![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Somehow I missed the PD James interview of BBC Director-General Mark Thompson when she was guest editor of Today in late December. Which was a pity, because I heard highlights of it last night and it was magnificent. Indeed, listerners wriote in in, er, their dozens, asking that she immediately be brought in as a regular presenter on Today and that, in her spare time, she head the Chilcot Inquiry.
Here was a woman in her late eighties making the BBC d-g look like a fool. Why did this happen? Because, unlike the "journalists" on Today, she didn't play the game, go through the "ritual hostility". Journalists need the politicians as much as the politicians need the journalists. But PD James does not need them.
The Guardian gave some glimpses of this here http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/dec/31/bbc-mark-thompson-pd-james , but they do not show the extent of the discomfiture felt by Thompson when James analytically pointed out that a system where 37 senior executives at the BBC got paid more than the prime minister had to be wrong on one side or the other.
"You have a director of marketing, communications and audiences who gets over £300,000, then there is a director of communications. Well, I thought that's what the previous director was doing, and he gets £225,000. One wonders what actually is going on here?" she asked.
And, well, yes, what could Thompson say? His sole defence seemed to be that these people could earn more elsewhere.
Which, when you think about it, was no defence at all.
The listeners' responses were even more illuminating. "Thompson was clearly out of his depth when face with a real questioner" said one.
Precisely.
It's been quite a morning for bollocks from bosses whose wages we pay. The DVLA managed to lose more than 100,000 blank V5 vehicle registration documents. It sent them to be shredded, but they never arrived. This was a few years ago. Now these documents have started to be used to steal vehicle identities. You think you are buying a clean car, but in fact you are buying a stolen car that has a clean car's identity.
Noel Shanahan, CEO of DVLA, said on screen,
Well, that's so wrong you can't really know where to start. But once again the "real" journalists let him get away with it. "Suppose", I would have liked to have asked him, "suppose you had left them on the street. There is an offence of stealing by finding. Would you have absolved yourself of any responsibility because the person that found these registration documents failed to hand them into the police, thus committing a criminal act?"
Effectively the DVLA registration document is worthless as proof of ownership, all because the DVLA has a useless bunch of incompetents who didn't even think that it might not be too good an idea to just send more than 100,000 blank vehicle registration documents to be shredded with hardly any security in place to make sure that they were shredded. For the DVLA to try to get out of this by saying that it had posted information on its web site telling peiople how to avoid being duped is disingenuous in the extreme, and I hope that someone who has lost money as a result of the DVLA's incompetence takes it to court, and Clive Bennett, ex-DVLA CEO, to court in a personal capacity.
Oh, and Noel Shanahan might care to read this, http://www.dft.gov.uk/dvla/~/media/pdf/publications/Information%20charter.ashx , the DVLA's own charter.
+++++++++++++
Our final "have we learnt nothing?" and "who will think of the children?" moment comes from the Life & Longevity Markets Association (LLMA), which was formed this morning, with the aim of creating a liquid secondary market in longevity risk. AXA, Swiss Re, Legal & General, Prudential and Pension Corp have joined with Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Chase and Royal Bank of Scotland to create the group, which intends to develop standard contracts, a trading index and a valuation model for mortality.
What's wrong with that, you might ask? Well, basically, this organization wants to shift liability for added longevity to the capital markets, because insurers and reinsurers have worked out that the $3.2trn liability in the UK alone is, er, a bit lumpy. Swiss Re head of pricing Jonathan Graham said that "longevity capacity exists within the insurance market at present, but there simply isn't enough to cover the long-term future needs".
So, the plan is to create new secondary contracts -- let's for the sake of argument call them derivatives, and "diversify" the risks into the capital markets. Thus the people who we think have the pension liabilities (our pension providers) will in fact have shovelled that liability out of the back door, paying another counterparty a fixed fee to take on liability above a certain amount (e.g., any liability if people who have just retired live beyond an average age of 94).
Ring any bells?
It should do, because this is just another version of what happened with AIG. The pension providers will be able to show a perfect book to the auditors, discounting the potential additional liabilities if it turns out in 20 years time that everyone is living to be 108. Then, all of a sudden, it turns out that nearly all these hedges have eventually funnelled through to a single company, the future equivalent of AIG, which then says "whoops, sorry, we didn't allow for people living THAT long. We're broke." Pension providers go into shit loads of panic because something they had previously booked at 100% is now worth 30%, if that. The only hope is for the Federal Reserve/UK Government to step in and bail out the future AIG to the tune of a few trillion dollars.
Except, this time round, it can't, because sovereign debt just won't be what it used to be.
And that is how your pension will blow up in your face, circa 2030.
___________________
Here was a woman in her late eighties making the BBC d-g look like a fool. Why did this happen? Because, unlike the "journalists" on Today, she didn't play the game, go through the "ritual hostility". Journalists need the politicians as much as the politicians need the journalists. But PD James does not need them.
The Guardian gave some glimpses of this here http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/dec/31/bbc-mark-thompson-pd-james , but they do not show the extent of the discomfiture felt by Thompson when James analytically pointed out that a system where 37 senior executives at the BBC got paid more than the prime minister had to be wrong on one side or the other.
"You have a director of marketing, communications and audiences who gets over £300,000, then there is a director of communications. Well, I thought that's what the previous director was doing, and he gets £225,000. One wonders what actually is going on here?" she asked.
And, well, yes, what could Thompson say? His sole defence seemed to be that these people could earn more elsewhere.
Which, when you think about it, was no defence at all.
The listeners' responses were even more illuminating. "Thompson was clearly out of his depth when face with a real questioner" said one.
Precisely.
It's been quite a morning for bollocks from bosses whose wages we pay. The DVLA managed to lose more than 100,000 blank V5 vehicle registration documents. It sent them to be shredded, but they never arrived. This was a few years ago. Now these documents have started to be used to steal vehicle identities. You think you are buying a clean car, but in fact you are buying a stolen car that has a clean car's identity.
Noel Shanahan, CEO of DVLA, said on screen,
"When we discovered that these documents had been stolen, we actually went to the police because it is a criminal act.
"If it's a criminal act then clearly we can't be held responsible for that."
Well, that's so wrong you can't really know where to start. But once again the "real" journalists let him get away with it. "Suppose", I would have liked to have asked him, "suppose you had left them on the street. There is an offence of stealing by finding. Would you have absolved yourself of any responsibility because the person that found these registration documents failed to hand them into the police, thus committing a criminal act?"
Effectively the DVLA registration document is worthless as proof of ownership, all because the DVLA has a useless bunch of incompetents who didn't even think that it might not be too good an idea to just send more than 100,000 blank vehicle registration documents to be shredded with hardly any security in place to make sure that they were shredded. For the DVLA to try to get out of this by saying that it had posted information on its web site telling peiople how to avoid being duped is disingenuous in the extreme, and I hope that someone who has lost money as a result of the DVLA's incompetence takes it to court, and Clive Bennett, ex-DVLA CEO, to court in a personal capacity.
Oh, and Noel Shanahan might care to read this, http://www.dft.gov.uk/dvla/~/media/pdf/publications/Information%20charter.ashx , the DVLA's own charter.
+++++++++++++
Our final "have we learnt nothing?" and "who will think of the children?" moment comes from the Life & Longevity Markets Association (LLMA), which was formed this morning, with the aim of creating a liquid secondary market in longevity risk. AXA, Swiss Re, Legal & General, Prudential and Pension Corp have joined with Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Chase and Royal Bank of Scotland to create the group, which intends to develop standard contracts, a trading index and a valuation model for mortality.
What's wrong with that, you might ask? Well, basically, this organization wants to shift liability for added longevity to the capital markets, because insurers and reinsurers have worked out that the $3.2trn liability in the UK alone is, er, a bit lumpy. Swiss Re head of pricing Jonathan Graham said that "longevity capacity exists within the insurance market at present, but there simply isn't enough to cover the long-term future needs".
So, the plan is to create new secondary contracts -- let's for the sake of argument call them derivatives, and "diversify" the risks into the capital markets. Thus the people who we think have the pension liabilities (our pension providers) will in fact have shovelled that liability out of the back door, paying another counterparty a fixed fee to take on liability above a certain amount (e.g., any liability if people who have just retired live beyond an average age of 94).
Ring any bells?
It should do, because this is just another version of what happened with AIG. The pension providers will be able to show a perfect book to the auditors, discounting the potential additional liabilities if it turns out in 20 years time that everyone is living to be 108. Then, all of a sudden, it turns out that nearly all these hedges have eventually funnelled through to a single company, the future equivalent of AIG, which then says "whoops, sorry, we didn't allow for people living THAT long. We're broke." Pension providers go into shit loads of panic because something they had previously booked at 100% is now worth 30%, if that. The only hope is for the Federal Reserve/UK Government to step in and bail out the future AIG to the tune of a few trillion dollars.
Except, this time round, it can't, because sovereign debt just won't be what it used to be.
And that is how your pension will blow up in your face, circa 2030.
___________________
