Cardboard Spaceship

Interesting Origin of a Phrase... and a Little Ditty.

I occasionally wonder where an apparently odd phrase or saying came from, and in this spirit of enquiry, I looked up the word "Tickety boo" meaning, "everything is great" in English English.  (As opposed to American English for example.)

I found out that:

"It first appeared around 1920-40 It is almost certainly a relic of the British colonial presence in India.
One of the most accepted and common theories about "ticketyboo" connects to the Hindi expression "tikai babu," meaning "it's all right, sir."

For some reason that tickled me pink, and I just thought I would share.

PS, I then looked up "Tickled Pink" and found this little gem of a nursery rhyme.

"Peter Pan has lost his grin:

Tinkerbell is drowning in

A hefty keg of pirates' rum.

Fairy-flavoured booze. Yum yum.

Captain Hook enjoys his drink: 

Every sip is pickled Tink."

Ah.  Google!

Derivatives Exposure Now a Number You Have to Google...

Enquiring minds will enjoy the fact that the derivatives exposure in total may be as much as 1.4 Quadrillion dollars.  I had to Google to even find out what a quadrillon dollars is.  Turns out it is 1,000 trillons.  Or to put it another was, it is one thousand of these heaps.

Or to put it in a way that we can all understand, it is 230 thousand odd dollars, assuming that I have done the decimal places right, for every breathing soul on the planet.  

What could possibly go wrong?

Rolling Stone on the Wall Street "Collapse" AKA Execution

Rolling Stone has one of the best populist descriptions of what the hell happened on Wall Street and why.  Read it, and weep. 

UK News Makes Me Reel in Disbelief

I read a very good column by Martin Wolf in today's Financial Times.  He talks about the state of the world economy, and Britain in particular.  His main point is that the banks are giving real trouble because they are essentially too big to fail, and too big to rein in.  Now that is true enough, and he makes a very coherent argument about it. 

What caught my eye, apart from his keen good sense, was the following observation from the IMF about the scale of write downs of debt needed.

"According to the IMF, writedowns on UK bank assets are going to be $604bn, against $814bn for the eurozone and $1,025bn for the US. Yet the US economy is roughly six times as large as the UK’s. The UK’s cuckoos are too big. Regulation must take these differences into account."

Holy crocking feck.   As much as 814 billion dollars in write downs?  If we assume 60 million people in the UK, then that makes it 13,500 odd dollars per head of the UK population, if my miserable arithmetic is right.  Now that's quite a lot of money.

Meryn King, Governor of the Bank of England no less, has also come out in fighting mood, albeit a well dressed and grammatical one.  He gave a speech in my old stomping ground, Edinburgh, the other day, and also had much to say on the subject of bank reform, or more accurately, the lack of it. 

"The sheer scale of support to the banking sector is breathtaking. In the UK, in the form of direct or guaranteed loans and equity investment, it is not far short of a trillion (that is, one thousand billion) pounds, close to two-thirds of the annual output of the entire economy. To paraphrase a great wartime leader, never in the field of financial endeavour has so much money been owed by so few to so many. And, one might add, so far with little real reform.

It is hard to see how the existence of institutions that are “too important to fail” is consistent with their being in the private sector. Encouraging banks to take risks that result in large dividend and remuneration payouts when things go well, and losses for taxpayers when they don’t, distorts the allocation of resources and management of risk."

So, what you might say, what will it do to me.  Well, how about a seven pence in the pound tax rise and another five years until you retire to pay for the bank's mistakes?  In the words of that magnificent scene from Glengarry Glen Ross. 

"Have I got your attention now?"

What is required is clear.  Utility banks get the government backing - meaning payment systems, deposit accounts, vanilla savings, etc.  The rest is in the bad boy bank, and does not get underwritten.  It worked America for years, and it was called the Glass Steagall Act, and it was passed after the events leading to the Great Depression.

So, what you are seeing now is the greatest failure of regulation and financial control ever, mainly brought on by regulatory capture.    What is interesting is how this one is going to fall.  Battle of the rich and powerful coming up.

Enjoy the show, you've paid a lot for the ticket. 

Sumitomo Not Very Bullish on the Dollar

This report on Bloomberg has the chief currency strategist at Sumitomo Bank being rather gloomy about the dollar. 

"The dollar may drop to 50 yen next year and eventually lose its role as the global reserve currency, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp.’s chief strategist said, citing trading patterns and a likely double dip in the U.S. economy.

“The U.S. economy will deteriorate into 2011 as the effects of excess consumption and the financial bubble linger,” said Daisuke Uno at Sumitomo Mitsui, a unit of Japan’s third- biggest bank. “The dollar’s fall won’t stop until there’s a change to the global currency system.”"

Trouble with that view is that what with Japan, alongside China being the biggest buyers of dollar denominated debt until now, if there is any serious change in that behaviour, the dollar really is in trouble, and there are a lot of people now talking seriously about removing the dollar from its reserve currency role. 

What is also interesting is his assertion of the trading blocs going back to the Americas, Europe and Far East model rather than the global trade we have seen recently. 

It's Not My Fault Gov, It's the Future Toying with Us.

I once read a really elegant reason why there will never be a working time machine.  If you believe that the universe can be changed - which is not a given - then you could imagine a machine that would go back in time, using whatever method, and you could change things.

Only by changing the past you would change the future, from whence you came, and so would you still have invented the time machine?  Possibly, yes, possibly no. 

Assuming then that people could go back and keep changing the past and the future adapts, the changes keep happening, until...

By a freak occurrence a universe is thrown up that no one invents a time machine in, at any point. Then it becomes stable.  Forever.  Problem solved.

Now, here in Geneva we are home to the world's largest anti-matter weapons making facility, the Large Hadron Collider.  I have written about this marvellous machine before, with its ability to make the whole planet disappear, and to make sure that the IQ level at the local drinks parties, especially on the right bank, is frighteningly high.  Normally a man at a party with a horrible unkempt beard and a dirty t-shirt is a failed drunk, but round here, he is just as likely to be a Noble Laureate, whatever that is worth these days.  

Anyway, back to my so-called point.  

According to two scientists it will never work, because the future will not let it.

"In a theory reminiscent of the time travelling film Back to the Future, the theoretical physicists Holger Nielsen, from Denmark, and Masao Ninomiya, from Japan, have concluded that its discoveries could be so "abhorrent to nature" that they are coming back to stop their own creation"

Time to go and lie down in a darkened room and consider the wonder of it all.

Now That's a Good Buy

Someone bought a chalk and wash drawing for 19,000 dollars, but it is now believed to be an original Leonardo da Vinci, and so worth 100 million dollars. 

Get on ebay now folks, it could be you. 

Real Women will Avoid Karl Lagerfeld

Here's a deal that I think that everyone can grok:  Karl Lagerfeld thinks that fat women should not be on the catwalk.  Maybe it's too obvious to say that real women, i.e. with a healthy body mass index, and all the bits that make us chaps go "va-va-voom", might find it easy to not wear Karl Lagerfeld.

"No one wants to see curvy women," he was quoted as saying on the website of news magazine Focus.

"You've got fat mothers with their bags of chips sitting in front of the television and saying that thin models are ugly."

An anorexic, old, ugly, gay man thinks that a women who has the temerity to breed and look normal should not wear his clothes.   I think that women should agree with him.

Nobel Peace Prize for Man Running Two Wars.

In one of the oddest decisions I can remember, the Nobel Prize for peace has gone to a man who is commander in chief of country that is currently running two simultaneous wars.

Now Obama does deserve a prize for not being George W.Bush, most of the world would agree with that, but the Peace prize?  Hardly. 

Clay Shirky on the Future of Journalism

I wrote about what would you pay for free the other day, about Rupert Murdoch wanting to ring fence the News International titles and charge for access. 

Clay Shirky is interviewed in the Telegraph on a similar theme.  He seems to be of the opinion that many would agree with, the Internet has basically killed the Newspaper business model.  

One experiment in the other direction is the venerable London Evening Standard is to become a freesheet.  Owned by the Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev, this may be another variant of the joke "What's the best way to make a small fortune in the news business? Start with a big one."

So once again, the old adage be the best or the cheapest, there is no in between is coming true.