The Banking Bailout or Succour for Speculators

It may well be true that our Government needed to guarantee the banks to the tune of 400 Billion. It is without doubt that certain Irish banks were in difficulty, the banks which chose to use historically low interest rates to fund a massive house building boom. As a means to give themselves extra dosh they financed the buying of the land, the building of houses, the marketing,and all the other sub-contractors involved in the build. And then, having taken money at all levels to bring the developments to market,they decided they needed another bite. At the jugular of another huge opportunity.

So they and their media friends-whose loyalty lay more with the Advertising Department than with their audiences, who acted as PR men for the whole charade, the well-rewarded presstitutes who promoted the new developments, growing fat on the plump property pages profits. British televison shows taught us we could all get rich developing property if not terminally thick. The ads from the finance houses rolled in,the plugs for the rapacious lifestyle, for measuring people by their house and not for themselves. And having helped create panic that not getting on the property ladder all around they sucked in parental money for deposits. And harnessed our next generation to 40 year mortgages. This meant absurdly-priced homes being thrown up with no regard or responsibility to quality or to minimising their environmental impacts. Minister Roche was the man responsible for getting his developer friends derogations from European insulation levels whilst the largest number of houses ever built were being hurriedly and profitably built. It would have added 3% to the build cost of those houses to have made them energy-efficient during construction. But no,even as their profits grew as they raised house prices on a daily basis. No. Instead the greedy devolopers and builders cut corners and showed their utter contempt for their client, because it was a sellers market. Their contempt for the environment is truly a disgrace, and says more about them than I can say. Do these gombeen men plan on having no grandchildren, and care not a jot for the sort of world for the world their great-efficiency grandkids might inherit? (Roche really should be embarrassed, and hounded out of public life. His environmental crimes will cost money as long as the houses last). So we may have a lot of people with the sub-standard, energy-inefficient, but tax-free second home, especially in the BMW region. Many of these homes will have low energy efficiency certificates,making them harder to sell,and reduce their value. With ever-rising energy costs, why buy a home which costs more to run? This boom has led to a lot of empty homes, and the mortgages on them still have to be paid.. No easy and profitable exit strategy in sight. No tenants to rent the buy-to-let pad. Especially now the Eastern European builders left.And the mortgage is probably going to up. Still historically property has always gone up in value. Which is true to a point. In the old days, the bad old days of the early 1980s when I bought my house in London at an interest rate of 16.75% and on a damn good salary, I couldn't get a mortgage even twice my salary. More usually the salary you got might get you twice your salary, as well as half your wife's. ( Yes, wife, as living with someone wasn't accepted by the banks.They needed proof of marriage. Honest.) What happens to the property and motgage if a job is lost? A major illness? It comes a nasty shock when people discover that their critical illness cover is worth bugger-all, with more get-out clauses than a Hollywood pre-nuptial agreement. The very bankers and financiers who are responsible for this mess, the economists who were assuring us only a few short months ago that there was no need to worry, that all was rosy, this thieving cartel walk away with their hands in our pockets, their debts covered and their fat salaries secured. Now they urge us to overlook how we got here, how we got into this mess,promising that we can examine this later. (Yeah, right.) How convenient! Some even now have the gall to blame us, the people they seduced into becoming so massively These are people for whom "ethics" is an English county Lenin observed that Capitalism was ready to pay any price to ensure its survival, so long as the workers get to pay that price. I wouldn't often agree with Vladimir Ilych, but have to admit he was right. Why don't we copy the model used by the Scandinavian countries when they went through a similar disaster in the early 1990s? In return for getting their assets and debt protected, the banks transferred equity to the State. At least let us, the plebs, profit when the banks overcome their difficulties, having returned to more sound and old-fashioned banking principles. And let us not ever forget just who got us here. Let us also make sure they are not allowed forget, either. Or profit on the back of our sweat.

Which Is Greenest Large Cap?

Many companies are rushing to claim Green credentials,often on the thinnest of grounds. This practice is called greenwashing, and will eventually backfire on companies caught up in it,as the public sees through the bull. An example would bee recent ads for Vauxhall in which they bragged about having reduced energy use at one of their UK plants by a whopping 33%. Sounds good,even virtuous, doesn't it? But what they don't tell you is that they closed down one of the three daily shifts and laid the workers off. If they had reduced the workforce by closing down one of the remaining shifts, they would presumably have claimed a 66% saving! Spinning job losses into good green news is a new one on me. However some large caps are genuinely green. As many investors tend to head for the perceived safety of Top 100 companies at times of volatility, let me suggest GE for a green investment. This behemoth and American icon we used know as General Electric but it involved in much more than kitchen appliances,making everthing from wind turbines,desalination plants, and trains to energy-efficient lighting such as CFLs and LEDs. They built the wind turbine farm on the Arklow bank for Airtricity,the first offshore wind farm in Europe,and have a film of it on their website.http://ge.ecomagination.com/site/index.html The Appliance Division is to be sold off and this should benefit stockholders.If this should happen somewhere between 5 and 8 Billion dollars would be realised,according to the Wall Street Journal. GE also pays a dividend 4 times a year, and yields a useful 3.87%. The stock price is down 12% y-o-y, and should recover over the medium term. And when the dollar eventually recovers we may see we got these cheaply. BBC NEWS | Business | GE strikes $2bn wind turbine deal

Personal Transport and Possible Pneumatic Profits.

Transport accounts for much more energy use than than all the power we consume in our homes. Many miserable commuters spend more and more of their time alone in their cars,commuting from homes bought further and from jobs, homes bought in a desperate attempt to get a claw hold on the very bottom rung on the housing ladder, crawling along on severely congested roads. And now with petrol,oil, gas and electricity bills all rising, their misery is increasing. All Greens denounce all these single occupant cars, and more should be done for car pooling and public transport. This is all well and good, but offers little hope for the depressed commuter. During our fat years billions were spent on our road network, and not nearly enough on public transport. And we managed to demonstrate another proof of the theory that roads soon fill with traffic. But let's face some reality here: we won't get commuters out of their cars until we offer a decent and comfortable alternative.Certainly, many would prefer to have an extra hour in bed and be able to catch a fast,comfortable and guaranteed train, on which they can doze, work,or whatever they wish, in a comfortable seat.With one carriage for anyone wanting to use their mobile phones. Building new railways takes an absurd amount of time in this country, but if we can put a motorway through Tara then we can build railways anywhere we want too,or so I would imagine.And the Rail Procurement Agency must by now have built up a level of expertise,and this would help a lot in contract negotiations. And even if we manage to get our public transport infrastructure to line up with where we live, and build fast links to where we work we will only have solved part of the problem. The sense of private personal space we get from our car-ownership,too, is an important issue, and not one that I can do justice to here.However all transport policies seem to forget about country people,who rely on their cars,and who feel unfairly hit by policies designed to encourage/punish urban motorists out of cars. The cost of transport is considerably more than the cost of the electricity we use in this country. And with oil prices rising for the the foreseeable future we need a solution. A solution offering all that the car offers, but at a lower cost. What have we got? We have hybrids and electric vehicles emerging and I will write about them again. We have battery companies getting huge backing to develop better batteries. But their is one technology which seems to have been overlooked. Air power. Or being more accurate, compressed air piston engines. And like buses, at least two engines have been developed to a stage where the private small investor might get a look-in at an IPO. There's a bunch of video of these these two companies showing off real working vehicles on YouTube . Since these vehicles can fill up anywhere there is a compressor refuelling will not be a problem. And they certainly qualify as low emission vehicles,as they only emit air. Even allowing for the fuel used by the compressor.

I understand that Motor Development International (MDI) the Company behind the Air Car has done deals with a number of major firms such as Tata, the Indian family-controlled conglomerate also in the news because of having bought Jaguar and Land Rover. Two British icons being bought by a company from a country which used be a British colony seems a delicious irony. I apologise to any readers still with me down here for the length of this post. Fear not,there's more to come. But in the next post. I also think the Australian air-powered engine is a beautiful piece of sculpture worthy of a place in any gallery.