Draghi just now: Mini-BOTs are either money, in which case they are illegal, or they are debt, in which case the stock goes up.
-
-
There is very little appetite domestically for Italexit, perhaps because the Italian public have a better sense of the benefits they have gained from membership.
There is nostalgia for the Lira, but I don't see there being a majority for that either, especially since the costs of leaving the common currency become clear.Comment
-
This is an interesting graph.Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
What is hyper inflation like? I only started paying attention to such things in 1987.Comment
-
Well, that ain't Weimar or Zimbabwe, but I can tell you that entering the workforce with 20% interest rates colours one's attitude towards money for a very long time.Comment
-
In what way?Comment
-
-
Never mind mortgages. Overdrafts are an impossibility. I remember my mam completely losing her rag, when she got a letter from the bank asking her to come in to meet the new bank manager to discuss their small longstanding overdraft facility. She took it really personally and went in and put manners on him. To put that in context, both my parents were secondary school teachers, they had been customers at that branch for 25 years, paid off their mortgage in six years thanks to a timely burst of hyperinflation, didn't have any other outstanding loans and were making provisions for college fees, and retirement, and it wasn't unusual for a bank in the 80's to treat you like you were some sort of criminal over surprisingly small sums of money.
Bank managers were often just another petty tyrant driven half mad by a little power. Somewhere along the line this all changed completely and utterly.Comment
-
Well, overdrafts were never really a thing in this country.
It colours how many people of my generation think about money. One never really believes in "low interest rate environments", even after they have lasted for over a decade and/or are being massively propped up by government action. One is inherently suspicious of borrowing at a floating or adjustable rate, especially if it took one almost ten years to pay subsidised student loans bearing interest rates in the high single digits or low double digits. One is much less comfortable "using leverage", lest one be caught in an interest rate whipsaw.
It is yet another example in which the "rational actor" of economics textbooks is anything but. Even when the necessary maths are dead easy and entirely in one's favour, there is trepidation in one's gut that doesn't go away.Comment
-
That's not irrationality, that's experience. That's the older locals in Gort objecting to planning permission for an estate because that field has been known to flood under certain low probability circumstances. You're never going to guess what happened five years in, then the State had to rehouse the people involved.
The thing is that while we're probably never going to go back to double digit interest rates, loans are so much bigger now, that a much smaller increase could have the same effect. 20% interest rates on the equivalent of a £100k mortgage, is the same interest cost as 5% on a mortgage of £400k. However most people are violently opposed to making housing cheaper, as they're not going to be in the market for a cheaper house, and it reduces the value of the house that they own.
But the thing you describe is important. People generally have to live through something really bad to realize how bad things can actually get .I'll put it to you this way ursus, it's a lot better to be the way you are, than it is to think that the current status quo is all there is. One of the most depressing things about the whole brexit discussion, is that people in the UK have literally no scope for realizing just how bad things can get, because nothing really bad has happened in britain in living memory.Comment
-
Wow.Comment
-
Not a real surprise. Indications of significant Russian funding have been around for years,Comment
-
'kin 'ell!Comment
-
EIM linked to this on Facebook. On the face of it it doesn't seem that we're dealing with the creme de la creme of the illicit underworld arms trade. That's a 40 year old missile, that almost certainly wouldn't work very well (The fuel degrades over time), and it is kind of useless without the 50 year old french jet fighter to fire it, which really limits your potential pool of customers. One of the things you can infer from the existence of a 40 year old missile is that no-one has wanted to buy it for the last 40 years. If this missile didn't get sold to Iraq in the iran iraq war, it was never going to get sold. I imagine it to be part of a hazing ritual for the newbies at the international convention for arms dealers. They have to buy the drinks and pay for dinner until they can manage to offload this missile on some wet behind the ears wannabe.Comment
-
You just don't understand Italian (not that) neo-fascist culture.
There has been a bit of a debate in the Italian press on just how operational the missile is. It is Qatari and was designed to be fired from an aircraft.Comment
-
I believe that the Qataris actually have some of the requisite planes.
The muppets wanted almost half a million euro for it, and were evidently surprised that they weren't getting any takers.
They also liked to collect memorabilia that went quite a ways beyond the usual Mussolini nostalgia tat (though the Nazi Red Cross is an interesting concept)
Comment
-
Oh I'm sure it could do damage. You just wouldn't be sure to whom. They would have been better off stealing cannonballs, because at least you could sell them for scrap. Their best bet for getting rid of it would have been to sell it on E-bay as a surprisingly heavy film prop.Comment
-
I'm pretty sure that you are a native of the EU country with the highest quotient of meaningful expertise in contraband weaponry.
Not everyone is so lucky.Comment
-
I believe that the Qataris actually have some of the requisite planes.
hmm. If I were a oil despot, and someone stole a missile from me, and tried to sell it back to me, I'd be very tempted to kill them, and everyone belonging to them, on principle. Also relationships between France and Qatar are.....cordial. They could always buy a new one from the maker, that hasn't been hidden in a cowshed. I mean just think of all the qataris the french had to bribe to get them to buy it in the first place?
I'm pretty sure that you are a native of the EU country with the highest quotient of meaningful expertise in contraband weaponry.
I really wouldn't be sure about that. Firstly those people mostly don't live in this country, and they're all over 70 now. It wasn't just Leo Varadkar who came into trinity the year after me There was also a fellow called Gerry McGeough. One of those seemingly pleasant friendly people, who knows the name of everyone he's ever met. If I were to meet him today I'm fairly sure that he would both recognize me and remember my name. I've since seen a video of him trying to buy a stinger missile from the FBI. (thanks Whitey bulger) He wound up going back inside because of his lack of enthusiasm for the peace process. There's no real skill involved in receiving the gift of 50 tonnes of libyan army surplus, and some of their efforts to get guns in from the US were not that successful. I suppose it it tricky to send an anti-materiel rifle through the post.
We have quite the little gang war going on in Dublin at the moment, but those guns just come in with the drugs shipments, and the main gun runner just got 10 years yesterday, while the other gun smuggler is a neighbour of Sean of the Shed, and just got done for possession of a Stun gun disguised as a torch. It would seem that the midlands police have their own reasons for wanting to lock him up for a long time.Last edited by The Awesome Berbaslug!!!; 16-07-2019, 14:36.Comment
-
You know how it is.
You are a minor princeling with control over a relatively remote arsenal of less-than-current weaponry when that weekend in Paris costs a few hundred thousand euro more than you budgeted for and AmEx keeps calling your mobile.
There is no evidence that they were trying to sell it back to the Qataris. It sounds more like the Italian equivalent of the "guy down the pub" scenario.Comment
-
yeah. It really seems to be the old Port story doesn't it? Someone steals something out of a crate, gets it home and realizes it's too valuable and specialized to sell. I bet this was happening in phoenecian times.Comment
-
I've toyed with doing a piece on the absolute carnage wreaked by shipwrecked cargoes of various kinds over the ages.Comment
-
But the thing that would be nagging away at you, is all of the similar incidents that have long been forgotten, because the cargo either killed everyone or destroyed civilization to the point where it couldn't be recorded. There's so much that is lost to us .Comment
Comment