Deliver Us From Swedish Furniture

A friend of mine sent me this from the Beeb and for the first time since the turn of the 20th Century, people in the UK will be earning more per person than their US counterparts. Partially down to currency fluctuations, but also down to the higher economic growth, which unsuprisingly are related - if your country gets stronger economically then so will your currency assuming you don’t print too much of it. Now I have never been a fan of Bush, from the start I thought he was a hawkish half-wit with a bunch of oil hungry cronies in tow…or rather paying his way. Now I could go on about how he managed to turn the huge amount of goodwill the rest of the world felt towards the US after 9/11 into a state of affairs whereby being an American abroad is bad for your health. So after spending trillions on his ‘war on oil’…sorry ‘terror’ which seems to have done a good job of increasing terrorist activity by acting as the best recruitment advertisement Al-Qaeda could ever have hoped for (and just the response the provocation of 9/11 was supposed to induce) He has also introduced some restrictive trading practices that have seen the WTO (not normally known for their anti-US bias) hand out several penalties against the US. Lastly, and probably the most harmful, is the floodgates were opened on cheap credit leading tohuge inflationary pressures on prices, which meant that globally the dollar had to fall - how does this affect anything for the average joe? I’m glad you asked, because that means I can go off on one of my periodic, but always dull economic lectures…. Read the rest of this entry »

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He almost managed to come across as cool until he opened his mouth after the film ended. Once a geek, always…..

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You have got to love Jeremy Clarkson, at least he is prepared to put his money where his mouth is, quite literally in this case! In his newspaper column in The Sunday Times, he said that the whole fuss about the British Government losing a huge quantity of bank and personal data (I think it was something like 7 million families’ records!) was a storm in a teacup. Now usually he is one of the first people to lampoon the government, so this was a bit of a novelty in itself, but he then went on to give out his bank details - well you give them out if you write anyone a cheque (no, not a check; Jezza, like me, is a Brit after all!) anyway don’t you? He then went on to tell people how to get his address from the electoral roll and find out what car he drives, because there is no possible way that this data could be used against him… Read the rest of this entry »

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