All hail Mr Peter Rushforth of West Yorkshire for proposing a solution to one of the great problems of our age: dark winters. Writing to the Times this week, Mr Rushforth opines that "the simple answer if people don't want children and workers going home from school in the dark is for all of them to start an hour or more earlier in the morning, rather than artificially altering the time by adjusting clocks.....let's stop this disruption twice a year and stick to good old GMT all year round".
There you go -- a simple solution that has apparently evaded policymakers not only in the UK but also across Europe and North America, where the siren song of clock changes has also been heard. I propose we set Mr Rushforth to work on the practicalities right away. Let's see -- all train and bus timetables will have to be shifted by an hour to get folk to work on time (I'm prepared to bet right now that Mr Rushforth is not the driver of the 5:30 am -- soon to be 4:30 am -- train from his local station to Leeds every day); entertainment and pub opening times will have to be shifted because people will not be able to stay up late; the entire country will have to agree on which day we all switch schedules (and it better not be cold and rainy that day); and we'll have to explain all of this carefully to our foreign trading partners, as there's a teeny-weeny possibility that they will not follow our lead, at least until we work the bugs out.
Give me a call when you've got all of that in place Mr Rushforth, because I have another assignment waiting for you: herding cats.
Thursday, 30 November 2006
Wednesday, 29 November 2006
Farepak follies
OK, so how did you imagine that a "christmas savings club" worked? To the extent I ever thought about it, I guess I assumed that the club collected money from savers, then used the pooled funds (a) to get a decent rate of interest from a bank and (b) to negotiate good prices on the stuff that went into the hampers. The interest earned would provide the income to cover the costs of the operation, and maybe a bit besides. I think that's probably how most of them do work -- very close in nature to a co-op, and not a business with much get-rich-quick potential.
Farepak doesn't seem to have been run like that, at least not in recent years, when it has been part of a sort of conglomerate of marginal consumer businesses (door-to-door catalogue sales and such). It appears that the parent company treated the funds provided by the Farepak savers as part of their own funds, and earlier this year used them to buy another company. It's no exaggeration to say that the savers would have been better off investing in a private equity fund, because in effect, that's how the management treated their money. In any event, although the story is still not entirely clear, once the savers' money was gone, there was no way to fund the purchase of the hampers.
Farepak senior management reacted to the collapse of the company by (a) heading off on holiday to Argentina (as you do) and (b) blaming the banks (as you also do). There are claims that Farepak asked its main bank (HBOS) to "ring-fence" the savers' deposits to protect them from the problems elsewhere in the conglomerate, but it appears that by the time this request came, there was nothing left to ring-fence. It seems unfair to blame the bank for the fiasco, though I suspect that the HBOS account manager who allowed the savers' money and the company's own funds to be mixed in the first place has not done his/her career any good.
There have been entirely predictable calls for the government to "do something" -- bail out the depositors in the short term, regulate savings clubs in the long term. Both of these pose problems -- and may in fact be at cross-purposes. A bailout creates a precedent that reduces the incentive for people to take better care of their money in future. As for long term regulation: who are you going to regulate? There seems to be no feasible way of preventing people from concocting schemes of this kind, altering the structure gradually to stay ahead of the regulators. And a bailout in the present case only increases the incentive for nefarious operators to get into this business, secure in the knowledge that the Government won't let the savers suffer.
It's to be hoped that these savings schemes will just fade away, because they are an awful way to put money aside. The sad stories of the Farepak savers should ensure that fewer people get involved in the next year or two, while the lessons remain fresh. For the longer term, it's up to legitimate (and regulated) financial institutions to make sure that there is no demand for these clubs. It's well known that banks don't much care to deal with poor people, but there is surely money to be made by any bank or building society that can come up with a Christmas savings offering of its own. Or, if the Government really wants to get involved, how about NS&I? In Canada the government-run Canada Savings Bond programme used to be known as "the biggest damned Christmas club in the world". If the banks aren't interested, who better than NS&I to accommodate the small savers who have been skewered by Farepak?
Farepak doesn't seem to have been run like that, at least not in recent years, when it has been part of a sort of conglomerate of marginal consumer businesses (door-to-door catalogue sales and such). It appears that the parent company treated the funds provided by the Farepak savers as part of their own funds, and earlier this year used them to buy another company. It's no exaggeration to say that the savers would have been better off investing in a private equity fund, because in effect, that's how the management treated their money. In any event, although the story is still not entirely clear, once the savers' money was gone, there was no way to fund the purchase of the hampers.
Farepak senior management reacted to the collapse of the company by (a) heading off on holiday to Argentina (as you do) and (b) blaming the banks (as you also do). There are claims that Farepak asked its main bank (HBOS) to "ring-fence" the savers' deposits to protect them from the problems elsewhere in the conglomerate, but it appears that by the time this request came, there was nothing left to ring-fence. It seems unfair to blame the bank for the fiasco, though I suspect that the HBOS account manager who allowed the savers' money and the company's own funds to be mixed in the first place has not done his/her career any good.
There have been entirely predictable calls for the government to "do something" -- bail out the depositors in the short term, regulate savings clubs in the long term. Both of these pose problems -- and may in fact be at cross-purposes. A bailout creates a precedent that reduces the incentive for people to take better care of their money in future. As for long term regulation: who are you going to regulate? There seems to be no feasible way of preventing people from concocting schemes of this kind, altering the structure gradually to stay ahead of the regulators. And a bailout in the present case only increases the incentive for nefarious operators to get into this business, secure in the knowledge that the Government won't let the savers suffer.
It's to be hoped that these savings schemes will just fade away, because they are an awful way to put money aside. The sad stories of the Farepak savers should ensure that fewer people get involved in the next year or two, while the lessons remain fresh. For the longer term, it's up to legitimate (and regulated) financial institutions to make sure that there is no demand for these clubs. It's well known that banks don't much care to deal with poor people, but there is surely money to be made by any bank or building society that can come up with a Christmas savings offering of its own. Or, if the Government really wants to get involved, how about NS&I? In Canada the government-run Canada Savings Bond programme used to be known as "the biggest damned Christmas club in the world". If the banks aren't interested, who better than NS&I to accommodate the small savers who have been skewered by Farepak?
Tuesday, 28 November 2006
Say No to Borat!
I have no intention of seeing Sacha Baron Cohen's "movie film". Usually I would say that disqualified me from commenting on it. But stick with me -- I have some pretty strong views on what Cohen seems to regard as acceptable ways of geting laughs and making money. (For what it's worth, when I went to see the latest Scorsese epic I saw the Borat trailer. I didn't find it funny. But that's beside the point, or at least bseide my point).
When Ali G first appeared on TV in the UK, it provided some wonderful moments: Mohamed al-Fayed dancing around the stage chanting his own name, Tony Benn maintaining his rigorous socialist correctness in the face of ever more provocative questioning from Ali G, to name but two. (And one other personal favourite: Ali G's gleeful reaction when some royal hanger-on or other described Camilla Parker Bowles as "a very fit woman". You couldn't have scripted a better set-up line -- though I'm tempted to think that Cohen scripted that one).
Throughout that series, Cohen's unwitting victims saw their own pretensions unveiled and then fairly gently mocked. That's OK; they were mostly public figures who should have been able to take care of themselves. However, there was another aspect of the show that started to trouble me. Although Ali G was presented as a white trash yoof who just wished he were black, it was clear that Cohen was using the character to get laughs by skewering black urban culture. It's not hard to guess what the reaction would have been if a black comedian had attempted the reverse trick by playing an equally stereotyped Jewish character.
I lost interest in Ali G in the second TV series, partly because it was becoming harder to believe that the "victims" weren't in on the joke, and partly because the hugely offensive Borat character was introduced.
So to the current "movie film", which as I say I have not seen. Once again Cohen's character embodies vicious racial stereotypes of a kind that he would justifiably find very objectonable if they were apllied to Jews. But he is no longer using his comic creation to lure unsuspecting public figures into dropping their guard. Now he is using a variety of techniques (getting his victims drunk seems to be one of the less reprehensible) to get ordinary people not just to look foolish, but to portray themselves as racists and anti-semites. It seems to me that this is a slur not only on Kazakhs, through the Borat character himself, but also on the Americans who are Borat's victims. This is a pretty unpleasant way to make money.
One last, semi-personal note: I haven't met Sacha Baron Cohen, but he went to the same Cambridge college as I did. Famous graduates: John Milton....Charles Darwin....Earl Mountbatten of Burma....me....Cohen. Things definitely seem to be going in the wrong direction!
When Ali G first appeared on TV in the UK, it provided some wonderful moments: Mohamed al-Fayed dancing around the stage chanting his own name, Tony Benn maintaining his rigorous socialist correctness in the face of ever more provocative questioning from Ali G, to name but two. (And one other personal favourite: Ali G's gleeful reaction when some royal hanger-on or other described Camilla Parker Bowles as "a very fit woman". You couldn't have scripted a better set-up line -- though I'm tempted to think that Cohen scripted that one).
Throughout that series, Cohen's unwitting victims saw their own pretensions unveiled and then fairly gently mocked. That's OK; they were mostly public figures who should have been able to take care of themselves. However, there was another aspect of the show that started to trouble me. Although Ali G was presented as a white trash yoof who just wished he were black, it was clear that Cohen was using the character to get laughs by skewering black urban culture. It's not hard to guess what the reaction would have been if a black comedian had attempted the reverse trick by playing an equally stereotyped Jewish character.
I lost interest in Ali G in the second TV series, partly because it was becoming harder to believe that the "victims" weren't in on the joke, and partly because the hugely offensive Borat character was introduced.
So to the current "movie film", which as I say I have not seen. Once again Cohen's character embodies vicious racial stereotypes of a kind that he would justifiably find very objectonable if they were apllied to Jews. But he is no longer using his comic creation to lure unsuspecting public figures into dropping their guard. Now he is using a variety of techniques (getting his victims drunk seems to be one of the less reprehensible) to get ordinary people not just to look foolish, but to portray themselves as racists and anti-semites. It seems to me that this is a slur not only on Kazakhs, through the Borat character himself, but also on the Americans who are Borat's victims. This is a pretty unpleasant way to make money.
One last, semi-personal note: I haven't met Sacha Baron Cohen, but he went to the same Cambridge college as I did. Famous graduates: John Milton....Charles Darwin....Earl Mountbatten of Burma....me....Cohen. Things definitely seem to be going in the wrong direction!
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