Amateur Ramblings

We do like to say YES!

Well, what a ridiculous flyer it was that pooped though my letterbox this morning. The sad thing is, there will be some people right now who need to take this firm up on their 'tempting' offer of 'help'.

 

I have questions:

1. Why would a 'family firm' with '40 years experience' feel the need for a name change?
2. 1,564.2% APR? Really?
3. I presume you don't deliver the cash via the popular fist through the front door method, as depicted above. Can you guarantee that this is not representative of the methods you employ to collect the repayments?
4. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but are there many CEOs of finance companies who also run an internet business called Lights4Fun, pervayors of 'high quality Christmas and decorative lights'?
5. Again, 1,564.2% APR?

And What Do You Do?

My name is Tom Smith.

I love sports. I play rugby for Wales and (until recently) Northampton. I also dabble in basketball (past and present), and have tried my hand at major league baseball, ice hockey and american football. I was one of the runners who symbolically defied Hitler's Olympics. I trained horses.

I currently play cricket for Lancashire and Middlesex. I have played professional football for Tottenham Hotspur; Preston North End, Southampton and Queens Park Rangers; Northampton Town, Leicester City and Manchester United; Kilmarnock; Partick Thistle, Ayr United, Clydebank and Hibernian; and perhaps most famously for Liverpool. I now play for Ipswich Town and Portsmouth right now. I was a pioneer of Aussie rules football.

I like photography. I like photography. I like photography. I like photography. I am a geographical location:

 

I have been known for my flauting, saxophany, and filking, and right now I am the singer in a popular beat combo. I am a disc jockey in Little Rock.

I like my politics: I have been the governor of Newfoundland and Labrador, and Carolina. I was a congressman in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Maryland, and Illinois. I have mayored in Jersey City and Philadelphia. In the UK, I've been a Labour MP.

I spend some of my time now writing (plays and novels). I paint, and I paint some more. I was the Bishop of Carlisle at the end of the 17th century, and I was a general in the American Civil War. I was a mountain-man who told 'tall tales'.

I found time in my hectic 17th century cloth-making life to found the first bank in England outside of London. I built lighthouses in Scotland. I have worked as a physician, a soldier, academic and barrister, and if you need any agricultural, engineering or hydraulic supplies, I can help you out with that. Or, do you need medical advice? I can help with that also.

I am many more things that I have't got the time or space to tell you about.

That is who I am. Who are you?

Share and share alike

I have never bought shares. There has always been a scheme at work whereby you pay a fixed sum into a fund, and after three or five years you use the money you saved to buy shares at the price they were when you joined the scheme. Then you are free to sell at the current market value (though if this is lower than the purchase price, that price would be honoured). The thinking is that the share price is on an ever upward trend.

I'm glad I never joined the scheme, as five years ago the RBS share price was the equivalent of around £9. By last week it had collapsed to forty-something pence. And yesterday it dropped to 12p per share.

I guess we'll now be in government hands for some time yet.

Payback

A couple of people at work are clinging on to the idea that we will still be getting our annual profit -share this year. All staff traditionally receive a payment to reflect the profits made by the RBS Group, and in recent years this has been fixed at 10% of our salaries.

Well, this hope has surely been finally dashed by the revalation this morning that the bank has announced losses in 2008 of around £8 billion. It's actually worse than that, as RBS actually made total losses of £27 billion, but for some reason it is able to write off £20 billion of this staggering total.

It's a good job the firm don't run a loss-share scheme, or else each of the 170,000 employees would be paying the bank £47,058.82 each!