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[mount teide] 24/9/2018 00:23

Well, well - After a total waste of two years - what the Country voted for may finally prevail!

'Majority of Cabinet' now supports move towards Canada-style Brexit deal - Telegraph

'Majority of the Cabinet now supports moving towards a Canada-style trade deal with the EU following the outright rejection of Theresa May’s Chequers plan, the Prime Minister will be told.

Mrs May will be urged to rethink her approach to the Brexit negotiations by favouring a free trade agreement that would represent the “clean Brexit” that Leave supporters voted for.

Jeremy Hunt, the Foreign Secretary, has emerged as a key figure in the Brexiteers’ fight to convince Mrs May to change tack. A former Remain campaigner, Mr Hunt is now squarely in the Leave camp and has publicly indicated that he is open to the idea of a Canada-style deal.

It comes as the Institute of Economic Affairs on Monday publishes a detailed alternative Brexit plan, which has the backing of former Brexit Secretary David Davis and former foreign secretary Boris Johnson.

It urges Mrs May to put the deadlocked EU talks on the back-burner and open trade talks with the rest of the world.

Eurosceptics in the Cabinet, which meets on Monday, will tell Mrs May that a free trade agreement is the only form of Brexit deal that could command a majority in Parliament.

They believe EU leaders behaved so appallingly towards Britain at last week’s Salzburg summit that Mrs May can now change tack without any need to resign, as long as she stands firm over the need to avoid a hard border in Northern Ireland.

Hard-line Brexiteers in the Cabinet who were reportedly considering resigning ahead of today’s Cabinet meeting have now made it clear they will stay on and make the case for a Canada-style deal as they feel it is a fight they can now win.

They will also urge Mrs May to sack Olly Robbins, the civil servant in charge of Brexit negotiations, after blaming him for giving too much ground to the EU during the talks.

One Cabinet source told the Telegraph: “In a nutshell, we now face a choice between a Norway-type deal and a Canada-type deal. More than half the Cabinet now support the idea of a Canada-style option, while there are maybe half a dozen who favour Norway.”

A Cabinet insider said: “No one in Cabinet thinks it’s the PM’s fault that we’re in the situation we’re in.

“They are fuming about Ollie Robbins and think he should fall on his sword. There were mumblings for a while that Chequers wouldn’t get through the EU and yet he didn’t say anything and let her shoot herself in the foot.

“This has now become about encouraging the PM to change her own mind and lending their support to do that. There’s no sense whatsoever that she needs to go, just that she needs to change her mind.”

However, one Cabinet source warned that if Mrs May digs in her heels and sticks to her Chequers plan she will be putting her premiership on the line, because “as time goes on the pressure gets greater”.

[maxk] 23/9/2018 22:39

Not to mention the (probable) cause of his back problems..

[mount teide] 23/9/2018 21:28

Remarkable to see Tiger Woods - after 4 career threatening back surgeries and five years without a win - is 5 shots clear of the field with just 5 holes left to play in the season ending US Tour Championship with its staggering FedEx $35m bonus money on top of the US$9m purse.

[mroalan] 22/9/2018 15:37

Good read also from the comments section KJH link to Spiked.

[jtcod] 22/9/2018 15:37

24th October 2008
Instead of bailing out the Irish government thought they could fix it with a promise.

MINISTER FOR Finance Brian Lenihan said the bank guarantee scheme was "a necessary first step" and "the cheapest bailout in the world so far".

They went on to borrow €64bn from the EU and IMF.

Save us from politicians!

[jtcod] 22/9/2018 15:31

Yes MT I am just reading up on the shenanigans part. As Buffett once said: "You never know who’s been skinny-dipping till the tide goes out".

Allied Irish (and to a lesser extent BoI) were fearless lenders in the early days of the English care home market and made good profits at first but it went wrong in the downturn of the early 90’s. They obviously didn’t learn any lessons there but I recall they entertained clients very well in the good times. :-)

[mount teide] 22/9/2018 15:02

Remember watching a Channel 4 TV interview Morgan Kelly gave at the height of the Irish property market lunacy - he said it was a major accident waiting to happen as 75% of Irish Bank lending was tied up in property and land speculation and totalled more than 2.5 times the size of the Irish Economy.

Irish banks were almost entirely funded by deposits until 2000. In the next decade their business model was to borrow in the international wholesale markets and lend to property developers and house-buyers – it was Northern Rock on steroids until an international credit crunch came along and brought the whole thing crashing down.

Politics and regulation instead of acting as a preventer acted as a catalyst as a result of the reckless behaviour of self serving politicians and banking sector management.

Yet another huge financial disaster aided and abetted throughout by the big audit groups.

The shenanigans at Anglo Irish 'Bank' probably best demonstrated the astonishing scale of the folly and breathtaking arrogance and corruption of its CEO - well reported on at the time by the FT:

'At the heart of the crisis was Anglo Irish Bank, the domain of Sean FitzPatrick, its chief executive for 18 years and chairman from 2005. FitzPatrick and Anglo streaked across the dull firmament of Irish banking like meteors, igniting a frenzied battle for size and market share. Between 1998 and 2008, Anglo’s loan book swelled from €3bn to €73bn. Almost all of this was to builders and property developers. Bertie Ahern, the Taoiseach who presided over the alchemical prolongation of the boom and hides his shrewdnesss behind a blokeish bonhomie and mangled syntax, saw it differently in 2006 when, as he put it, “the boom was getting more boomier”.

Sean FitzPatrick, it would later transpire, used Irish Nationwide, the building society, to warehouse an undeclared personal loan from his own bank of €87m during the end-of-year reporting season – every year for eight years until it was detected in 2008. As the Anglo share price started to crumble and it and other banks started to haemorrhage deposits, another building society, Irish Life & Permanent, lent the bank €7.5bn to tide it over another sticky reporting season. This was presented in the accounts as part of Anglo’s customer deposit base. Anglo also lent money to a select group of 10, mainly builders, clients to buy stock in the bank and prop up its share price. This is a bank into which the government has already had to inject €14bn.

Even after the nationalisation of Anglo Irish and the state’s rescue of its rivals through the establishment of a “ bad bank”, the National Asset Management Agency (Nama), to manage nearly €80bn in toxic property assets, some bankers’ purchase on reality was negligible. FitzPatrick, less than a week after Anglo was bailed out by the taxpayer, called for cuts in child and pensioner benefits. He and his peers were not operating in the penumbra, they were hiding in plain sight, protected by what Fintan O’Toole, The Irish Times columnist, has called “the Celtic informational twilight of things that are known but not known”. They have helped turn Ireland upside down.

Twenty years ago, any Irish man or woman would be fluent in EU lore, from the number of scholarships available to the precise value of Brussels regional aid. Ten years ago they became encyclopaedic on property prices, and a storehouse of tips for buzzy holidays from Barcelona to Bangkok. Now, they enumerate toxic assets like a loss adjuster. “That building there, it’s just been Nama-ed,” said one resident, pointing to one of Dublin’s best-known hotels. As a barman in that same hotel had it: “We’re all economists now.” And as Yeats put it in a different context: “all changed, changed utterly”. '

[jtcod] 22/9/2018 12:56

Just reading some more about the background to the Irish banking Crisis 2008.

This from Wiki. -

"Morgan Kelly, a professor of economics at University College Dublin, was particularly concerned about the real estate bubble which was reaching its climax in the summer of 2006. In an article published by the Irish Times, Kelly noted that the raise in house prices relative to income and rents is a strong indicator of their subsequent decrease, and that Ireland's house prices had risen 30% more than income since the year 2000. He then asserted that Irish real estate prices could possibly fall 40 – 50% when the bubble burst.[49] His second article was rejected by the Irish Independent and lingered unpublished at The Sunday Business Post until the Irish Times agreed to run it in September 2007. Kelly predicted the collapse of Irish banks, which had fuelled the rapid rise of real estate by increasingly lowering their lending standards and relying more on 3-month interbank loans than on their deposit base.[50]

Kelly's prognostications caused a minor controversy but mostly went unnoticed until March 2008, when Philip Ingram, an analyst at Merrill Lynch, wrote a scathing report about the real estate bubble, focusing on the three major Irish banks most responsible for the crisis, Anglo Irish, Bank of Ireland, and AIB. Merrill Lynch had major, lucrative underwriting relationships with those banks, and a senior executive at Anglo Irish, Matt Moran, who had registered displeasure with Kelly over his articles, among others, did the same to Merrill. Merrill in turn retracted the report within hours, and fired Ingram by yearend."

Talk about shoot the messenger!

Property prices subsequently fell as much as 60% in some areas*

Edit: *amended %

[grannyboy] 22/9/2018 08:04

Would appear I confused Ian Dale with someone else, so posts been edited..

[maxk] 21/9/2018 23:40

That makes Ian Dale an enemy of the people (€U people that is)

[7kiwi] 21/9/2018 22:20

Back to Asian Tigers. I was in Singapore earlier this year.

If I recall correctly:

Upsides: They have roughly twice the GDP/capita; higher life expectancy; about 20% of households are $ millionaires; better health outcomes from their largely privatised health system (although I do believe state funded insurance is available for the poorest); very low crime.

Downsides: Not as socially free as here, with quite draconian punishment for fairly minor violations - but that may explain why serious crime is negligible. House prices are also astronomically high.

[7kiwi] 21/9/2018 22:16

MT, I think ID voted Brexit.

[jtcod] 21/9/2018 18:58

I think we are headed for a pretty volatile Q4. Currency markets have turned into a paranoid schizophrenic.

[aleman] 21/9/2018 17:23

Great things apprenticeships. You had to work with grumpy old men with lots of skill and experience but you learned a lot about work AND LIFE in a few years - and discovered that they were not quite as grumpy as you thought and often had a dry sense of humour and lots of useful insights. Now what do school leavers learn in their first few years, often surrounded by other youngsters that have never been anywhere near an experienced old fart or anything practical? Of course, you can Google lots of technical stuff but that does not teach you much about life.

[alphorn] 21/9/2018 17:01

Mine was £5. I have my first pay slip in a gold frame to remind me. ;)

[mroalan] 21/9/2018 16:51

oh yes, as did most i knew, it was well know for you to tell the boss on the Fri that you were finishing to start up with the bloke across the road for threepence more an hour,and that worked both ways,it was called lickum and stickum,work was plentiful,my first wages were £4 6 shillings aweek.

[bahamasoil] 21/9/2018 16:26

mroalan

I guess you had an apprenticeship as well ;¬)

[blusteradjuster] 21/9/2018 14:58

“20 million ‘unemployable’ males with a criminal record”

Obviously not that simple but still a huge problem.

Perhaps a quietly accepted way to deal with undesirables is to have them medicate themselves into a zombie state in which they pose less of a danger to the productive members of society. Assuming these people are less likely to reproduce, you’ve a form of eugenics on your hands.