Stiff legs
Mar. 15th, 2012 01:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksWell, I broke the Dell Streak again – it fell out of my inside pocket when I was putting on my leather jacket, although I have no idea how – so decided that I needed a new phone. That resulted in a trip to O2 to buy a new mobile phone -- which turned out to be an HTC Rhyme. Still not sure if it was the right choice and that I should instead have bought a more expensive larger screen phone. On the other hand, if I get used to this, then I could keep the phone and go for a tablet with a data allowance for a fiver a month or whatever it is they charge.
Various busy-ness (not excluding the three hours spent reinstalling stuff on the new phone) has meant that I've neither played poker, practised the piano nor watched TV for three days. I went to the theatre on Tuesday and had the phone fun last night. Monday was just a general tidying up and sleeping evening.
On Tuesday I had an hour's training with another trainer, since Nick has gone to Brazil for a couple of weeks. Even though the training was similar, the slight changes in exercise, and the things that a new trainer spots which your established trainer might not, all made for an interesting hour.
Ryan wanted to give me 24kg dumbbells for the lunges, a weight which had me staring in disbelief. However, he assured me that I could manage 20kg on either side, and, indeed I could (and this was after the squats exercise).
And at the end we did an interesting (but killing) planks exercise. That was so good in terms of reward for work that I did it again yesterday.
But today I've got the standard two-day-delay-world-of-pain in the legs after a tough new workout. And this was despite a really strict stretching-off period after we had finished.
But it's still the diet, the diet, that's occupying my mind the most. I mean, I work really hard at my training, and I put myself through a lot of pain for the rewards achieved (which really ARE worthwhile!) only to undo 75% of it through not being tough enough on myself over diet.
The reason is not hard to find. The 'hour of pain' is just an hour, whereas the "eating very sensibly" is a 24-hour task. If I could just treat that temptation of a sugar rush the same way I do a whisky or a cigarette, then I could do it, but, for the moment, I'm not managing it.
I think that I'm still reducing the amount of fat, on average, but far slower than I could do if I were properly strict. Far slower.
+++++++++
A lot of money could have been made last October if you were an institutional player with the right mindset. I'm seeing figures all over the place showing that this was when many financial institutions got out of Italian bonds and global equities -- and, in good Goldman Sachs terms, it was the worst time to do it. I did right on the equities and I had no chance on the Italian bonds -- if there had been aan easy way to punt on the yield dropping, I would have taken it.
Because, quite simply, Italy is not Greece. It isn't even Spain (and last October the yields on the Italian bonds actually went higher than Spain's). Notwithstanding my opinion that the country is a political and economic mess, it is, like the USA, a country that can cope with being useless far better than can Greece or (indeed) could the UK. Indeed it's perhaps because the country can survive such uselessicity that it has failed to get its act together. Like Ireland was 40 years ago, the youth is leaving, in Italy's case because the labour market is stitched up by a conservative and aging workforce. But it has a system that means it can survive for a long time before the shit hits the fan.
While my opinion on the euro has not changed, it's interesting what strategy has been employed. By delaying and delaying, banks and insurers have used free cash flow to reduce their exposure to peripheral debt. Meanwhile the ECB has printed money. Of course, it claims not to have printed money. But that's a bit like their claims that the Greek default was not a default. What it called it was a "long-term refinancing operation" (LTRO). And what that was, was another 'kick the can down the road' idea.
As with cereal subsidies in emerging nations, the LTRO will be a difficult hole to get out of, even though it solves some short-term problems. What happens at the end of the three-year 1% loans so eagerly snapped up by even solvent institutions? If that €1trn is taken off the market in a single year, the economic strain will be immense. If the financial institutions did what they have been doing ahead of the Greek default -- building up their balance sheets so that they could make the write-off without going bust –- then we could probably survive. But the financial institutions have toher calls on their cash -- not least, their investors. And with Greece it was a race against time. With the LTRO there will be the strong hunch that the ECB will blink first and will agree to a rollover at, say 1.25%. This will give us the LT RO-RO, kind of a cross between a bus and a ferry.
__________________
Various busy-ness (not excluding the three hours spent reinstalling stuff on the new phone) has meant that I've neither played poker, practised the piano nor watched TV for three days. I went to the theatre on Tuesday and had the phone fun last night. Monday was just a general tidying up and sleeping evening.
On Tuesday I had an hour's training with another trainer, since Nick has gone to Brazil for a couple of weeks. Even though the training was similar, the slight changes in exercise, and the things that a new trainer spots which your established trainer might not, all made for an interesting hour.
Ryan wanted to give me 24kg dumbbells for the lunges, a weight which had me staring in disbelief. However, he assured me that I could manage 20kg on either side, and, indeed I could (and this was after the squats exercise).
And at the end we did an interesting (but killing) planks exercise. That was so good in terms of reward for work that I did it again yesterday.
But today I've got the standard two-day-delay-world-of-pain in the legs after a tough new workout. And this was despite a really strict stretching-off period after we had finished.
But it's still the diet, the diet, that's occupying my mind the most. I mean, I work really hard at my training, and I put myself through a lot of pain for the rewards achieved (which really ARE worthwhile!) only to undo 75% of it through not being tough enough on myself over diet.
The reason is not hard to find. The 'hour of pain' is just an hour, whereas the "eating very sensibly" is a 24-hour task. If I could just treat that temptation of a sugar rush the same way I do a whisky or a cigarette, then I could do it, but, for the moment, I'm not managing it.
I think that I'm still reducing the amount of fat, on average, but far slower than I could do if I were properly strict. Far slower.
+++++++++
A lot of money could have been made last October if you were an institutional player with the right mindset. I'm seeing figures all over the place showing that this was when many financial institutions got out of Italian bonds and global equities -- and, in good Goldman Sachs terms, it was the worst time to do it. I did right on the equities and I had no chance on the Italian bonds -- if there had been aan easy way to punt on the yield dropping, I would have taken it.
Because, quite simply, Italy is not Greece. It isn't even Spain (and last October the yields on the Italian bonds actually went higher than Spain's). Notwithstanding my opinion that the country is a political and economic mess, it is, like the USA, a country that can cope with being useless far better than can Greece or (indeed) could the UK. Indeed it's perhaps because the country can survive such uselessicity that it has failed to get its act together. Like Ireland was 40 years ago, the youth is leaving, in Italy's case because the labour market is stitched up by a conservative and aging workforce. But it has a system that means it can survive for a long time before the shit hits the fan.
While my opinion on the euro has not changed, it's interesting what strategy has been employed. By delaying and delaying, banks and insurers have used free cash flow to reduce their exposure to peripheral debt. Meanwhile the ECB has printed money. Of course, it claims not to have printed money. But that's a bit like their claims that the Greek default was not a default. What it called it was a "long-term refinancing operation" (LTRO). And what that was, was another 'kick the can down the road' idea.
As with cereal subsidies in emerging nations, the LTRO will be a difficult hole to get out of, even though it solves some short-term problems. What happens at the end of the three-year 1% loans so eagerly snapped up by even solvent institutions? If that €1trn is taken off the market in a single year, the economic strain will be immense. If the financial institutions did what they have been doing ahead of the Greek default -- building up their balance sheets so that they could make the write-off without going bust –- then we could probably survive. But the financial institutions have toher calls on their cash -- not least, their investors. And with Greece it was a race against time. With the LTRO there will be the strong hunch that the ECB will blink first and will agree to a rollover at, say 1.25%. This will give us the LT RO-RO, kind of a cross between a bus and a ferry.
__________________
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no subject
Date: 2012-03-16 07:25 pm (UTC)First off, the rate is tied to the ECB benchmark lending rate. THis is indeed 1% now, but the LTRO deals will float with it, they're not fixed for term. After the first year, the borrower banks have a monthly put to terminate any part of their loan early.
The vast majority of the borrowed money is actually being redeposited at the ECB, at the 25 bps overnight rate. Banks are making carry on the repo'd bonds, but losing 75 bps on the cash for the moment. What they do have is immediate access to the deposited cash, which means that no-one has to be concerned about the liquidity (as distinct form solvency) of any European counterpart banks who are in the LTRO. THe other side of this is that there is actually a lack of interbank liquidity at the moment, not through lack of supply (as it was in late 2008), but throughout lack of demand. Also the banks are paying this 75bp fee instead of lending to the real economy, which would boost growth and earn better returns, and allow banks to strengthen their balance sheets.
The problem is that the need to provide sovereign funding has meant a repeat of the zombie bank support the Japanese have been practising for 20 years with such delightful effect.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-18 12:13 am (UTC)I'm not about to argue for the "logical" free market argument of letting every last one of the weak going to the wall, but it's hard for me to understand the benefit of pissing around with subsidies to obvious hopeless irredeemable bankrupts like Greece and, ahem, certain large Italian, French, and German State banks. Subsidies they obviously are. Is there an upside to all this?
I was hopelessly confused on the macro-economics of all this even before the LTRO stuff. To be honest, I'm even more hopelessly confused now.
Help!
no subject
Date: 2012-03-18 12:04 am (UTC)Obviously, I'm not qualified to speak on matters of economics. On matters of politics, however, the chutzpah on display by hoi en telei is quite breathtaking, and has taken more and more of my breath over the last four or five years. Moving 75% of troubled Sovereign debt into a short-term (OK, three years, but in EU summit terms, short-term) central bank repository would have hit the screaming hab-dabs in headlines across financial newspapers back then. Now it happens with scarcely a murmur. Well, I suppose it's all about what you can get away with.
Difficult to escape the feeling that the majority of the effort is designed to protect the guilty whilst punishing the bystander, though.
The way this is going to unwind is fairly obvious, I would think. At this point we are already talking Eurobonds, except that we're not. We've got the unwanted consequences of Eurobonds (the EU states bailing out the sinners) without the theoretical beneficial consequences (tiny things like growth, social and political stability, and a managed balancing between creditor and debtor nations within the Eurozone).
Or, to put it another way, the tax-payers will stump up for it, over time. Which is a Good Thing. We should all follow Jesus, deplore the sin, and forgive the sinners.