Making the news today....

[kevinjohnsonmbe]

3 hours ago, Mark J said:

Yes. If it was made apparrent that most nannas are going to die as a result of inactivity.

"Take it on the chin"

Who shall we call upon to govern us, now that all the kings are gone...

I won't vouch for the authenticy since it's just a copy of a FB post but it might be worth a thought...

 

 

[kevinjohnsonmbe]

[AHPP]

On top of donnk's sadly accurate explanation of the farce of fiat, the Persimmon shitboxes are performing a second nefarious function.

The government help-to-buy scheme lends prospective buyers 5% of the cost of the house so they only have to find 5% themselves to make a 10% deposit. Now you'd think a party contributing 5% of the cost of the house would get  5% of the equity in it. Not here. The government puts in 5% of the cost but gets 20% of the equity. If people default on their mortgages, the houses will be repossessed and sold and the government will make a tidy profit. Everybody knows there's a house price crash coming. The government positioning themselves like this (and with taxvictims' money remember) is no mistake.

One might even be suspicious of some large newsworthy event that puts a lot of people into financial difficulty; the sort of financial difficulty that might make it hard to pay your mortgage...

Edited April 20, 2020 by AHPP

[donnk]

4 minutes ago, AHPP said:

On top of donnk's sadly accurate explanation of the farce of fiat, the Persimmon shitboxes are performing a second nefarious function.

The government help-to-buy scheme lends prospective buyers 5% of the cost of the house so they only have to find 5% themselves to make a 10% deposit. Now you'd think a party contributing 5% of the cost of the house would get  5% of the equity in it. Not here. The government puts in 5% of the cost but gets 20% of the equity. If people default on their mortgages, the houses will be repossessed and sold and the government will make a tidy profit. Everybody knows there's a house price crash coming. This is no mistake.

One might even be suspicious of some large newsworthy event that puts a lot of people into financial difficulty; the sort of financial difficulty that might make it hard to pay your mortgage...

not quite. The Help to buy is a straight %, so if they loan 5% they take a 5% stake, 10% same etc.

 

There is no interest payments on the H2B element until the 6th year after which it gets increases by the previous 12 months RPI + 1%.

 

When the property is sold/remortgaged the gov takes its 20% equity at current market rates, assuming house prices increase they make a tidy profit. All 100% secured so they cant lose.

 

Again this is all made up magic money that only exists when the driod at the bank presses 'approved' on the mortgage application.

[AHPP]

9 minutes ago, donnk said:

not quite. The Help to buy is a straight %, so if they loan 5% they take a 5% stake, 10% same etc.

 

There is no interest payments on the H2B element until the 6th year after which it gets increases by the previous 12 months RPI + 1%.

 

When the property is sold/remortgaged the gov takes its 20% equity at current market rates, assuming house prices increase they make a tidy profit. All 100% secured so they cant lose.

 

Again this is all made up magic money that only exists when the driod at the bank presses 'approved' on the mortgage application.

The 20% when sold is what I described when the banks repossess and sell. Unless I've missed some other subtlety?

[kevinjohnsonmbe]

20 hours ago, openspaceman said:

How come you keep dredging this figure up?

 

Because it is entirely relevant to understand the scale of some salaries in an organisation which is constantly bemoaning it's critical underfunding.  

 

20 hours ago, openspaceman said:

 

There must be many organisations where the upper 4% earn more than £100k.

 

Absolutely, in private enterprise financial reward is often directly tagged to personal performance and I have no particular beef with that.  The NHS, it seems, like many public sector closed-shop cartels, appears to ignore, reward or transfer incompetence rather than thrashing it out.

 

20 hours ago, openspaceman said:

 

Also where does it say consultants are not in that figure?

 

I'm not so sure it does...

 

20 hours ago, openspaceman said:

 

I was at school with  brain surgeon who made far more than that out of the NHS before he spent half of his time in america. Staunch labour supporter too though he has ghosted me for these last twenty years.  It's a good example you present - was trained, equipped and gained considerable experience and expertise at public expense then sold out to a higher bidder.  Why is there no lock-in?

 

20 hours ago, openspaceman said:

 

My old boss drew a few million out of the company while I was there and that was quite a few percent of the gross turnover.  Private company?  Private business....

 

20 hours ago, openspaceman said:

 

I've never earned or made much money but then I've never understood the quest for so much more, especially when I see what wealthy people spend it on but I can see a problem of governance when  measures to control pollution depend on fiscal controls which are a burden on those with the mean income and a triviality to the wealthy that are responsible for much higher levels of consumption than average.  We can agree there!

 

10 hours ago, openspaceman said:

I cannot see how you come to that view by mentioning the earnings of 50,000 people.

50k bods x £100k x 10 years + end salary pension how many hospitals is that?  I mention it because it is not an insignificant yearly total and I think it would come as quite a surprise to many. 

Don't get me wrong, if it truly is performance based, and somebody can show some illustration of VfM, I'm in, happy days, where do I sign up for approval?  What troubles me however, is how do we know these people are worth their salt (not so much the doctors but the non medical chummies)  

 

10 hours ago, openspaceman said:

 

What are you saying:

 

Employees of a state financed organisation should not earn as much as £100k/annum?  No, I'm saying a fairly significant number DO.

 

10 hours ago, openspaceman said:

No one should earn £100k/annum?  No, didn't say that either.

 

10 hours ago, openspaceman said:

 

The demand for health care will always go up and as the science of healthcare gains more knowledge then treatments and procedures will become available and will cost more.

 

As populations age there will be more demand for care.

 

The funding for the NHS is constrained by what the economy can afford, so is related to earning and income tax plus other demands. It's no good saying we should grow the cake bigger so everyone should have a bigger share and hence personal contributions to healthcare should go up, this was Thatcher's  mistake, the bigger the cake the increase in slice the rich get and the rich do not spend their money for the benefit of the rest.  I kind of lost where you were going with that...

 

10 hours ago, openspaceman said:

 

We know there is incompetence in the NHS but I see incompetence in many people I have to deal with in other industries. The NHS seems to be particularly incompetent in IT systems but how can it be changed, it's a behemoth?  That's the crux of my point really, it's a behemoth with some sort of halo which no one dare not bow down to.  It's like sacrilege to speak out.  It's like we know it already has some considerable 'issues' but it's just easier to throw more money into the ever growing pot rather than seek some sort of evolution.

 

10 hours ago, openspaceman said:

 

Talk of rebuilding it from the ground up ignores the billions of man hours that underpin the monster, I think Microsoft faced the same problem when updating windows such that windows 10 probably still has code from windows 95 in it somewhere.

 

10 hours ago, openspaceman said:

 

What this crisis shows is that we don't value the things we need, when we think we have enough, over the things we want, which is insatiable, and why salesmen, politicians, entrepreneurs etc. earn more than dustmen, nurses, care workers etc.  In large part I find nothing to disagree with there...

On a closing note then, and to link to your final paragraph about valuing things, and to hang with the 50k figure that I seem to be obsessed with....

 

ONS figures for 17/18 recorded 50k excess winter cold deaths in the UK.  50k (predominantly old, poor folk) died because they couldn't put the heating on.

 

No fanfare, no media outcry, no COBRA meeting....  Nuffin.

 

Just strikes me as odd that's all.

 

Excess winter mortality in England and Wales - Office for National Statistics

WWW.ONS.GOV.UK

---

Excess winter mortality in England and Wales, by region, sex, age group and local authority.

 

[eggsarascal]

Trig, is it true that oil companies are paying people to take oil away, due to them having nowhere to store it due to this virus?

 

If so why are they still drilling?

 

Laimans terms, please.

[Toad]

42 minutes ago, eggsarascal said:

Trig, is it true that oil companies are paying people to take oil away, due to them having nowhere to store it due to this virus?

 

If so why are they still drilling?

 

Laimans terms, please.

A large problem will be at the refineries, you can't just stop them and restart again when there is more demand. The lack of petrochemical consumption will mean that the refineries will have been filling storage tanks but will be reaching the end of their capacity. In the UK tankers can be used as extra floating storage, but this again is only finite.

 

I think the problem in the states is also to do with futures trading where people buy and sell barrels but only really on paper, they don't have anywhere to put the oil just rely on the fact they can sell it on between ordering and delivery, now they don't have anywhere for it to go.

[trigger_andy]

3 hours ago, Toad said:

A large problem will be at the refineries, you can't just stop them and restart again when there is more demand. The lack of petrochemical consumption will mean that the refineries will have been filling storage tanks but will be reaching the end of their capacity. In the UK tankers can be used as extra floating storage, but this again is only finite.

 

I think the problem in the states is also to do with futures trading where people buy and sell barrels but only really on paper, they don't have anywhere to put the oil just rely on the fact they can sell it on between ordering and delivery, now they don't have anywhere for it to go.

This about sums it up.  

 

West Texas Intermediate futures are trading at -$38 a barrel, which is astounding really. I dont really understand all the futures trading to be honest. But its not looking good at all.

 

Brent Crude, which covers the UK and Norwegian oil produced is still trading at $25 a barrel. Im not sure what the knock on effect will be over here? 

 

We've been really busy in Q1 for installing new Wells here in Norway with Q2 getting even more busy and Q3 & Q4 looking to be very busy for us too. Lots of projects for Drilling on-going and its dificult to just suddenly stop. Semi-Submersible and Jack-Up Rigs are on 1 year and 2 year contracts. Sometimes just 1,2 or 3 well contracts though. The Rig Im on just now is rented by the oil company for $350,000 a day, its on a two year contract. All the equipment to Complete this years Well's have been bought and at least partially paid for. I'll assume its simply cheaper to continue operations and hope we come out the other side of this soon. 

 

Interesting times for sure. 

 

Edit, I was just reading this; 

 

 

How did you end up with negative oil prices today? This happens when a physical futures contract find no buyers close to or at expiry. Let me explain what that means:

1. A physical contract such as the NYMEX WTI has a delivery point at Cushing, OK, & date, in this occurrence May. So people who hold the contract at the end of the trading window have to take physical delivery of the oil they bought on the futures market. This is very rare.

2. It means that in the last few days of the futures trading cycle, (which is tomorrow for this one) speculative or paper futures positions start rolling over to the next contract. This is normally a pretty undramatic affair.

3. What is happening today is trades or speculators who had bought the contract are finding themselves unable to resell it, and have no storage booked to get delivered the crude in Cushing, OK, where the delivery is specified in the contract.

 

 

. This means that all the storage in Cushing is booked, and there is no price they can pay to store it, or they are totally inexperienced in this game and are caught holding a contract they did not understand the full physical aspect of as the time clock expires

 

5. The contract roll and liquidity crunch that made the extreme sell-off today possible but it DOESN’T necessarily represent futures market conditions: NYMEX June settled today at $21.13

6. The June contract is not out of the woods either: today’s action indicate that physical oil markets at Cushing are not in good shape and that storage is getting very full.

7. A decline of over 15% in the June contract price points to real worries that the physical stress will continue to reverberate, and will force a lot more production shutdowns during May than the ones announced so far.

8. So today negative prices are the reflection of dire market conditions for producers, with the hope that demand restart before the middle of May and that the June contract does not face the same fate.

Edited April 21, 2020 by trigger_andy

[donnk]

9 hours ago, AHPP said:

The 20% when sold is what I described when the banks repossess and sell. Unless I've missed some other subtlety?

only if you took out a 20% H2B contribution, otherwise it just mirrors the deposit taken, 5%, 10% etc

 

They cant take more than they loaned as an initial %.