In the words of one of my former school masters, we are past the worst. We can look forward to longer days and shorter nights now as star gazers and people who read their daily horoscopes will know that at 12.04 GMT on Sunday 21st December 2008, the Sun reached its southernmost point in the sky or winter solstice (in the northern hemisphere) and is now on its slow journey back north. Days will be more or less equal at the Vernal equinox 11.43 GMT on 20th March 2009 when the Sun passes through the plane of the ecliptic and we are then on the run into Summer. More of this stuff here at the National Maritime Museum website http://www.nmm.ac.uk/explore/astronomy-and-time/time-facts/equinoxes-and-solstices#solstice Just the sort of stuff for a pub quiz and a very interesting place to visit in the Christmas break.
Earlier winters with no central heating, street lighting, cars or supermarkets hardly bear thinking about as if you had not stored enough food for the winter, some of your family would not survive. Not much excuse would have been needed for a celebration and some of our Christmas festivals e.g. Yule date from a pre-Christian era.
Back in the present time and season of office parties, imagination has never been in short supply and the Christmas bash at in2 Consulting Christmas took us on the water in the form of a DUKW tour
rather than under it when we went to Brussels via Eurostar last year http://www.georgeemsden.co.uk/2007/12/mannekens-woodpeckers/
- 00 prompt and the 66 year old DUKW turns up at our offices in Shoreditch. London DUKW tours have a fleet of 6 http://www.londonducktours.co.uk/ dating from WW2 and are considering getting another one. Our journey through the City and West End is enlivened by a few jokes and stuff we did not know like Green Park in the West End is so called because it has no flowers (only trees) and was once a mass burial ground for victims of the plague. The entrance ramp into the water itself is next to our SIS (MI6) service HQ from which we can see their “5″ cousins on the other side of the river at Thames House. The HQ of the latter used to be above Euston Square tube station and as my guide at the time told me, one of the worst kept secrets in London. The Thames House in the BBC series Spooks is actually the Freemasons’ Hall in Great Queen Street round the corner from Covent Garden. My April blog http://www.georgeemsden.co.uk/2008/04/itchy-wings-sticky-susan/ mentioned that the feature film Green Zone set in Iraq was being filmed there, and more of it was being filmed three weeks ago when I went to a lodge meeting.
For borrowers there is some good news as rates ease slowly with fixed rates appearing at 3.89% and 3.69% for example. Nationwide has reintroduced a 95% mortgage but the rate is high. Lending criteria do not seem to get any easier with Abbey tightening their Affordability calculator parameters and withdrawing their Fast Track facility where no proof of income was needed below a certain LTV level. Doing mortgages at present is rather reminiscent of “work to rule” we used to hear about in the days before New Labour. All this will continue to depress house prices as most people pay for most of their property cost with borrowed money. The long term values can be guessed quite easily – multiply your earnings by say, 3 and that will give you a pretty good idea of how much you will be able to borrow and of course what price property you can afford. Even worse, a retired building society manager I met at the Bank of England last month informed me that the multiple with some lenders used to be 2 and half times earnings!
The higher Stamp Duty rates introduced by the Government still affect most property owners and of course, Home Informations Packs are basically a tax on property buyers. The effect is rather like pre-Keynesian economics where the perceived economic wisdom of the time was for Governments to increase taxes in a depression which made the 1930s one much worse. This was in the days of the Gold Standard and the UK was one of the first countries to leave saving itself a lot of economic pain as a result. The UK Chancellor of the Exchequer who increased taxes then was Winston Churchill who as my economics lecturer was fond of saying, was The Worst Chancellor we ever had!
History will judge if he continues to deserve this mantle as British forces in Afghanistan suffer 4 times the rate of casualties as American troops there, as our troops are not given enough resources to do the job http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/defence/3884829/Afghanistan-British-suffer-four-times-as-many-casualties-as-Americans.html something the head of the SAS resigned over recently.
One money raising idea the Government has not tried might be to allow drivers to BUY off their penalty points on their licence say, for minor offences – such as a being few miles over the limit at 1-o-clock in the morning when no one was around and no one was in any danger?? This could be very popular and might allow some people who need their licences for their jobs to keep them?
Thanks to a Daily Telegraph reader for doing an Emperor’s New Clothes job and pointing out the obvious regarding state pensions. The Bernard Madoff hedge fund scandal has been likened to a gigantic Ponzi scheme where today’s money going in pays for the return of the people in already. This is exactly the way public sector and the State Pensions are funded (sometimes called the Pay As You Go system) prompting the question, is the Government is running the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time?
Merry Christmas!