I'm On Witter
Mar. 3rd, 2011 01:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksA pleasant lunch with Mr Aardvark, aka Doubleday (P) yesterday. There was a queue at Le Relais, so we went to the The Gallery in Austin Friars instead (triple sausage and creamy mash with caramelized onions for me, confit of pork belly for Pete D). Clearly you have to get to Le Relais before 12.15pm if you want to sit down straight away. But the Gallery was perfectly pleasant, and it does offer the plus of high ceilings.
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I've been picking up a sequence of PD James novels for three quid each at Bargain Books. I should have bought the lot as soon as they appeared, rather than just the first in the Dalgleish series. When I returned, numbers two and three in the series had vanished. I've picked up another six in the past couple of days, although when I shall get round to reading them I do not.
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My Broadband has been getting worse and worse, to the extent that I seriously considered booking Virgin to come round to fit a system. However, I have an idea that the problem lies in my decision a few weeks ago to sign up for BT Fon (the 'sharing' system for BT Broadband customers). I strongly suspect that the software update required is causing the conflict with my (non BT Home Hub) router, although there is no mention of the possibility of this on the BT Fon web site. I've now opted back out of BT Fon. With luck this might cause the problem to go away. An engineer is coming round next Friday in any case.
This morning at home (I went to bed at about 8pm and so I was up at 4am) I played for 45 minutes on Full Tilt via my Vodafone Mobile 3G, and it cost the grand total of 15p. In a sense, even given my "heavy" use of Broadband, I probably don't actually download that much data. The only drawback of the Mobile dongle is that I can only use it for one machine at a time (and of course it's useless for the Dell Streak).
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Portugal sold off €1bn of debt on Tuesday, at 4.06% for one-year bonds. We don't know how much the ECB had to step in. Barclays Capital estimated that the ECB bought €19.5bn worth of Portuguese debt last year out of €21.7bn of issuance.
But the ECB and Germany are, effectively, still at each other's throats over this, and the standard political response to such an impasse, "kick it into touch and hope it goes away" won't work here. Germany doesn't want a system that effectively creates a hybrid super-level of bond guarantees. That was the idea when the euro was created in the first place (that the Deutschmark's strength would miraculously transfer itself to the whole euro zone) and look where that got us. If this currency position is extended to the euro-bond position, you get one step closer to federalism, but you are also one step closer to pan-European euro-bonds. One can understand a German government not being keen on effectively signing a blank cheque for other countries' debt issuances.
But the alternative -- that if you want a euro guarantee, then you have to go through some super-body before you can issue debt -- would presumably be unacceptable to any eurozone government bar, er, Germany.
The OTHER alternative, the one which we've been happily predicting, is default, in one form or another. It probably will be called a "restructuring" and, I hope, it is being worked out now. The trouble is, the price of it when it comes to Spain might be selling off half the country's real estate and debt to the Chinese. How ironic. Over 20 years after Reagan's dream of "outspending communism to death" appeared to have come true, the Chinese have come up with another non-military weapon -- they've outworked the west to death.
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++++++++++++++++++++
I've been picking up a sequence of PD James novels for three quid each at Bargain Books. I should have bought the lot as soon as they appeared, rather than just the first in the Dalgleish series. When I returned, numbers two and three in the series had vanished. I've picked up another six in the past couple of days, although when I shall get round to reading them I do not.
+++++++++
My Broadband has been getting worse and worse, to the extent that I seriously considered booking Virgin to come round to fit a system. However, I have an idea that the problem lies in my decision a few weeks ago to sign up for BT Fon (the 'sharing' system for BT Broadband customers). I strongly suspect that the software update required is causing the conflict with my (non BT Home Hub) router, although there is no mention of the possibility of this on the BT Fon web site. I've now opted back out of BT Fon. With luck this might cause the problem to go away. An engineer is coming round next Friday in any case.
This morning at home (I went to bed at about 8pm and so I was up at 4am) I played for 45 minutes on Full Tilt via my Vodafone Mobile 3G, and it cost the grand total of 15p. In a sense, even given my "heavy" use of Broadband, I probably don't actually download that much data. The only drawback of the Mobile dongle is that I can only use it for one machine at a time (and of course it's useless for the Dell Streak).
++++++
Portugal sold off €1bn of debt on Tuesday, at 4.06% for one-year bonds. We don't know how much the ECB had to step in. Barclays Capital estimated that the ECB bought €19.5bn worth of Portuguese debt last year out of €21.7bn of issuance.
But the ECB and Germany are, effectively, still at each other's throats over this, and the standard political response to such an impasse, "kick it into touch and hope it goes away" won't work here. Germany doesn't want a system that effectively creates a hybrid super-level of bond guarantees. That was the idea when the euro was created in the first place (that the Deutschmark's strength would miraculously transfer itself to the whole euro zone) and look where that got us. If this currency position is extended to the euro-bond position, you get one step closer to federalism, but you are also one step closer to pan-European euro-bonds. One can understand a German government not being keen on effectively signing a blank cheque for other countries' debt issuances.
But the alternative -- that if you want a euro guarantee, then you have to go through some super-body before you can issue debt -- would presumably be unacceptable to any eurozone government bar, er, Germany.
The OTHER alternative, the one which we've been happily predicting, is default, in one form or another. It probably will be called a "restructuring" and, I hope, it is being worked out now. The trouble is, the price of it when it comes to Spain might be selling off half the country's real estate and debt to the Chinese. How ironic. Over 20 years after Reagan's dream of "outspending communism to death" appeared to have come true, the Chinese have come up with another non-military weapon -- they've outworked the west to death.
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