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« Last post by mrjonathanr on Yesterday at 02:20:26 pm »
I very much agree with bringing social care funding back into the NHS. The current system where a person gets discharged from hospital into care and then becomes almost immediately a council/social care problem is a nightmare and just creates lots of perverse incentives that do not help the person involved one little bit.
Cheers Dave
Agreed. Its cost is also where property will get cannibalised and wealth concentrated upwards. I suspect a lot of people who imagine that they can pass on homes to their children will find that they won’t be able to, for this reason.
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It's a hard call, on one hand should she be ritually humiliated online by a gang of SJW's, or on the other, quietly taken off to the Gulag for her crimes?
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« Last post by mrjonathanr on Yesterday at 02:17:07 pm »
Revising planning is no bad thing but to focus exclusively on that when the real danger lies elsewhere is a dangerous red herring imo.
Apologies to Nemo if that reads as insulting, you never know on the internet. That wasn’t the intention. It was a little sarcastic poke because our friends in Tufton St would love us to focus on anything but the true cause: the accumulation of massive wealth at the top of society. Taxation is the answer.
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« Last post by stone on Yesterday at 02:12:19 pm »
The actual assets in a sensibly managed fund might be yielding say 4%/year before and after any change in gilt yields from eg 0.5%/year to 0.25%/year. There is perhaps a chance they change from 4%/year to 3.75%/year. Either way it makes no difference to actually paying the pensioners in the future. But it makes a vast change to a present value liability calculation based on those gilt yields.
Consider a typical pension liability that the USS fund is faced with. That would be someone getting a three year fixed term job between the ages of 22 and 25. I suppose they would then be expected to draw a pension when they are 67 until 90 or something. The change in that liability present value from a 0.5% gilt yield to a 0.25% gilt yield is bonkers IMO.
Anyway, for the time being this is mostly of (recent) historical interest since gilt yields are now 4%.
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A climbing partner of mine found this out the hard way, definitely worth getting a system which doesn't rely on similar sounding words with the same number of syllables being heard over long distances.
Oooooff!! We figured this out on our training burn - "safe, off-belay" was sufficiently different to all our other calls and seemed to work pretty well... Lots of French folk we saw seem to have gone down the walkie talkie route so might invest for our next trip....
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This is quite a surprising post to read Nemo. Has someone in Tufton Street hijacked your account?
This is a lazy generalisation surely mjr? The YIMBY movement, for want of a better term, which calls for a vast acceleration in house building, has proponents from across the political spectrum. Starmers proposals to bulldoze the planning system are one of the things that excite me the most. Green belt land is not all the same and the current system is far too restrictive. There are large swathes of green belt land where there should be no objections to building; referred to as the grey belt in this piece. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/oct/11/labour-keir-starmer-pledges-to-build-new-towns-utilising-grey-belt-areasLocal activists and objectors have for too long leveraged the planning system for their own ends and blocked totally sensible development. In my own town a decaying brownfield site has sat derelict for years while councillors of all political stripes played to the nimby gallery and rejected applications for housing. These people should be ignored, which Starmer has commendably said he will do. From today, relating to YIMBYism from an infrastructure perspective: https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/will-labour-actually-get-britain
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« Last post by yetix on Yesterday at 01:41:54 pm »
Having done the boulder without such a close spot, but having received a similar dabby spot whilst working the moves out, for me there was a difference in the difficulty of the moves to be honest, it was much easier to keep the hips in etc.
Whether spotting like this is acceptable though I think is more down to personal preference and ethics, and as long as this lady is happy with her ascent I don't really see a problem.
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« Last post by AJM on Yesterday at 01:41:35 pm »
Yes I think the BOE should have leaned very heavily on the Pension Regulator and anyway the Pension Regulator should have themselves stopped this.
Firms with Defined Benefit Schemes wanted the swaps not to serve those on the pension schemes but to make their owe company accounts look rosier to the firms' shareholders and creditors. The accounting rules mean that company accounts need to have the Defined Benefit Scheme as a liability valued as though it were a series of gilts able to fund those future pensions. So when interest rates are very low, a tiny further fall in gilt yields results in a huge increase in that notional present value of the pension fund liability (even though it has no material effect on whether the pensions can be paid by a sensibly managed fund).
If the sponsors wanted their accounts to be hedged against that, that is something they should be paying for, not something the pensioners on their scheme should be exposed to. They could for instance have hedged using options instead of swaps. Then there would have been no risk of calamity and merely an ongoing cost drag to the sponsoring firm.
Stepping back, the most sensible (IMO) way to avoid all the mess would be to change the accounting rules such that defined benefit pension liabilities on company accounts instead got a notional present value based on a sensible conservative view of what a well managed scheme yields. So say 3.5%/year over inflation.
A few thoughts: - the basis on which pension schemes appears on the company balance sheet (which incidentally is based on bond yields rather than gilt yields) is not in my experience the basis on which the scheme is usually managed. So those swaps and so on have not been bought to benefit the sponsors balance sheet. - as Stabbsy suggests, it's worth making sure you understand why schemes might want to use swaps in managing the schemes interest rate exposure, rather than gilts, before assuming that banning schemes from using swaps would be a net improvement. It isn't a thing that would happen in isolation with no consequences further down the line. - whilst I wouldn't argue that pension scheme valuation always gives meaningful answers, the way it behaves is trying to impart information. So when you say "when interest rates are very low, a tiny further fall in gilt yields results in a huge increase in that notional present value of the pension fund liability (even though it has no material effect on whether the pensions can be paid by a sensibly managed fund)" - if the scheme as a whole (i.e. considering the assets as well as the liabilities) looks worse in a lower interest rate environment, that is meaningful information, not just an abstract artefact of the calculation.
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« Last post by Davo on Yesterday at 01:22:19 pm »
I've said it before on here, but to me, the number one problem for why so many of the country are living miserable lives, is the cost of housing. And that the government can start doing something about by simply getting out of the way. ie: Essentially make a bonfire out of most of the planning regulations in this country. You can't build anything anywhere in the UK. Environmentalism has been weaponised by every NIMBY out there, to block anything being built. That needs to end.
This is quite a surprising post to read Nemo. Has someone in Tufton Street hijacked your account?
The reason housing is so problematical has very little to do with restrictive planning. No doubt some improvements should be made, but a bonfire of the green belt will do nothing to ameliorate the problem. Namely, asset prices.
This isn’t being driven by a shortage of supply, but by an excess of money driving asset values up and out of reach of what used to be called the working classes. The middle classes will be similarly impoverished in a generation. Thatcher’s ’home owning revolution’ has been great for foreign owned capital owning UK homes. Bob and Brenda in Birmingham, not so much. You are talking about tinkering with symptoms, not causes.
Primary steps to address this:
1 Seriously high levels of tax on the very rich whose wealth has grown exponentially in the last decade are needed. Billionaires can leave, but their fixed assets can’t.
2 Legislate against housing being owned by funds rather than individuals or UK owned business.
Secondary steps:
3 Rebuild significant social housing stock.
4 Fix social care. Ideally, bring it back into the NHS, or set up a dedicated national body rather than the fragmented current state of affairs.
5 Raise IHT thresholds (eg £1m) so that ordinary householders can keep their homes. Currently, once forced to sell they are just another spiralling asset increasingly out of the reach of ordinary people.
6 Rigorously enforce high levels of IHT compliance above the threshold.
7 Introduce fair rent legislation.
8 Increase house building, especially on brownfield sites.
Without 1 and 2 we are all going to be renting in a generation or two.
I wholeheartedly agree with all your points and ideas here. Housing should quite clearly be for accommodation and not another asset that the already wealthy accumulate and put of the reach of most people. I very much agree with bringing social care funding back into the NHS. The current system where a person gets discharged from hospital into care and then becomes almost immediately a council/social care problem is a nightmare and just creates lots of perverse incentives that do not help the person involved one little bit. Cheers Dave
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« Last post by SA Chris on Yesterday at 01:14:36 pm »
Remind me of a story (don't know how true) of a German climber visiting SA who was getting belayed by a local, he disappeared out of sight over a bulge, but shouted down "Slack!" so the belayer fed out some rope. Again he shouted "Slack!" so the guy fed out some more, he shouted "slack!" a third time, and then fell off, taking a massive whip with all the rope in the system. As he was lowered off he asked "So what is the word you use when you want someone to hold you on the rope?"
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