to re-structure the fares because so-called “gangs” offer discounts on longer journeys – though technically they are breaking the law by doing this. If taxi drivers are willing to offer discounts on longer journeys, it makes perfect sense for the government to take this into account.
Will people who currently use taxis for short journeys really stop using them because they have to pay a few dollars extra? I doubt it.
Today’s SCMP has a lengthy Bloomberg story about the credit-rating weasels – Bringing Down Wall Street as Ratings Let Loose Subprime Scourge by Elliot Blair Smith:
“I view the ratings agencies as one of the key culprits,” says Joseph Stiglitz, 65, the Nobel laureate economist at Columbia University in New York. “They were the party that performed that alchemy that converted the securities from F-rated to A-rated. The banks could not have done what they did without the complicity of the ratings agencies.”
Driven by competition for fees and market share, the New York-based companies stamped out top ratings on debt pools that included $3.2 trillion of loans to homebuyers with bad credit and undocumented incomes between 2002 and 2007. As subprime borrowers defaulted, the companies have downgraded more than three-quarters of the structured investment pools known as collateralized debt obligations issued in the last two years and rated AAA.
Without those AAA ratings, the gold standard for debt, banks, insurance companies and pension funds wouldn’t have bought the products. Bank writedowns and losses on the investments totaling $523.3 billion led to the collapse or disappearance of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch and compelled the Bush administration to propose buying $700 billion of bad debt from distressed financial institutions.
Honestly, what is the point of having credit-rating agencies if they do this kind of stuff?
The second part of the Bloomberg story is here:
The world’s two largest bond-analysis providers repeatedly eased their standards as they pursued profits from structured investment pools sold by their clients, according to company documents, e-mails and interviews with more than 50 Wall Street professionals. It amounted to a “market-share war where criteria were relaxed,” says former S&P Managing Director Richard Gugliada.
“I knew it was wrong at the time,” says Gugliada, 46, who retired from the McGraw-Hill Cos. subsidiary in 2006 and was interviewed in May near his home in Staten Island, New York. “It was either that or skip the business. That wasn’t my mandate. My mandate was to find a way. Find the way.”
More great thinkers in the SCMP’s marvellous Talkback column:
As a domestic helper gets a holiday on Sunday, if the Monday is a statutory public holiday the helper gets two days off. However when that happens, who does the cleaning for those two days? It means the house remains in a mess for that period of time.
The Mid-Autumn Festival last Monday was for the Chinese community to celebrate and I do not understand why the foreign domestic helpers should be allowed to go on holiday.
I hope some employers will join me in calling for this extra holiday to be cancelled.
T. Narain, Sham Shui Po
Actually, T Narain, you can give your helper Saturday off if you wish. Then she could spend Sunday making your apartment spotless for you.
Or why not just clean up your own mess?
Recently I bought a bottle of Snapple Iced Lemon Tea, thinking that it really was natural (as stated on the label).
Then I read the ingredients. The second item (after water) is High Fructose Corn Syrup, the ingredient which is widely blamed for making the population of the United States so obese.
From Wikipedia:
The process by which HFCS is produced was first developed by Richard O. Marshall and Earl R. Kooi in 1957. The industrial production process was refined by Dr. Y. Takasaki at Agency of Industrial Science and Technology of Ministry of International Trade and Industry of Japan in 1965-1970. HFCS was rapidly introduced in many processed foods and soft drinks in the US over the period of about 1975–1985.
So not really very natural at all, then.
I found this rather amusing chart at GraphJam (see right).
Ordinary Gweilo 