Predictions For 2010

As 2009 closes out and most of us want to close the door on it as fast as possible, still more bad news wallops us causing Lord Mandelson to shout that the loss of 1,700 jobs at the Corus plant as, 'Galling'.

So our thoughts start to turn to the year ahead - to a world of old rate VAT and the potential emergence, at last, from technical recession although verbally we have been assured the world is fine according to our leaders. I started to do my own bit of research on the subject of what we might expect ahead and I came a across a very helpful prediction site hosted by a bunch of psychics at http://www.psychics.co.uk/. But then again, some of you already knew I would do that.



Read them for yourselves but my favourites are:

• As commanded by Gordon Brown, Osama bin Ladin will die. No doubt Pakistan will be short of spin bowlers and select him, where he will be recognised as a famous terrorist leader and be shot by a sniper.


• An unspecified MP will be caught performing an indecent act in a public toilet. This is a safe bet as surely we have had one a year for a while or are we talking about indecent acts as 'flipping' now?


• A secret human cloning experiment attempts to clone a famous person - I can confirm the person in question will be Bruce Forsyth in order to extend the show beyond his years but wig makers are still dubious about being able to hide the join line.


• Barack Obama expresses an interest in holistic healing and it becomes a watchword in his speeches. He will be seen on live TV sipping his own urine while having his face covered in leeches.


• Britain and Germany make a green energy agreement and a huge new wind turbine farm will be constructed just outside the front doors of Parliament. Plenty of wind coming out of there.


• Quantum physicists will find a way to get electricity from water, and the MP caught in the act in the toilet will claim he was merely testing the theory.


• A celebrity is kidnapped and huge ransom is demanded, but the kidnappers got the name from Ant and Dec's list and so no one has ever heard of them.


• Britain will withdraw all troops from Afghanistan bar a few token ones from the 1st Battalion of Sitting Ducks. Straw prices go through the roof in anticipation of the draw for the short ones.


• A strike by Civil Servants will cause widespread disruption as the country struggles to find out why it has no effect on anything and no one misses them at work.

So here a few of my predictions in the same vain:

• Gordon Brown saves a baby from drowning and wins a landslide at the election as his popularity as a world superhero soars. An independent inquiry 30 years later reveals that not only Lord Mandelson threw the baby in but the real one did drown and Brown saved the plastic replica.


• Bankers agree to give up all rights to any bonuses for 50 years and most take their holidays working in parts of Africa worst affected by drought, starvation and disease.


• England come narrowly close to winning the World Cup when they are beaten in the first round by Algeria and drawing 0-0 with Slovenia after heroically beating USA. But due to a countback on non-qualifying dives, lack of unnecessary referee abuse and no hand balls they are tragically eliminated for lack of unfair play. David Beckham announces his retirement to pursue a career in banking and Wayne Rooney becomes a monk.


• Osama bin Ladin doesn't die but is actually found hiding out on the wing for Scotland's rugby team.


• MPs vote for abolishment of all expenses is a popular move, but go onto a lucrative bonus scheme in aiming to halve the budget deficit by 2014 - Brown earns £10m in 2010 as he hits the first milestone.


• X Factor is syndicated all over the world and Simon Cowell becomes the inaugural First World President by popular vote with Cheryl Cole narrowly missing out in s sing-off. Louis Walsh is condemned to death as a traitor to the cause in the first public decree while Sharon Osbourne is put under house arrest for life as a dissenter.

I'll work on a few more real ones in the coming weeks, but I am sure that unless you were part of the groups who won the £90m Euromillions last month, you just can't wait to see the back of 2009.

Facts, Hercule, Facts!

As Peter Sellars' Inspector Clouseau used to shout at his ever patient assistant, Hercule, 'Facts, are what we need!'.

I love a good fact. For instance, did you know that if the entire population of the world were collapsed to just 100, 50% of the currency would be held by just 6 of them. That's the kind of shocking fact I like - 6% of the world's population hold 50% of the currency. Iceland reckoned they could name the 6 individuals who took their country to the brink of bankruptcy, I would like to know the names of the 6 individuals in the shrunken world population who hold 50% of the currency and if they are doing anything for dinner to tonight.

Here's another. The Mall, a large shopping centre in Washington DC is 1.4 times larger than the Vatican City. I would say it's likely that at any time, The Mall contains more Catholics too and I wonder if it has its own Pope? Perhaps it will be the subject of the next Dan Brown book - 'The Pin Code' does not quite have the same ring.

Another. The top 8 most developed countries speak a Germanic language and all such countries are in the top 20. I have to say I was a bit surprised on that one as I had no idea Japanese was a Germanic language but perhaps they have a different list to me. Anyway, ve ask ze qvestions.

Saudi diplomats have 367 outstanding parking tickets in the UK. I dare say if one of us owed a parking fine in Saudi we would have a limb lopped off which is food for thought for Boris Johnson. However, I shall bring that up at my next parking fine and plead precedent.

Turtles can breath through their backsides. That's nothing special really as most politicians can actually speak through their backsides. I can't think why evolution would have dealt that interesting card to turtles but you never know when these things come in handy, perhaps when you are stuck in a pond with your backside in the air? I don't know.

Walt Disney was afraid of mice. Well that stands to reason as the mice he became famous for all had to wear gloves. I heard that Disneyland in Paris was shutdown last week as inspectors found a large mouse in the kitchen.

Male and female rats can have sex up to twenty times a day. Pathetic, I would be only warming up. However, over an 18 month period, a pair of rats could have up to 1 million descendants. I dare say that if I announced I had won the Euromillions Lottery I would have the sum number in 18 minutes.

It took approximately 2.5 million blocks to build the Pyramid of Giza, which is one of the Great Pyramids. Imagine the builder on that, 'Oo, mate, that's gonna cost yer. Them bricks aren't easy to find, you know.' It is a commonly held belief that when constructing Milton Keynes, a roundabout was put in where every navvi had put their tea mug down on the map.

Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite. I can believe that, they used to cause explosive wind in a friend of mine. It's always a friend in these stories, isn't it?

Two final facts - there are more nutrients in the packaging than there are in the contents of a packet of cornflakes. Some would say that the packaging tastes better too. It is impossible for a solar eclipse to last more than 7 minutes and 58 seconds. I like that - there has to be something finite about this Universe.

And finally, for one the chaps. Christmas is coming and did you know that women who read romantic novels have sex twice as much as those who don't? Get down to Waterstones fast, boys.

Too Good To Be True?

Yesterday I posted a blog about what appeared to be a sure fire investment scheme. Today I can reveal what was going on.

I offered two things - 1) was a chance to invest £100,000 to 1,200 subscribers to my plan and I would return then after just one week of using their money, the entire amount plus a further £20,000 - no risk and tax free and 2) I was offereing a share in the 'idea' of the plan at £1,000 a pop to up to 1,000,000 shares under a normal investment scenario.

Of course I had a point. The point being the the plan seemed too good to be true and most people rightfully ignored it as such.

I received some replies on the investment in the plan, but only one on the 'share' in the idea. There was a reason behind that and it was at the heart of what was really a Thought Experiment and a piece of fun.

In reality, the investment plan has some credence. You see, if I had all the investors I needed I would have at my disposal £120m. The chances of winning the Euromillions lottery is around 1 in 76m, so the cost to buy 76m tickets each with a unique number to exhaust all the permutations would be around £114m, leaving me £6m to buy a range of insurances against having to share my winnings, either through spread betting or simple insurance. I would then wait until the value of the Euromillions draw was around £150m (remembering the largest it has been is €183m so far) and then I would call the cash and buy all the tickets - having signed each subscriber as member of my legitmate lottery syndicate for tax puproses. I probably would never even have used the money as the pledges could have secured a loan to the value for a single week and I might have raised more to cover the costs of the scheme legally and technically as buying all those tickets quickly would have to be done automatically. The payouts to the investors would be £144m, leaving me a further £6m in profit.

Thus, I would guaranteed to have at best won the jackpot outright and at worst have shared the winning number with someone else, which would have to be paid for by the insurances or the loan I raised.

The share scheme in my idea was unattractive as it would raise £1bn for a scheme that may or may not be able to be repeated.

OK, here is where I was coming from. On paper, it looks as though I have a scheme that really does guarantee a return fast - remember it is only one week of money use for 20% tax free and no risk. In some respects this is analagous to the whole financial system. It is a seeming no-flaw scheme to make money. The only risk comes in if many people start to do the same thing and prizes are shared. But the concept is always about hitting the jackpot and so the lure to the investors is focused around their winning without regard to anything else. The analogy is not a good one but it does show a flaw in thinking and this is the disease that the financial system has - inside there is a flaw in logic. You cannot keep having money and gaining profit when there is nothing under-pinning it.

Except, of course, insurance. You see, the whole system is propped up by insurance and hedging. Without it, there would be no financial system. The trouble is, as we saw in the credit crunch, if the financial system fails then the call on insurance would bring us all down. The concept of insurance is that it calculates risk - but the whole financial system had become so incredibly risky, but apparently profitable, that all previous forms of risk calculation went out of the window and it became nothing better than betting on horses or daft lottery schemes.

Interestingly, my unpopular share scheme in my idea would have raised £1bn. This I liken to the background amounts required to underpin the whole plan I had. I only wanted to raise around £120m but I would need a great deal more to cover my losses if the whole scheme unravelled. Think upon this as being the money we have pledged as taxpayers into the global bank bailouts. It's an unattractive, unwise investment and it remains at risk all the while someone like me is using my plan to make money. While I am winning, it's great, but all I have to do is lose and the situation changes drastically.

You see my scheme was designed to be repeatable. As long as Euromillions exist, paid for by millions of chancers, and as long as I can raise money on the pledges of my subscribers, then I can play as many times as I like absorbing losses going along. And anyone can play - there is no patent on this scheme so as long as you have people who will subscribe the £100,000 for their return, you will find that everyone can play. Indeed, if all I am doing is raising loans to play, then to continue all I need to do is one enough each time I play to cover the interest on all the borrowings to pay out. Of course, the profits are far less and in reality, the returns cannot be sustained for one reason.

The Euromillions lottery kitty is not growing. The whole scheme needs the available total payouts to be growing in line with the profits being made. But that would not stop the scheme from working and being sold, you simply no longer rely on subscribers' cash pledges to raise you money, you can 'sell' the share in the profits as the pledge for cash. As long as no-one really analyses what you are doing and there is a 'herd mentality' that says, 'If Goldman Scachs are doing it then it must be ok', then no one need stop and explain to investors that there are no real underpinning assets to the whole idea. You are simply trading on the 'thought' of a guaranteed return on your money.

I bow to those who would easily see the flaw in this whole idea. I would also wish that those who see the flaw as clearly as I do would go back and take a long hard look at the financial system. If I can see the flaws, then so should they.

Government, bankers, economists - all of them - have systematically ignored the obvious which is wrapped up in the professional image of murmuring 'suits' in the financial centres of the world who tell us that greed is good.

My illustration tells us that it is easy to stop the flaws if you are prepared to look for them. My point here is that if a banker came along and told you about a 'structured investment tool' to make you money, you would believe every word.

After all, bankers wouldn't let you down, would they? What, they did? So why did we all save them? Heck, buy my scheme anyway - at least I'm genuinely stupid and so have an excuse.