Barclays Libor Fixing

The news of the fixing of interest rates for lending between banks is hardly surprising given their track record. It is hard to trace a direct link to how it affects everyday finance, which is why the BBC has also bolstered the story with aggressively marketed interest rate fix loans which have turned out to be bad for some small businesses.

There seems to be more of an attitude in government to do something about this, which is refreshing - although may lead to nothing. The injustice is that you would go to prison if this was done in any other line of business - it is after all straight fraud. But somehow we always excuse the banks, because they both help set the rate and also bet on the rate there is an obvious conflict of interest.

I think the individuals involved are probably suffering enough because internally the banks will deal with them. I would like to see a roughing up of the senior management - to remind them they earn those salaries for a good reason, and it is they who set the rules of how business is conducted. They will claim they knew little of the fraud, which maybe brings the charge down to negligence while running a bank.

Beckham Olympics

Well perhaps the first own goal of the Olympics. I think even the most ardent anti Beckhamite would recognise he probably deserves a place as an over age player in the Olympic squad. But we seem to have the misconception that we want to actually win at football anyway. It is one of those sports that should never be in the Olympics, and we have just demonstrated in Euro 2012 that we are nothing more than also rans...

So why not select Beckham, he has a world wide brand that would attract interest and is still serious about playing. It's not an event we are expecting to win, and perhaps it would help shift a few tickets.

Tax Efficiency

It is hard not to feel a little sympathy for Jimmy Carr, caught using a dubious tax efficiency scheme - having himself used low tax paying corporate as part of his comedy routine. Giving us a sense he was "one of us", when in fact he was at the same game.

But the lesson learned here is to simplify the tax system, the simpler it is the less loop holes you will have to close! It was wrong of Cameron to name him directly, as he has found out many of his conservative party donors are doing similar or worse - and in the interest of fairness they should be named too.

Likening tax to a moral issue is highly dubious though, the real annoyance here is the rich being able to use mechanisms that are never available to the ordinary person - who ends up footing most of the tax bill.

Book read: Life on Air by David Attenborough

An interesting account of Attenborough's life in broadcasting. What I did not appreciate was his pioneering work that saw him join the BBC at the very outset of television. Everything was being learnt from scratch, and the fact that wildlife was seen as a thing that television could do well was interesting considering how primitive the equipment was.

The book shows him moving on from commissioning programmes to presenting them it all feels like a steady transition and Attenborough probably makes light of how difficult the switch was.

He clearly has a good understanding of the technical side of television right from the early days, and from that had an instinct for what could be achieved in terms of filming. These were interesting accounts and really reminded you of how primitive the technology was (but of course at the time was high technology)

Encrypted Partitions

I am very late to the game here, I've being using gnugpg for years to encrypt files - but only recently have I looked at encryting entire partitions, for example on an external drive.

Having seen it is common place on Ubuntu/Fedora for internal drives on operating system install. But for a seperate drive it is easy too:

cryptsetup -y luksFormat /dev/sdb1

This formats the partition ready for use with LUKS a standard for encrypted filesystems. This will prompt for the passphrase to access the volume.

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb1 secretfs

This associates the file /dev/mapper/secretfs to the device, through which encrytion will occur. The passphrase will be prompted for.

mkfs -t ext3 /dev/mapper/secretfs

To create the ext3 filesystem.

mount /dev/mapper/secretfs /media/disk

This mounts the newly created volume.

All very neat and simple, do that on Windows!

Peer to Peer Lending

With UK banks restricting lending, partly because of reserve contraints, and mostly because they are sitting on lots of bad debt that they do not want to admit - I think it is time for governments to look at other forms of lending to provide some much needed competition.

Peer lending has been around for a few years and it is an obvious choice for cutting out the banking middle man. It just need some extra backing from governments to push it more mainstream.



It seems too good to be true, a borrower pays less interest than a regular bank loan, and a saver receives more interest than if it were sitting in the best paying savings account (they are accepting some extra risk though).

Diamond Jubilee

Well an interesting few days, overall I think it went well. The BBC have been slated for putting on what amounted to a "6 hour One Show" for the Thames barge, which lacked any useful commentary. But that aside it went off well even if the weather did deteriorate toward the end.

The concert outside Buckingham Palace was also well done. It's unlikely we'll see this kind of thing again so there is the feeling of it being once in a lifetime and maybe once in several generations.

These occasions also serve to remind us how much affection the royalty are held in. Despite a bleak 1990s they have now got a convincing line up for future generations, Charles probably remains the one question mark - his reign may test out loyalty again depending on how it is handled.

Facebook Economics

After a couple of weeks of trading, it's nice to sit down and work out how they are doing

The shares have taken quite a battering, and confidence is down.

There are 2.14 billion shares issued.

$38 per share, $81.32 billion market cap.

This was an incredible floation price, remember it is just a website people use for free, with advertisers try to target those people, and with Facebook every so often changing the privacy rules to try and make it more of a business proposition.

$27 per share, $57.58 billion market cap.

That is a loss of $23.74 billion, 30% of the flotation price. Maybe now things have found their true level, but I cannot see how this business can justify much more than a 10-20 billion value (and even that is pushing the imagination).

That would imply a share price of $9...

Budget U turns

Some of the more ridiculous micro management in the recent budget have been withdrawn amongst all the noise of the Jubilee celebrations. The dead in the water pasty tax, the ill thought out charitable donations limitations.

In all gives the feel of a government not thinking things through, and perhaps over pre-occupied with things that do not help the country - smoothing through the News Corp take over of Sky springs to mind.

So is it time to start remembering why you got put into power, forget the short termism and self interest and perhaps do something that the country might remember you for!

Interview with Hart-Dyke

About the sinking of HMS Coventry in 1982, and life after.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/falklandislands/9272406/David-Hart-Dyke-the-captain-of-HMS-Coventry-recalls-the-horror-of-his-ship-sinking-in-the-Falklands-War-It-was-black-with-people-on-fire....html