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More Fool 'Im
Sep. 22nd, 2006 10:58 amAs we happily mock the public sector for inefficiencies, jobsworths, money being thrown down the drain and generally being bloody rubbish, it should perhaps serve us well to recall that the private sector can, when they put their mind to it, balls things up to a level that would make DEFRA proud.
Furniture chain MFI, for example, is paying Merchant Equity Partners more than £70m to take their retail business away. Now, when you hear about capitalism and "adding value" and all the upbeat crap spouted by CEOs, you don't hear much mention of their talent for, occasionally, destroying value on a scale of almost incalculable ineptitude. The people in charge of the MFI chain were, to be frank, hopeless, hopeless beyond hopelessness. I tried to buy a bed there once. I needed it in three days' time. They guy had no idea how long it would take for the earliest bed available to be delivered, but he thought it would be "about three weeks". Meanwhile, an eager beaver at the "finance here" section was persuading a young gormless couple how they could order their sparkling new kitchen for just a fiver down and £20 a month for the rest of their lives. You could see where these short-sighted fuckers saw their profit coming from.
And they were wrong, partly because what they sold was crap, partly because the interest rates that they charged were too high, and partly because their staff were useless (matching the senior executives, no doubt). So now our genius company pays another company a fortune to take away the pile of shit that they have created out of what was a powerful retail chain, destroying about half a billion pounds of shareholder value in a matter of 15 years, is my guess. Needless to say, the stockmarket being what it is, the MFI share price rose 8% to 95p on hearing the news, although that won't be much compensation to any poor bastard who foolishly bought the shares 15 year ago and has held them "for the long term".
However, this sequence of value destruction over a decade and a half, although it required a determined incompetence and patience not usually found in our American counterparts, is surely eclipsed by the talent in the US for going broke on a quite spectacular scale in virtually no time at all.
The Amaranth hedge fund had about $9bn under management and my guess is that it managed to lose nearly half of it in a single week, which is good going by anyone's standards. Amaranth fucked up by betting the wrong way on natural gas prices, thinking that they had fallen far enough. As Mr Woodhouse once sagely observed, buying a stock or commodity or whatever because you think it has fallen far enough means that the maxuimum you can lose is, er, all your money.
The fund has now sold off its energy positions to JP Morgan and Citadel at a substantial discount. Anyone want to bet who (anonymously, via brokers, of course) the counterparties were against Amaranth the week before?
++++++++
I don't know if anyone else is suffering the same problem, but yesterday I logged into Paradise just to make sure no-one had hacked in to steal the money that I had sitting there, and an upgrade took place.
All the games on Paradise at 2-4 and 3-6 looked remarkably fishy, so I decided to observe a few hands and perhaps play a bit (I'd already done everything that I wanted to do for the day on Party, Stars, Ultimate, FTP and Virgin, so I thought -- let's go for a full house). Unfortunately the CPU usage shot up to 100% as I opened a single table and the cards were dealt at such a slow rate that two bets had taken place before the button got his second card! Ayone else suffering this problem? I haven't had time to check 2+2 to see what (if anything) is being said about it there, but I may e-mail Paradise and tell them that I am withdrawing my cash because the site is, for me, utterly unplayable at the moment.
+++++++++++
Lewisham Hill is to get Speed bumps/humps! This is good news. It means that my road is now de facto seen as a residential road rather than as a rat run from Shooters Hill to Lewisham.
Of course, they aren't called Speed Bumps/Humps any more. The "traffic calming" measures (which always makes me think of psychologists walking the streets telling automobiles not to get so het up about things) are now called "speed cushions". Marvellous. Speed cushions. Sort of like the kind of thing you throw on the sofa. How long do you think a subcommittee took to come up with a word which they thought would be less upsetting than humps or bumps? Those meetings must have been a laugh and a half.
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Furniture chain MFI, for example, is paying Merchant Equity Partners more than £70m to take their retail business away. Now, when you hear about capitalism and "adding value" and all the upbeat crap spouted by CEOs, you don't hear much mention of their talent for, occasionally, destroying value on a scale of almost incalculable ineptitude. The people in charge of the MFI chain were, to be frank, hopeless, hopeless beyond hopelessness. I tried to buy a bed there once. I needed it in three days' time. They guy had no idea how long it would take for the earliest bed available to be delivered, but he thought it would be "about three weeks". Meanwhile, an eager beaver at the "finance here" section was persuading a young gormless couple how they could order their sparkling new kitchen for just a fiver down and £20 a month for the rest of their lives. You could see where these short-sighted fuckers saw their profit coming from.
And they were wrong, partly because what they sold was crap, partly because the interest rates that they charged were too high, and partly because their staff were useless (matching the senior executives, no doubt). So now our genius company pays another company a fortune to take away the pile of shit that they have created out of what was a powerful retail chain, destroying about half a billion pounds of shareholder value in a matter of 15 years, is my guess. Needless to say, the stockmarket being what it is, the MFI share price rose 8% to 95p on hearing the news, although that won't be much compensation to any poor bastard who foolishly bought the shares 15 year ago and has held them "for the long term".
However, this sequence of value destruction over a decade and a half, although it required a determined incompetence and patience not usually found in our American counterparts, is surely eclipsed by the talent in the US for going broke on a quite spectacular scale in virtually no time at all.
The Amaranth hedge fund had about $9bn under management and my guess is that it managed to lose nearly half of it in a single week, which is good going by anyone's standards. Amaranth fucked up by betting the wrong way on natural gas prices, thinking that they had fallen far enough. As Mr Woodhouse once sagely observed, buying a stock or commodity or whatever because you think it has fallen far enough means that the maxuimum you can lose is, er, all your money.
The fund has now sold off its energy positions to JP Morgan and Citadel at a substantial discount. Anyone want to bet who (anonymously, via brokers, of course) the counterparties were against Amaranth the week before?
++++++++
I don't know if anyone else is suffering the same problem, but yesterday I logged into Paradise just to make sure no-one had hacked in to steal the money that I had sitting there, and an upgrade took place.
All the games on Paradise at 2-4 and 3-6 looked remarkably fishy, so I decided to observe a few hands and perhaps play a bit (I'd already done everything that I wanted to do for the day on Party, Stars, Ultimate, FTP and Virgin, so I thought -- let's go for a full house). Unfortunately the CPU usage shot up to 100% as I opened a single table and the cards were dealt at such a slow rate that two bets had taken place before the button got his second card! Ayone else suffering this problem? I haven't had time to check 2+2 to see what (if anything) is being said about it there, but I may e-mail Paradise and tell them that I am withdrawing my cash because the site is, for me, utterly unplayable at the moment.
+++++++++++
Lewisham Hill is to get Speed bumps/humps! This is good news. It means that my road is now de facto seen as a residential road rather than as a rat run from Shooters Hill to Lewisham.
Of course, they aren't called Speed Bumps/Humps any more. The "traffic calming" measures (which always makes me think of psychologists walking the streets telling automobiles not to get so het up about things) are now called "speed cushions". Marvellous. Speed cushions. Sort of like the kind of thing you throw on the sofa. How long do you think a subcommittee took to come up with a word which they thought would be less upsetting than humps or bumps? Those meetings must have been a laugh and a half.
++++++
