FT.com / UK - Tories pledge rapid reform on regulation

FT.com / UK - Tories pledge rapid reform on regulation: "'Think about the enormous disruption this would create at a time of great uncertainty for the financial services sector and the economy generally. To say that this would be ill-timed is a massive understatement,' Andrew Love, a Labour member of the Treasury select committee, told a Westminster event.
Vince Cable, Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, said the reforms would involve 'major costs . . . and massive uncertainty . . . at a crucial time'."


Dear Tories, please stop and think, listen to those who have been regulated rather than those who have been regulating as well as those who have created every manifistation of failed regulators to date.

Council tax rise needed due to local government pensions black hole - Telegraph

Council tax rise needed due to local government pensions black hole - Telegraph: "She said: “The Liberal Democrats are playing into the hands of commentators peddling the line that hard-working public servants are living in the lap of luxury once they have retired.”
The Government described the size of the deficit as “pure speculation”.
A spokesman for the Department of Communities and Local Government said: “This year's valuation of the fund has not been carried out yet and is legally required to be based on market levels at the end of March - no one has any accurate way of knowing what that will be.”"
*************

What was it last year? And the year before?

We can't afford to fund these pension schemes, time to wind them up...

Tesco's Sir Terry Leahy attacks 'woefully low' education standards - Telegraph

Tesco's Sir Terry Leahy attacks 'woefully low' education standards - Telegraph: "Sir Terry was also critical of the tax burdens placed on businesses. 'Today's recession can best be tackled if businesses – of all sizes, from the street stall to Tesco – are not burdened with more tax and more regulation."

***************************************************

Less is more http://www.cutthisredtape.com/  

BBC NEWS | Northern Ireland | National park 'still years away'

BBC NEWS | Northern Ireland | National park 'still years away': "Supporters say the park, which would run from Carlingford Lough to Newcastle and Slieve Croob, would boost tourism and create 2,000 jobs.
Opponents, many of whom live in the area, fear it could price young people out of the property market and place tough restrictions on farming."


***************************************************

Allow this to happen at your peril folks! Ask the dissaffected residents in Snowdonia National Park whether they have more jobs, better housing or any other benefit from being force fed what someone from far away wants.

Gordon Brown: we are the insurgents now - Telegraph

Gordon Brown: we are the insurgents now - Telegraph: "He said: 'Sun readers, when they get a chance to hear what we are saying on anti-social behaviour, on cancer, they will see that this is very much in line with the mainstream middle of this country.'"

Who reads the Sun newspaper? Pervs?

The SEC Makes Wall Street More Fraudulent

Parallels with the FSA

 

See Also What the American Votes For by Albert Jay Nock, and David Gordon's Article, Nazi Economic Policy.

The SEC Makes Wall Street More Fraudulent

Daily Article by Robert P. Murphy | Posted on 1/5/2009

The mainstream reaction to the Bernard Madoff scandal was inevitable. Whenever a government regulatory agency proves itself to be incredibly incompetent or corrupt, the respectable media swoop in to declare that the "free market" has failed and the agency in question obviously needs more money and power.

Whether it's the Department of Education's failure to produce kids who can read, the FBI's accusations against innocent people in high-profile cases, or the FDA cracking down on tomatoes, the answer is always the same: proponents of bigger government argue that yes, mistakes were made, but the solution of course is to shovel more taxpayer money into the agencies in question.

In the private sector, when a firm fails, it ceases operations. The opposite happens in government. There is literally nothing a government agency could do that would make the talking heads on the Sunday shows ask, "Should we just abolish this agency? Is it doing more harm than good?" It's not just Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: throughout history, virtually every agency created by the federal government has been deemed too important to fail. (I vaguely remember some Republicans in the mid-1990s holding a press conference and declaring that the Department of Commerce was done, and that voters could "stick a fork in it." I guess they found it was still pink inside.)

Madoff's Ponzi Scheme

The pattern plays out perfectly with the SEC and the Madoff bombshell. Suppose a few years ago, I told a group of MBAs to imagine the worst screwup that the SEC could possibly perform, something so monumentally incompetent that members of Congress might openly question whether the agency should continue. I think that at least half of the class would have come up with something far less outrageous than what has happened in fact.

Everyone who reads the headlines knows that Bernard Madoff is accused of running a massive Ponzi scheme that, for over a decade, has ripped off investors to the tune of $50 billion. But those who dig a bit deeper learn that Harry Markopolos, who used to work for a Madoff rival, has been writing the SEC since at least May 1999, urging them to put a stop to Madoff's Ponzi scheme. (Markopolos examined the options markets that Madoff told investors he used to hedge his positions and yield his steady stream of dividends, and Markopolos concluded that Madoff's results were impossible.) Incredibly, the SEC apparently had evidence in front of its face sixteen years ago (in relation to another case) that Madoff was a crook.

Yet it gets worse. As the Wall Street Journal and others dig into the story, they find that Madoff's family had close ties to the SEC. His sons, brother, and niece, for example, worked with or advised financial regulators on certain matters—no doubt telling them the best way to protect investors from fraud.

But the pièce de résistance is that Madoff wasn't caught; his own sons turned him in after he came to them and admitted what he'd done. (Let's assume they are telling the truth and didn't realize what their father was up to all along.) And even Madoff's confession was not because of a visit from the ghost of Christmas future. No, Madoff's scheme simply ran out of gas, because of large redemption claims that his clients filed, due to the collapse of the financial markets. Had it not been for the bursting of the credit bubble, Madoff would likely still be bilking new investors — and advising the SEC.

Laissez-Faire Ideology to Blame?

Even though George Bush has presided over the most interventionist government since FDR's New Deal, he somehow has a reputation for being a free marketeer. (It's funny that his political opponents take him at his word when it comes to economic rhetoric, yet they don't universally refer to Bush as a lover of world democracy and peace.) Naturally, the Madoff Ponzi scheme is blamed on the Bush administration's failure to adequately fund and staff the beleaguered SEC. "Bush thinks markets are self-regulating, and look what happened!"

This is complete balderdash. The SEC under George Bush has the biggest budget and the most personnel in its history. The charts below show the annual budgets and "full-time-equivalent" staff for the SEC by fiscal year. These numbers were obtained from the annual SEC reports archived here. (Note that there might be a slight discontinuity in the budget series in the year 2003, when the report format changed.)

It's even more interesting to break down the growth rates in budget and staff by presidential administration. For the following table, I have assumed that an incoming president doesn't really influence the SEC's operations for that (partial) fiscal year. For example, Ronald Reagan won the election in November 1980, and was sworn in the following January 1981. To gauge how much he increased the SEC budget and staff, I look at the annualized growth from FY 1981 (which ran through September 1981) to FY 1989. However, I also ran the numbers going from FY 1980 through FY 1988 etc., and it doesn't really affect the results.

Administration	Annualized SEC Budget Growth (not inflation-adjusted)	Annualized SEC Full-Time Staff Growth
Jimmy Carter	9.3%	-1.2%
Ronald Reagan	7.5%	1.4%
George H.W. Bush	15.3%	6.7%
Bill Clinton	6.8%	1.4%
George W. Bush	11.3%	1.0%

As the table shows, clearly the person who hated the free-wheeling market most was the first President Bush, followed up by his son. And especially when we consider the high inflation rate, it's obvious that Jimmy Carter was a laissez-faire ideologue. Bill Clinton, in contrast, had the same attitude towards speculators as Ronald Reagan.

Naturally we can quibble with these conclusions. Maybe Bill Clinton's numbers would have been a lot higher had Newt Gingrich remained a history professor. Maybe George W. Bush used the Enron scandal to beef up the SEC's budget, while he gave orders behind the scenes to use the cash for pizza and beer rather than enforcement.

But whatever the excuse, it just proves my point: it is foolish to give the task of ensuring financial integrity to DC politicians. The SEC was supposedly retooled after the Enron fiasco in order to do its job. And it failed miserably. Some heads may roll and budgets balloon, but if history is any guide, there will be another huge financial fraud within another decade.

Conclusion

The SEC clearly botched its alleged job in the case of the Madoff Ponzi scheme. Taxpayers are certainly entitled to ask, "What exactly are we getting for our (now) $900 million per year?"

It is not simply that the SEC failed to help. On the contrary, the SEC is actively harmful. For one thing, its implicit blessing of Madoff probably reassured some investors; surely the SEC would have shut him down if his returns were bogus! Beyond that, the SEC has been horrible during the financial crisis. In the summer it engaged in a phony ban on "naked" short selling that was already illegal, and then a few months later it banned short selling outright on hundreds of financial stocks, a move that paralyzed that particular sector even more. And lately, they've decided to launch a witch hunt on Mark Cuban—those 3,000+ employees have to do something.

Democrats should not take away from the Madoff scandal the lesson that Republicans cannot be trusted to regulate financial markets. Even if it were true that Democrats would run it more honorably and competently, eventually another Republican will win the White House.

Rather than pitting each party against the other, it is wiser to conclude that Washington politicians and bureaucrats will never put the average taxpayer or investor's interests above those of billionaire financiers. The SEC should be abolished, and investors should rely on private-sector watchdog groups to spot swindlers.

[VIEW THIS ARTICLE ONLINE]

_________________________

Robert Murphy runs the blog Free Advice and is the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, the Study Guide to Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, and the Human Action Study Guide. Comment on the blog.

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FW: [IFADU] Friday and You could not make it stuff..

-----Original Message-----
From: IFADU@googlegroups.com On Behalf Of Gordon Burns
Sent: 28 November 2008 19:09
To: IFADU@googlegroup
Subject: [IFADU] Friday and You could not make it stuff..

I receive a weekly newsletter on IT stuff which is always funny and
satirical.

A round of the weeks IT news.

I thought I would share it with you this week,. It is not entirely off
topic as it is a acerbic comment on our leaders and governments management
abilities.

I think some of the comments here were a little unfair, some public service
employees do a great job in difficult and stressfull circumstances. Working
in the embassy n the Congo might qualify. We must not judge all public
servants by the common experience we share and even then it is with the very
senior management who set policy that we have the problems.

So to end the week some humour...

Have a good weekend.

ID Card Scheme
Consider the latest news on the scheme this week.

The first UK ID cards will be of limited use because the government has yet
to reveal a timetable for the deployment of scanners capable of reading the
clever high-tech biometric data. That would be a problem but where there's a
problem there's a solution. In fact there are two but neither of them are
very good.

It's quite simple really. You look at the card and then look at the person
and if they look like the kind of person on the card then they're probably
the same people. Brilliant, eh?

But that's not all. Hell no, there's another way you can check if the card
is genuine - you just give it a flick.

That's according to Phil Booth national co-ordinator of ID card pressure
group NO2ID who told silicon.com that employers who doubt the authenticity
of the card had been told to flick it to check for a distinctive sound.

"This is the mechanism by which employers are supposed to be checking a
worker's identity - it is farcical," he said. And who's the Round-Up to
argue?

What the 'distinctive sound' might be is a mystery to the Round-Up
- a hollow sounding ring for fraudulent cards, perhaps? Or if it's a genuine
card it could chime out the opening chords to 'Rule Britannia'.

Booth seethed: "It makes a lie of all these grandiose claims about
biometrics if there is not the infrastructure to back it up."

You can stop right there, Phil. You had the Round-Up at 'farcical'...

Whitehall....

The grey-suited denizens of Whitehall are confused enough as it is, flicking
ID cards against their ears, without adding software upgrades into the mix.

MPs, peers and civil servants are having a hell of a time getting by with
Microsoft Word. So what's new, you might ask. Tuning forks as it happens but
that gag is just sooo last section.

The civil servants in question are struggling to deal with compatibility
between documents produced in Word 2003 and 2007 formats. Much in the same
way the rest of the country is confused about policy initiatives launched
over the same period.

Happily, Microsoft is working with Westminster tech chiefs after politicians
and peers complained of being unable to open the latest Word documents. And
presumably they were not talking about the paper clip, which seems to be
working fine:

"Looks like you're trying to write an ill-thought-out technology-based
policy initiative on a national security scheme.
Would you like help:

Generating enough snake oil?
Finding someone to blame when it all goes wrong?
Over-inflating budgets?"

There is a solution - a fix can be downloaded - but as Lord Methuen
writes in an annual committee report: "A program can be downloaded
to read the documents but obviously not everybody knows how to do
this." Followed by a stream of random wingdings characters and 200
blank pages, the Round-Up likes to imagine.

It also transpires that politicos have gone mad for IT with a long
list of outrageous requests. Happily for them they'll soon be able
to download said patch from anywhere they choose.

Not content with having email accounts of Herculean proportions and
wi-fi in every nook and crevice of Whitehall, MPs are also lobbying
to be able to place clips of themselves in the House of Commons on
YouTube. In addition, members and peers want to embed official
Parliamentary video on their personal websites. Hark at them.

It's encouraging to see our government embracing technology with
such gusto, but as a wise man* once said: "With great power comes
great responsibility."

(*Spider-Man's Uncle Ben)

We're just a year on from the HMRC missing CDs debacle (the
department is still happy to receive those CDs if you do find them)
so maybe things have changed. Maybe government employees can be
trusted with all the high tech kit and privileges.

Wait. What's that? Yet more big government data breaches on the
way? Well that's something to look forward to in the new year.

Plus ça change...

Regards

Gordon