Mots perdus

Quotes from news, books, sites, ...

[motsperdus]

none of the salaries in professional jobs have changed materially in a decade

https://on.ft.com/2PNZrYD

Melanesian 25 minutes ago

Virtually none of the salaries in professional jobs have changed materially in a decade. I started on 27k in London at a big four grad in 2012. This was virtually unchanged since 2005 and it’s still less than 30k. Yet my rent for comparable property has gone from 700 to 1400 in the six years since I graduated.

I now make 71k base salary which is the same as I’d be expected to make in my current role as someone in 2001 In London per my research. Kind of takes the shine of the favourite stealth brag of everyone i work with over 35, that they have “done well out of property”. Well well done you mini Warren Buffett you! Well done indeed!

I’d bite pwc hand off if I was a grad today offered a scheme somewhere else.

[motsperdus]

“They said that with [their levels of] debt and London’s costs, why go to London.”

https://www.ft.com/content/639ff0de-ba92-11e8-94b2-17176fbf93f5

PwC, the accountancy firm, plans to hire significantly more graduates and school leavers outside London in response to growing concerns among job applicants about the cost of living in the UK capital and high student debt. Kevin Ellis, chairman of the firm, which is the UK’s largest private sector graduate recruiter, said on Monday that he expected roughly half of the workforce to be based outside London “by the end of this month”.

[...] Mr Ellis said the growing desire of younger applicants to work outside London became clear to him when he gave a talk to 400 university students in Nottingham last year. When he asked them where they wanted to work when they graduated, less than a third said London. “Every hand in that room would have been up to say London five years ago,” he said. “They said that with [their levels of] debt and London’s costs, why go to London.”

[motsperdus]

reclassify trading assets from Level 2 to Level 3 as markets became more illiquid.

https://hbr.org/2009/11/is-it-fair-to-blame-fair-value-accounting-for-the-financial-crisis

When the debt markets froze during the fall of 2008, FASB released a staff paper clarifying the application of fair value accounting to illiquid markets. That paper emphasized the flexibility of standard 157 and made companies aware that they could reclassify trading assets from Level 2 to Level 3 as markets became more illiquid. FASB also stressed that companies did not have to use prices from forced or distressed sales to value illiquid assets.

However, these rulings did not provide enough comfort for bankers watching the market value of their toxic assets plummet; they complained loudly to their elected representatives, who threatened to legislate accounting standards unless FASB provided more relief. As a result, in April 2009 FASB quickly proposed and adopted a new rule, which detailed criteria for determining when a market is illiquid enough to qualify for mark-to-model valuation.

The rule was designed to allow more securities to be valued by bank models instead of by market indicators. On the same day, FASB issued yet another rule on how to account for securities when they were permanently impaired. The rule said that only the credit-loss portion of such impairments would affect a bank’s income and regulatory capital, with the rest (such as unrealized losses related to illiquidity) going into the special account for other comprehensive income.

Those two retroactive rulings made it possible for large U.S. banks to significantly reduce the size of write-downs they took on assets in the first quarter of 2009. The rulings improved the short-term financial picture of these banks, although they also led bank executives to resist sales of toxic assets at what investors believed to be reasonable prices.

[motsperdus]

Today’s rent-extracting economy, masquerading as a free market

https://www.ft.com/content/c85b9792-aad1-11e8-94bd-cba20d67390c

Beyond finance, it seems ever clearer that protection of intellectual property has gone too far. Also, why not shift taxation on to land? Why are we letting the taxation of capital collapse? And why are we not trying to revitalise antitrust?

An all-embracing new ideology may be unavailable today. That is probably a good thing. But good ideas do exist. A more likely cause of inertia is the power of vested interests. Today’s rent-extracting economy, masquerading as a free market, is, after all, hugely rewarding to politically influential insiders.

[motsperdus]

It is hard to remember now the world where your employer could not, by law, sack you just because they wanted to

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/09/the-war-on-raspberries/

My whole adult life has been defined by the changes initiated by Thatcher and continued by Tories and New Labour. It is hard to remember now the world where your employer could not, by law, sack you just because they wanted to, and where you could get state protection from rapacious landlords charging unfair rents.

The destruction of heavy industry in order to destroy the strength of organised labour, and the privatisation of the monopoly utilities for the profit of the rich, was a transformation that is at the root of the mass misery we live amongst today.

[motsperdus]

Northern Europe's top ten poorest regions 1. West Wales UK 2. Cornwall UK 3. Durham and Tees Valley UK

https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-news/cornwall-second-poorest-region-northern-1977843

Northern Europe's top ten poorest regions

West Wales UK

Cornwall UK

Durham and Tees Valley UK

Lincolnshire UK

South Yorkshire UK

Shropshire and Staffordshire UK

Lancashire UK

Northern Ireland UK

Hainaut Belgium

East Yorkshire & North Lincolnshire UK

[motsperdus]

day-labor markets, and the alliance between industrial capitalism and organized crime that governed them

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/09/01/tadaos-war-memory-manga/

Until the late Sixties, such informal labor markets (known as yoseba) were also where blood banks like the one where Tadao worked went to recruit when supplies were low. They were where major corporations like Toyota scouted men to work their assembly lines, usually on grueling shifts and under dangerous conditions for terrible pay.

Corrupt day-labor markets were also where the fledgling nuclear power industry and their yakuza go-betweens went to find short-term janitorial and maintenance workers, to be shipped off to places like the Fukushima Daiichi station (already notorious as a dirty and dangerous facility in the 1970s) to wipe up radioactive spills and remove radioactive corrosion from valves and vents, so that Japan’s nuclear power plants were clean enough to pass inspection and reopen with tolerable efficiency and without too great a risk of accident.

Many writers took to calling these exploited laborers kimin — “abandoned peoples” — thereby identifying the day-labor markets, and the alliance between industrial capitalism and organized crime that governed them, as one of the major engines of dispossession in Japan.

[motsperdus]

HB tenants spend too much time in the house wearing out the carpets and anything else they can wear out

https://on.ft.com/2x8JeoX

Maybe the report should look at the quality of the existing social housing stock. Loads suffer with damp and are in a far worse state of repair. The problem is complex but ultimately comes down to low levels of housing benefit and majority of benefit tenants being a pain in the neck.

I do not allow housing benefit tenants, unless I brought the property with them in it. HB tenants spend too much time in the house wearing out the carpets and anything else they can wear out. Professional people in my experience spend most of the time working and are out most weekends. Carpets not worn out and they pay more rent.

I build houses and flats, the cost of these at current construction rates and 0 land costs would mean a return on investment of 4%. Add in land and developers profit and the return reduces to 1.33% pa on the investment. If I had to build all the roads and infrastructure the cost would double again. So I rent at market rates which are generally double the HB rate and only require a small uplift in the build quality.

[motsperdus]

a giant suction pump had by 1929 to 1930 drawn into a few hands an increasing proportion of currently produced wealth

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6620825-beckoning-frontiers

Mariner Eccles, "Beckoning frontiers", 1951 (Knopf)

a giant suction pump had by 1929 to 1930 drawn into a few hands an increasing proportion of currently produced wealth. This served then as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied themselves the kind of effective demand for their products which would justify reinvestment of the capital accumulation in new plants. In consequence as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When the credit ran out, the game stopped

[motsperdus]

whilst fists are shaken at "the 1%", it's the top 20% that are getting nervous.

https://discussion.theguardian.com/comment-permalink/120230245

MadriMaraff 3h ago 3 4

The problem Labour has is that whatever one thinks of Jeremy Corbyn, I do not hear him trying to win over the middle-class, leafy suburbs . If you look at where the battleground, swing constituencies that decide elections it's places like these. It's great that JC wants to improve the lot of the poor, but it will be at the expense of the better-off. And decreasing the gap between rich and poor doesn't just involve raising one group without lowering another.

The simple fact is that whilst fists are shaken at "the 1%", it's the top 20% that are getting nervous. They look at the JC formula and think it will make their living standards go down. This may or may not be the case, but they don't feel like JC is talking to them or trying to persuade them to join in (beyond "it'll make other people's lives better!").

[motsperdus]

the disappearance of overtime, shift allowances, attendance allowances and unsociable hours pay, and drove full-time workers into welfare dependence and zero hours contracts.

https://discussion.theguardian.com/comment-permalink/120231565

wilfulsprite 2h ago 7 8

For those who push Blairism because 'he gave us the minimum wage': Like tuition fees, the minimum wage was one of the biggest cons pushed on us by Blair, because it was set far too low (in order to protect big business, as usual). It was set at £3.60 an hour, at a time when factory and warehouse workers were earning £5-7 an hour, giving plenty of room for wages to be forced down when the mass surplus of labour occurred. The latter also caused the disappearance of overtime, shift allowances, attendance allowances and unsociable hours pay, and drove full-time workers into welfare dependence and zero hours contracts.

Additionally, New Labour, being in the pocket of the CBI like so many Remainers, ignored the EU's pretty pointless attempts to give some stability to agency workers because big business didn't want it. 8 years for the Blair/Brown government to agree to it (after it had been so watered down it had become pointless). This is a MAJOR factor influencing the way the working classes vote, and yet the lame attempts to tackle it have simply made things worse. 'Moderate' politics looks anything but moderate to us.

[motsperdus]

less than 5% of lending by UK banks went towards productive investment

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2018/09/06/a-plan-for-a-new-economy/

Back in 2012, the UK firefighters union (FBU) commissioned a report on the banks, that I wrote jointly with Mick Brooks. We found that less than 5% of lending by UK banks went towards productive investment by companies. The rest went on real estate (mortgages) or lending to other financial institutions for speculation.

[motsperdus]

the Germans were threatening Iran and our oil

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Fleet

At this stage, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Alan Brooke wrote:

“We were hanging by our eyelids! Australia and India were threatened by the Japanese, we had temporarily lost control of the Indian Ocean, the Germans were threatening Iran and our oil, Auchinleck was in precarious straits in the desert, and the submarine sinkings were heavy.”

[motsperdus]

The generation who won the lottery of home ownership really did get the golden goose.

ttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/28/housing-crisis-not-solved-speculation-alone-ippr-land-prices

The generation who won the lottery of home ownership really did get the golden goose. The economy of the 21st century is defined by consumer spending that’s fuelled by borrowing against the rising value of the place where we live. Rock-bottom interest rates just enhance the significance of house values and their importance to the wider economy.

[motsperdus]

farmland with planning permission goes up at least a hundredfold

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/28/housing-crisis-not-solved-speculation-alone-ippr-land-prices

No, farmland with planning permission goes up at least a hundredfold, and in chosen parts of southern England – Oxfordshire, say, or Hampshire – the value of the land might go from £12,000 an acre to £2m or more, once it’s been signed off by the planners.

[motsperdus]

“structural reform” largely synonymous with lower taxes and de-regulation of labour markets.

https://www.ft.com/content/c85b9792-aad1-11e8-94bd-cba20d67390c

Conventional wisdom still considers “structural reform” largely synonymous with lower taxes and de-regulation of labour markets. Concern is expressed over inequality, but little has actually been done. Policymakers have mostly failed to notice the dangerous dependence of demand on ever-rising debt. Monopoly and “zero-sum” activities are pervasive. Few question the value of the vast quantities of financial sector activity we continue to have, or recognise the risks of further big financial crises.

[motsperdus]

public power so mixed with private interests.

https://www.ft.com/content/d27b000e-6810-11e8-8cf3-0c230fa67aec

Yet those challenges are nothing like as fundamental as was transferring responsibility for a core attribute of the state — the creation of sound money — to a favoured set of profit-seeking private businesses, co-ordinated by a price-setting government institution, the central bank. In no other economic area is public power so mixed with private interests.