BOOM!!!! Financial Meltdown!

[chaoticjelly]

1 Million is a piss in the ocean though. They will spend 20-30 on stupid projects like a statue in a city.

Not in Burnley pal

But yeah plenty of money gets wasted;

Like digging up a street, path etc, just to put it back to how it was, to spend some excess funds so that the same amount or more will be allocated next year.. I think that is totally ridiculous and it goes on all the time!

[merf]

so just enjoying sub £1 a litre petrol and the OPEC bstrds are going to have a pop at rigging the price back up by cutting production.

the head of OPEC though is interviewed and says he wants to do this without increasing the pain on all the economies on the brink of recession.

what a prize c*nt, how exactly does he propose to whack the price up without it hitting people in the pocket ? dunno why these people are given airtime for this drivel.

[Richard.John]

I love how the Beeb refers to them as a cartel.

"Also, Mr El-Badri of OPEC on Tuesday hit back, insisting that OPEC had no responsibility to keep production high and oil prices low to ease pain in the West caused by the credit crunch."

If we stop buying your over priced swamp sludge, then we will see. Of course the real problem is taxation.

[gunrock]

I love how the Beeb refers to them as a cartel.

Well, according to wikipedia and it's definition of a cartel, that's exactly what they are. Their aim is to keep the price high thus keeping profits up. They do this as an agreement between all the members of OPEC, thus they are price-fixing their product, which is exactly what cartels do.

[Richard.John]

I know, it's just a negative term to use. The world wants what they have, sadly. Good for them and the blood sucking oil companies.

[Nijo]

To be fair they cut production more than Saudi Arabia were wanting. It's the other OPEC countries that are doing this.

Check all the stock markets and currencies today. Pound getting a battering (negative growth report was out today). GBP to Yen is now only 140!

If we drop more than everybody else then our imports will get more expensive (all imports, not just games!), which means we import inflation (the UK is a net importer - we don't produce anything useful ourselves).

Recession plus inflation is NOT a good combination!

Edit: Or we could just go into full on deflation, what do I know.

[Brats]

the UK is a net importer - we don't produce anything useful ourselves.

No we're not, we export far more than we import (services rather tnan physical goods).

[Nijo]

No we're not, we export far more than we import (services rather tnan physical goods).

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?ID=199

The UK?s deficit on trade in goods and services was ?4.7 billion in August, compared with the revised deficit of ?4.8 billion in July (originally published as a deficit of ?4.6 billion).

The surplus on trade in services was ?3.5 billion, the same as in July.

The deficit on trade in goods was ?8.2 billion, the same as in July.


That's not even counting that there's less money in financial services these days....

[charlesr]

We export the same amount of chickens as we import though.... How completely screwed up is that?

[merf]

We export the same amount of chickens as we import though.... How completely screwed up is that?

but do we import nasty cheap chickens for value range products and nuggets/twizzlers and export happy corn fed organic chickens at greatly inflated prices ?

if so its all good.

[EJG1980]

Sounds like good news on the Icesave front according to the latest announcement from the FSCS. After reading yesterday that any sign of the money was unlikely before Xmas this is a welcome relief. As long as it all goes smoothly of course

[VR46]

Interest rates in Iceland have gone from 12% to 18%, in one fail swoop.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7694785.stm

[charlesr]

Since the dollar has dropped down from 2 to 1.55 to the pound, it's saving me a whole load of work that was scheduled for the new year adjusting lots of set-in-stone conversion rate stuff, because it was 1.55 last time around. Credit cruch saves me time and money. Whodathoughit.

[Holio]

Financial Meltdown............ not if you have Oil Shares!

"BP has seen its latest quarterly profits more than double, buoyed by record high oil prices.

Reporting its results for the three months from July to September, BP's replacement cost profit totalled $10bn (£6.4bn), up 148% from a year earlier."

They hiked the prices, and the World Economies fell apart, that's how I see it, and who will buy up things at cheap prices, lots of Foreign Investment companies from Dubai, Abu Dabai etc, the whole thing smells more than abit off, sure the crazy prices of Property was always going to crash, but it was the Oil Cartels as said earlier in this thread that brought it about, with the World so dependent on the stuff, the prices went up on everything, meaning people could no longer afford repayments on daft loans, and cutting back, thus the Bank's actually realising they really hung themselves with their own greed, sending the entire planet into recession, oh the joy........

[Nijo]

That's not how I see it. Yes they're a cartel, but they have no interest in sending the planet into recession.

Instead, fancy financial tricks have been used to create a credit boom, and it's this that has driven a boom in property and commodities. All the banks and hedge funds have overextended themselves and are now frantically trying to sell everything and hoard cash to stay afloat. The sovereign wealth funds - foreign investments - started buying in at the start of the year, thinking it was the bottom, but they've been burnt along with everybody else.

The only winners (aside from a small fraction of hedge funds that bet this would happen) are Porsche, who through some absolute GENIUS trading have managed to (temporarily) become the biggest company in the world.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/05bbd234-a4d2-11dd-b4f5-000077b07658.html