At around 07:00 today (5/7/12) British armed police have closed the M6 motorway, surrounded a bus/coach and got out their hazardous material kit after a passenger was seen "behaving suspiciously." What appears to be a anti-terrorist incident now (10:30) seems to be ending safely.
This is actually a much more dramatic version of an incident that happened to me on a bus journey between Madrid and Barcelona in Spain in I think 2006. Therefore apart from the obvious pre-Olympic al-Qaeda terrorism element this seems to be Britain's response to a bank seige/mass shooting that took place in Germany yesterday (4/7/12). I've no idea what the Germany incident was about but Britain are clearly trying to find out if it had anything to do with the LIBOR scandal.
Continuing with the al-Qaeda/Olympic theme London's Metropolitan police have today arrested six Muslims in Ealing and Newham in London. While I don't want to get into a position of laying down a challenge I actually think the chances of al-Qaeda attacking the Olympics are incredibly small. With the pull-out from Afghanistan, the situation in Syria, the situation in Libya and the knock-on effects in Mali al-Qaeda are actually in the strongest position they've been in for years. Therefore I think they're unlikely to jeopardise that by causing an atrocity on the global stage. However the US' drone program has significantly degraded the al-Qaeda leadership and communication channels so some British based lone-wolves might try something stupid but it's likely to be just something stupid.
Thursday, 5 July 2012
Wednesday, 4 July 2012
Darned Internet Connection
At around 01:00 on 5/7/12 it's down again and there is no way I'm writing up the discovery of the Higgs Boston particle on my smartphone even if it was a genuinely cool science thing that happened yesterday.
I might give it another go in the morning.
Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone on O2
I might give it another go in the morning.
Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone on O2
Well I Don't Think...
"The Killing" was that bad. Even if my father did decide that episode 10 of the second US season was a good time to start watching. He must have read the phrase "72 hour psych hold" in the listings somewhere.
Anyway at around 23:30 on 4/7/12 my tip is try and remember the characters that were not in it.
Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone on O2
Anyway at around 23:30 on 4/7/12 my tip is try and remember the characters that were not in it.
Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone on O2
Barclays and LIBOR.
Last Wednesday (27/6/12) Britain's Barclays Bank agreed to pay a fine of USD93million to Britain's Financial Services Authority (FSA) and another fine of USD286million to the USA's Department of Justice (DoJ) for rigging the London Inter-Bank Offered Rate (LIBOR) of interest for Sterling, the Euro and the Yen. The deal with the FSA prevents Barclays British customers from suing the bank to recover any losses but the DoJ deal does leave the door open to litigation. Essentially Barclays have done three things wrong;
Firstly they've rigged LIBOR. This is the rate of interest that banks pay to borrow money from each other on the open market. Long term LIBOR trends along with other factors such as the Bank of England base rate eventually have an effect on the rate of interest you are paid on your bank savings and the rate of interest you pay on your mortgage/car loan. However LIBOR rigging has two much more immediate and significant effects. Large organisations like multi-national corporations, the NHS and local government bodies rarely keep the cash reserves they need to meet their day to day expenses such as their pay-roll. Instead they borrow the cash on a short-term basis (often over-night) and pay the LIBOR on those loans. So if the LIBOR is too high those organisations can't borrow the money they need to pay their workers and go bankrupt. Also there are literally thousands of LIBOR indexed derivative products on the market. These range from things like futures to those infamous credit default swaps. However they are basically just spread bets like you would place on a cricket match or a basketball game which use the LIBOR as the score. So if you guess the LIBOR correctly you make a fortune but if you guess wrong (even by one basis point - 0.01%) you lose a fortune. In 2011 LIBOR indexed derivatives were worth in the region of USD554trillion and combined with LIBOR indexed loans on any given day can be worth several times the value of the GDP of the entire planet.
The second thing Barclays were fined for is mis-selling fixed-rate LIBOR indexed loans and LIBOR indexed loan insurance to small and medium sized business that lack the wherewithal to cope with what are quite complex financial products. Basically this was the Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) scandal but for commercial rather then retail customers. Putting aside the significant mis-selling issue this is particularly bad because having sold lots of loans that are fixed to a high LIBOR level or offering insurance against LIBOR going above a certain level Barclays have then deliberately driven down the LIBOR making these products worse then useless. As many of these products include stiff penalty clauses that run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars they have forced many of these small and medium sized businesses either into bankruptcy or to the point of bankruptcy.
The big thing that Barclays haven't been fined for though is their role in the collapse of many British retail banks during the 2008 credit crunch. Although there were many causes for the crunch - primarily sub-prime loans going bad - what actually drove many of these banks including Northern Rock, Alliance & Leicester, Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS including Natwest and Ulster Bank), Lloyds-TSB and Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) over the edge from crisis to catastrophe was the rising LIBOR which cut off their access to day to day funding. So by rigging the LIBOR Barclays appear to have played a central role in forcing most British banks to need government bailouts. This created a situation where really only two British high-street banks (HSBC & Santander) are now not wholly owned or partly owned by the British Government/State. This has significantly blurred the line between the private sector and state sector to the point where Britain is now more comparable to China or Mubarak-era Egypt then a free-market economy.
Quite apart from the epic fraud the Barclays scandal is particularly controversial because in intelligence circles Barclays has long been viewed as Britains dirty bank. That is to say Barclays goes and does the things that the British Government/State wants done but can't be seen doing. For example two of it's customers Huntington Life Sciences (HLS) who supply animals for vivisection and EDO MBM who make high-tech weapons systems/drones would both have been put out of business now by protest action if it wasn't for Barclays being prepared to back them at a loss. Also Barclays has been involved in helping the Iranian government circumvent US-led international sanctions in order to help increase British influence in the middle-east at the expense of the US and the European Union (EU). The close relationship between the British Government/State and Barclays has created a deep suspicion that Barclays LIBOR rigging was actually official British Government/State policy rather then the action of a few rouge traders. In response to this suspicion the British Government/State has tried to limit the scope of the scandal by setting up a narrow Parliamentary Inquiry rather then a wider Leveson-style Judicial Inquiry and seemingly hung Barclays out to dry by insisting that it's Chief Executive Bob Diamond and it's Chief Operating Officer Jerry del Missier resign and putting on a show of pulling Bob Diamond in for a grilling in front of a House of Commons Select Committee today (4/7/12). The reason for this approach is pretty obvious because if the world concludes that the LIBOR rigging is British rather then Barclays policy they will no longer want to do business with British banks and will certainly insist that LIBOR is no-longer used as an international benchmark.
Firstly they've rigged LIBOR. This is the rate of interest that banks pay to borrow money from each other on the open market. Long term LIBOR trends along with other factors such as the Bank of England base rate eventually have an effect on the rate of interest you are paid on your bank savings and the rate of interest you pay on your mortgage/car loan. However LIBOR rigging has two much more immediate and significant effects. Large organisations like multi-national corporations, the NHS and local government bodies rarely keep the cash reserves they need to meet their day to day expenses such as their pay-roll. Instead they borrow the cash on a short-term basis (often over-night) and pay the LIBOR on those loans. So if the LIBOR is too high those organisations can't borrow the money they need to pay their workers and go bankrupt. Also there are literally thousands of LIBOR indexed derivative products on the market. These range from things like futures to those infamous credit default swaps. However they are basically just spread bets like you would place on a cricket match or a basketball game which use the LIBOR as the score. So if you guess the LIBOR correctly you make a fortune but if you guess wrong (even by one basis point - 0.01%) you lose a fortune. In 2011 LIBOR indexed derivatives were worth in the region of USD554trillion and combined with LIBOR indexed loans on any given day can be worth several times the value of the GDP of the entire planet.
The second thing Barclays were fined for is mis-selling fixed-rate LIBOR indexed loans and LIBOR indexed loan insurance to small and medium sized business that lack the wherewithal to cope with what are quite complex financial products. Basically this was the Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) scandal but for commercial rather then retail customers. Putting aside the significant mis-selling issue this is particularly bad because having sold lots of loans that are fixed to a high LIBOR level or offering insurance against LIBOR going above a certain level Barclays have then deliberately driven down the LIBOR making these products worse then useless. As many of these products include stiff penalty clauses that run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars they have forced many of these small and medium sized businesses either into bankruptcy or to the point of bankruptcy.
The big thing that Barclays haven't been fined for though is their role in the collapse of many British retail banks during the 2008 credit crunch. Although there were many causes for the crunch - primarily sub-prime loans going bad - what actually drove many of these banks including Northern Rock, Alliance & Leicester, Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS including Natwest and Ulster Bank), Lloyds-TSB and Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) over the edge from crisis to catastrophe was the rising LIBOR which cut off their access to day to day funding. So by rigging the LIBOR Barclays appear to have played a central role in forcing most British banks to need government bailouts. This created a situation where really only two British high-street banks (HSBC & Santander) are now not wholly owned or partly owned by the British Government/State. This has significantly blurred the line between the private sector and state sector to the point where Britain is now more comparable to China or Mubarak-era Egypt then a free-market economy.
Quite apart from the epic fraud the Barclays scandal is particularly controversial because in intelligence circles Barclays has long been viewed as Britains dirty bank. That is to say Barclays goes and does the things that the British Government/State wants done but can't be seen doing. For example two of it's customers Huntington Life Sciences (HLS) who supply animals for vivisection and EDO MBM who make high-tech weapons systems/drones would both have been put out of business now by protest action if it wasn't for Barclays being prepared to back them at a loss. Also Barclays has been involved in helping the Iranian government circumvent US-led international sanctions in order to help increase British influence in the middle-east at the expense of the US and the European Union (EU). The close relationship between the British Government/State and Barclays has created a deep suspicion that Barclays LIBOR rigging was actually official British Government/State policy rather then the action of a few rouge traders. In response to this suspicion the British Government/State has tried to limit the scope of the scandal by setting up a narrow Parliamentary Inquiry rather then a wider Leveson-style Judicial Inquiry and seemingly hung Barclays out to dry by insisting that it's Chief Executive Bob Diamond and it's Chief Operating Officer Jerry del Missier resign and putting on a show of pulling Bob Diamond in for a grilling in front of a House of Commons Select Committee today (4/7/12). The reason for this approach is pretty obvious because if the world concludes that the LIBOR rigging is British rather then Barclays policy they will no longer want to do business with British banks and will certainly insist that LIBOR is no-longer used as an international benchmark.
Tuesday, 3 July 2012
The RAF Lose Two Planes.
Or at least they claim they did. At around 13:00 today (3/7/12) Britain's Royal AirForce (RAF) claimed to have lost two Tornado GR4 jet fighter/bombers out of RAF Lossiemouth in the Moray Firth off the coast of Scotland. The two crew from one of the aircraft were recovered alive at around 15:00. The reason why the RAF have a base at Lossiemouth is to prevent an air-attack from the Norwegian sea. During the cold war they used to play a game with the USSR whereby the Soviets would fly a bomber into British airspace and then see how long it would take for the Tornadoes based at RAF to respond and intercept.
In other news my father and I went to the supermarket today at around 13:00 and returned around 15:00. So the order of the day seems to be poke the Russian bear in order to kill all the Syrians.
In other news my father and I went to the supermarket today at around 13:00 and returned around 15:00. So the order of the day seems to be poke the Russian bear in order to kill all the Syrians.
It's Tuesday Night
I'm back from pub and emailing this in out of pure laziness.
Apparently today (3/7/12) in the Barclays scandal the Chief Executive Bob Diamond and the Chief Operating Officer Jerry De Messier have both resigned and the bank's Chairman Marcus Agius has un-resigned.
Personally I still trying to think up a way of explaining LIBOR indexed derivative swaps in something vaguely resembling the English language. I doubt I'll make much progress this evening
Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone on O2
Apparently today (3/7/12) in the Barclays scandal the Chief Executive Bob Diamond and the Chief Operating Officer Jerry De Messier have both resigned and the bank's Chairman Marcus Agius has un-resigned.
Personally I still trying to think up a way of explaining LIBOR indexed derivative swaps in something vaguely resembling the English language. I doubt I'll make much progress this evening
Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone on O2
Operation Oil Theft: Month 17, Week 4, Day 4.
Today (3/7/12) Libyan ex-pats living in Canada, Germany, Jordan, United Arab Emirates (UAE), the UK and the USA have begun voting in the election for the General National Congress (GNC). On Saturday (7/7/12) registered voters in Libya itself will go to the polls in the nation's first real election to decide the make-up of the body that will replace the National Transitional Council (NTC) and appoint the panel that will re-write the nation's constitution. I will try and prepare a post specifically covering that election before Saturday. However for now I will concentrate on some of the other events that have been taking place in Libya.
Yesterday (2/7/12) Melinda Taylor - an International Criminal Court (ICC) lawyer representing Saif al-Islam Qaddafi was released by the Zintan Brigade militia. You may remember that on June 7th (7/6/12) Ms Taylor and her Lebanese interpreter Helene Assaf were arrested by the Zintan Brigade over an ever changing list of allegations including passing letters to Saif al-Islam, concealing the location of Mohammed Ismail and possessing a spy camera (cellphone). Due to the lack of consistency in the allegations and the lack of evidence to support them the arrests seemed to be nothing more then a kidnapping on the part of the Zintan Brigade in order to force themselves into negotiations between the NTC and the ICC over the Saif al-Islam case. They certainly succeeded in creating a large and high level negotiation with the President of the ICC Sang-Hyun Song travelling to Libya to handle the negotiation personally. However the Zintan Brigade don't seem to have achieved anything more then that with Ms' Taylor and Assaf being released with no admission of wrongdoing by the ICC because they don't appear to have done anything wrong by any accepted international standard. Libya's Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammed Abdul Aziz has declared though that the pair will be tried in absentia on July 23rd (23/7/12). As the pair won't be present at their trial they will be unable to mount an effective defence so when they are inevitably convicted the only penalty will be that they'll be unable to visit Libya again. All things considered this latest incident has left people more convinced that Libya is not yet able to give Saif al-Islam anything resembling a fair trial.
The purpose of announcing this phantom trial seems to be an attempt to appease the Zintan Brigade who seem more intent then ever to use violence and bully-boy tactics to get what they want. Four days after they arrested Ms Taylor the Zintan Brigade claimed that some of their members had been killed by members of Mashasha tribe in the Nafusa mountains in the north-west of the country on June 11th (11/6/12). They responded by attacking the Mashasha tribe with heavy weapons triggering 9 days of fierce fighting that left 105 people dead and 500 wounded. The fighting got so bad that the NTC were forced to declare the area a military zone on June 16th (16/6/12) and send in the Libyan National Army (LNA) to keep the two factions apart and negotiate a peace deal. Therefore the whole incident seems to have been contrived by the Zintan Brigade in order to open another channel of negotiation with the NTC over Saif al-Islam and send the message that they're prepared to continue fighting and killing until the get exactly what they want. If Libya is going to become a stable and prosperous nation that sort of behaviour is simply not acceptable.
There has also been significant violence in the Kufra region in the south-east of the country. The conflict there has been taking place on and off since February-2012 and stems from tensions between the predominately Black Tebu/Toubou tribe that fought alongside Qaddafi and the predominately Arab Zway tribe who fought against Qaddafi. This latest round of fighting that began on June 24th (24/6/12) and has so far killed an estimated 100 people has been between the Tebu and the Libya Shield militia. This was formed out of half a dozen other militias in response to fighting between the Tebu and the Abu Seif tribe in Sebha in May-2012. The presence of this militia made up of men who spent most of last year fighting Qaddafi's "Black mercenaries" coupled with recent decisions to exclude thousands of Tebu from the upcoming election seem to have created a belief amongst the Tebu that the Shield militia is trying to racially purge the Tebu out of Libya. Therefore it would probably be better to send the more disciplined LNA to deal with the situation in Kufra and have the Shield militia deal with any problems in the less racially diverse north of the country.
Yesterday (2/7/12) Melinda Taylor - an International Criminal Court (ICC) lawyer representing Saif al-Islam Qaddafi was released by the Zintan Brigade militia. You may remember that on June 7th (7/6/12) Ms Taylor and her Lebanese interpreter Helene Assaf were arrested by the Zintan Brigade over an ever changing list of allegations including passing letters to Saif al-Islam, concealing the location of Mohammed Ismail and possessing a spy camera (cellphone). Due to the lack of consistency in the allegations and the lack of evidence to support them the arrests seemed to be nothing more then a kidnapping on the part of the Zintan Brigade in order to force themselves into negotiations between the NTC and the ICC over the Saif al-Islam case. They certainly succeeded in creating a large and high level negotiation with the President of the ICC Sang-Hyun Song travelling to Libya to handle the negotiation personally. However the Zintan Brigade don't seem to have achieved anything more then that with Ms' Taylor and Assaf being released with no admission of wrongdoing by the ICC because they don't appear to have done anything wrong by any accepted international standard. Libya's Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammed Abdul Aziz has declared though that the pair will be tried in absentia on July 23rd (23/7/12). As the pair won't be present at their trial they will be unable to mount an effective defence so when they are inevitably convicted the only penalty will be that they'll be unable to visit Libya again. All things considered this latest incident has left people more convinced that Libya is not yet able to give Saif al-Islam anything resembling a fair trial.
The purpose of announcing this phantom trial seems to be an attempt to appease the Zintan Brigade who seem more intent then ever to use violence and bully-boy tactics to get what they want. Four days after they arrested Ms Taylor the Zintan Brigade claimed that some of their members had been killed by members of Mashasha tribe in the Nafusa mountains in the north-west of the country on June 11th (11/6/12). They responded by attacking the Mashasha tribe with heavy weapons triggering 9 days of fierce fighting that left 105 people dead and 500 wounded. The fighting got so bad that the NTC were forced to declare the area a military zone on June 16th (16/6/12) and send in the Libyan National Army (LNA) to keep the two factions apart and negotiate a peace deal. Therefore the whole incident seems to have been contrived by the Zintan Brigade in order to open another channel of negotiation with the NTC over Saif al-Islam and send the message that they're prepared to continue fighting and killing until the get exactly what they want. If Libya is going to become a stable and prosperous nation that sort of behaviour is simply not acceptable.
There has also been significant violence in the Kufra region in the south-east of the country. The conflict there has been taking place on and off since February-2012 and stems from tensions between the predominately Black Tebu/Toubou tribe that fought alongside Qaddafi and the predominately Arab Zway tribe who fought against Qaddafi. This latest round of fighting that began on June 24th (24/6/12) and has so far killed an estimated 100 people has been between the Tebu and the Libya Shield militia. This was formed out of half a dozen other militias in response to fighting between the Tebu and the Abu Seif tribe in Sebha in May-2012. The presence of this militia made up of men who spent most of last year fighting Qaddafi's "Black mercenaries" coupled with recent decisions to exclude thousands of Tebu from the upcoming election seem to have created a belief amongst the Tebu that the Shield militia is trying to racially purge the Tebu out of Libya. Therefore it would probably be better to send the more disciplined LNA to deal with the situation in Kufra and have the Shield militia deal with any problems in the less racially diverse north of the country.
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