I never thought I would read this but the recession has finally hit the greatest bastion of Britishness - beer sales are down. This hot on the back of the announcement last month that Britain is the biggest importer of wine in the world.
Hard To Believe Facts
It really is a day for shocks.
Beer sales are over 8% down compared to the same quarter last year, 5.5% for the whole year, and much of it is blamed on the 18% increase in duty announced in the budget; pubs are closing at the rate of 6 per day. Nope, nothing to do with the fact loads of people are losing their jobs and watching the pennies at all. Have lily-livered British people gone all limp-wristed and started quaffing wine rather our national brew? What has happened to the odd pint of Brain's SA 'Skull Attack', the legendary Felinfoel or 'Feeling Foul', Stella Artois 'Wife Beater', Speckled Hen and Scruttock's 'Old Scrotum'? (OK, I made the last one up).
Are we really swapping en masse to sipping wines and iced ciders while discussing the merits of Martin Corry's alleged eye-gouging or watching Mickey Skinner's 'Greatest Hits' or the 'Beautiful Game'? What is the matter with us? Have we actually swapped over to the much dreamed of Continental Cafe Culture that President Blair thought up? Now we are open all hours to drink ourselves stupid, it's apparent we are becoming a nation of wine-sipping, cider quaffing nancies.
Hey, Buddy - Don't Blame Me!
It's John Thain again - the now ex-CEO of Merrill Lynch who recently left his post at the new parent Bank of America is back in the news and fighting back. Flatly accused of lying in relation to the 'surprise' $15.3bn fourth quarter losses everyone forgot about at Merrills at the time of the BoA takeover, it is apparent that Mr. Thain and the Merrills Board signed off on $3bn to $4bn 'early bonuses' at roughly the same time. In fact, Mr. Thain complained he had been 'completely transparent' with the new parent, BoA, and that bonuses paid 3 days before the merger were paid in the full knowledge of the BoA Chairman, Ken Lewis.
Transparent he may well be and I think Ken Lewis knows exactly what this kind of transparency means. Good to know that BoA, having petitioned for a Fed bung to help it out in the light of these surprise losses, have had to use US taxpayers money to once again pay for a pile of bonuses that were completely unwarranted.
Quite how Thain can justify any bonuses at all in the light of the trading mess Merrills was in is a mystery. But I suppose the only surprise in the whole story is that John Thain was ever given a job in the first place. At least he has had the hindsight to go back and pay for the $1.22m cost of redecorating his office in which the wastepaper basket alone cost over a $1,000 calling it a 'mistake'.
The mistake was someone putting him in charge of a company let alone a bank.
Eat My Shorts!
The spookily named Paulson & Co is a US hedge fund that has made a few bob of late - just a cool £100m or so for a fair week's work. After somehow foreseeing that Royal Bank of Scotland shares would plummet on Monday, it had taken a short position a little earlier to thankfully see the shares dive 67% in a single day after the second bail out announcement. On Friday it reduced its short position just one day before the shares rallied upward by 19.8%.
There's no story, here. Nothing to read into this, move along please.
Seven Days That Created The World
Front page of this week's 'New Scientist' reveals that, on the 200th anniversary on Charles Darwin's birth and the day David Attenborough launched a new series about the value of Darwin's Theory of Evolution, the Theory is actually hokum and that the 'Tree of Life has been uprooted'. Creationists will be chucking a few parties bearing banners with misquotes but certainly it looks that at least the theory itself has evolved.
To get the context right, Newton's Theory of Gravity and Motion led the way to modern day thinking on the motion of celestial bodies thanks to his radical ideas. In the same way, Darwin's theory was the ground breaking thought process that leads to the modern views of evolution. The Tree of Life, as it is termed, was a very good way of expressing what was observed and, much like quantum mechanics changed physics, so too the new works on genomes, bioinformatics and other disciplines have transformed biology.
Still, having travelled into London this morning by car, I would like to have a chat with the theorist that said that by charging £8 to each vehicle per day for entering London would actually reduce congestion or carbon emissions. That is a theory WORTH debunking.
G'day and B'bye, Andy
Silly us. After two wins over Roger Federer and one over Nadal already this year, Andy Murray entered the Australian Open as favourite to win the title. It came as a stunning shock then that the Scot got beaten by Fernando Verdasco yesterday. We Brits are perennial losers when it comes to tennis but the good news is that Greg Rudeski has come out of retirement for our next challenge in the Isthmian Part-Timers Division of the Davis Cup where we play Liechtenstein's Extra A's Veterans in March. Should be a cracker.
The Banking Crisis Explained
Dyscalculia.
No, I have not made this up and, no, it is not a sexually transmitted disease in cats. This the term applied to those individuals who fail to see the connection between a set of objects and the numerical symbols they represent, such as a set of 5 walnuts being represented by the word five or the numeral 5. However, equally these individuals may have still have high IQs, be highly intelligent, articulate and be able to grasp conceptual mathematics.
Remind you of anyone?
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