Snouts in the Trough » Uncategorized

Never put your money in a unit trust

David Craig — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 01:19:34 +0000

With savings interest rates at almost zero and likely to stay there for several years, many savers are being tempted to put their money into unit trusts in the hope of better returns. But when you buy into a unit trust, you can quickly lose a lot of money. First there’s the initial cost – about 5% (can be avoided if you use a funds supermarket). Then there are management and dealing charges of about 3% a year. Then when you take your money out, you lose another 5% due to the difference in the price you bought the units and the price you have to sell them. So, over 5 years, you can lose 20% to 25% of your money. Of course, the trust managers will claim they can grow your savings. But over the last 10 years stock markets have not gone up at all and over the next 10 years growth is likely to be about the long-term average of 1% to 2% a year.

So, this is what you should do. 1. Find some unit trusts you like. 2. Look on their websites and see which are the main shares they hold. 3. Buy those shares directly yourself. 4. Hold on to those shares for a few years, reinvesting your dividends in more shares of those companies. In this way, you get the benefit of the unit trust managers’ experience without having to pay them a penny. At the end of 5 years you’ll have 20% to 25% more than if you’d used a unit trust and at the end of 10 years you’ll have 35% to 40% more. Simples!

Did hopeless Osborne learn his economics from Gordon Liar Brown?

David Craig — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 01:25:59 +0000

Our latest failed Chancellor, George “I haven’t a clue old chap” Osborne has apparently been working hard to reduce Britain’s deficit. Result – the deficit has increased pretty much every month he’s been running the shop. We now spend more each month on interest payments than we do on education or defence. It seems Osborne has been about as prudent as Britain’s worst ever Chancellor, the liar Gordon Brown – the man who managed to waste over £1 trillion on increased public spending without any increase in services. The problem is that public-sector bosses believe that austerity if for everyone else except them. So they carry on wasting over £150bn a year of our money. The Guardian “non-jobs section” is still bulging with unnecessary and highly-paid but pointless public-sector positions. If he is to reduce the deficit, Osborne has to tackle the stupidity and profligacy of the public sector.

For a start, he should put all administrative government departments on a 4-day week. After all, would we notice any difference if all the penpushers at the Department of Health or Education only worked Monday to Thursday? He should shut down the ludicrous Equality and Human Rights Commission (saving £70m a year) and another twenty to thirty similarly useless quangos. He should set a maximum public-sector pension of £25,000 a year. If civil service bosses want more, they should save into a pension scheme like the rest of us. Only measures like these will make our free-spending public-sector realise that the days of Brownian waste are over.

Guardian readers must be even stupider than I had ever imagined

David Craig — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 23:18:45 +0000

Couldn’t believe my eyes yesterday. There was an article in the Guardian praising Gordon Brown for his courage, leadership and understanding of complex economic issues during the financial crisis. Who writes this kind of crap? And perhaps more importantly, who actually reads it? The liar Gordon Brown was probably the most catastrophic Chancellor in British history. At a time when the whole world’s economy was booming, this idiot, instead of paying down Britain’s debt, went on a massive borrowing spree. He then took over £1 trillion of our money and wasted the lot on increasing public spending without achieving any improvements at all in public services. Most of the money was wasted on bigger salaries for managers and bureaucrats. So when the economic cycle went inevitably from boom to slowdown, Britain was caught with its pants down around its ankles as one of the most heavily indebted countries in the world. All of this achieved by one man – the great liar Gordon Brown. Though, of course, he was helped in his ambition of bankrupting Britain by acolytes like Ed Balls and his lady wife.

But now, apparently Guardian readers believe that Brown was a great man. Well they would, wouldn’t they? After all, he hugely increased the salaries and pensions of the kind of people who read the Guardian. It hasn’t occurred to Guardian readers that while they have enjoyed Brown’s largesse with taxpayers’ money, the rest of the country has been ruined.

If “Prince” Charles wasn’t such a useless waste of skin, the Queen could retire

David Craig — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:48:11 +0000

As the Queen celebrates sixty years on the throne, she must have thought about retiring and handing over the throne to the next generation. Unfortunately, first in line is the snivelling, self-obsessed, idiotic, spoilt, adulterous fool Prince Charles. If this arrogant idiot ever became king, the monarchy might never recover. Incredibly, this buffoon has spent millions on getting good PR and yet only readers of the Daily Mail and OK haven’t realised that this excuse for a man is a complete waste of skin. If Charles became king, Australia and Canada would probably become republics. The last thing they would want is Charles’ stupid face on any of their currency. And even in Britain, the monarchy would become a laughing stock.

So Queenie has to soldier on in the hope that by the time she pops her clogs, William will be ready to take over and the preposterous a–hole Charles will never get a chance to ruin the monarchy in the same way as he has ruined everything else he has come in contact with.

How David “Money” Miliband craps on the stupid voters who elected him

David Craig — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 01:13:36 +0000

It has been reported that David “Give Me Money” Miliband pocketed about £500,000 last year. But if Miliband was working tirelessly to represent his constituents and to fight for his political beliefs, he would only have been paid his MP’s salary of about £65,000, plus he could probably have fiddled another £30,000 by cheating on his expenses. So how did Miliband make so much money? The answer, of course, is that Miliband couldn’t give a flying f—k about his constituents or any “political beliefs”. Miliband is in it for himself and for the money. Although Blair was a piece of human excrement, he at least had the decency to give up his parliamentary seat when he went off to make his millions. But Miliband knows that without his place at Westminster and the probability that he will be a senior minister in the next Labour government, he would just be a nothing. So he needs his position as an MP if he is to get rich.

So all you stupid voters in South Shields. At the next election are you really going to support a greedy, self-serving, pompous turd like David “Give Me Money” Miliband? Or will you have the intelligence to get rid of this arrogant creep and let him find out how “easy” it is to get a job in a country he helped Gordon Liar Brown to bankrupt?

Corruption wrecks South Africa’s education system

David Craig — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 01:17:37 +0000

Interesting article in the Bangkok Post this week about the collapse of South Africa’s education system. Apparently South Africa spends an impressive 20% of it’s budget on education. That’s the good news. The problem is that much of the money is stolen by corrupt ANC-friendly politicians and bureaucrats and never gets anywhere near schools or universities. A recent special grant of about £200m to one area to buy books and other equipment for the start of the school year was all embezzled. So no new books and no new equipment. And hundreds of “teachers” being paid by the government don’t actually exist – millions more stolen. This week some member of the ruling ANC was expelled for supposedly “bringing the party into disrepute”. The ANC is nothing but a bunch of crooks and thieves run by a buffoon-like son of Mugabe who is itching to take his country down the same road as Zimbabwe. How could you bring the ANC into further disrepute? What a disaster the ANC has been. What a corrupt, incompetent shambles.

Meanwhile in Britain, the lying, thieving former minister, the inappropriately named David Laws, looks set to return to government. Maybe we’ll soon be as corrupt as South Africa.

Are our taxes buying the weapons used to kill and maim our soldiers, Mr Cameron?

David Craig — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 01:30:27 +0000

Our useless, self-serving, expenses-fiddling MPs bleed us dry with their taxes. They then take almost £500m of our money and hand it over in supposed “aid” to a corrupt state with nuclear weapons – Pakistan. First the Pakistani president, affectionately known by his people as “Mr Ten Percent”, takes his cut. Then other corrupt Pakistani politicians and bureaucrats grab what they can. What little is left then disappears into Pakistan’s government coffers. Some of this is then used to supply the Taliban with guns, bombs and training so they can kill and maim British and American soldiers in Afghanistan. Pakistan is our enemy yet we are giving this corrupt rotten hell-hole of a place almost half a billion pounds a year.

It’s a pity that families of killed and wounded soldiers don’t launch a class action against the foreign aid minister for complicity in the deaths and injuries of their sons and daughters. As for Liar Cameron, how can this pompous fool sleep at night knowing that he is helping our enemies against us? Perhaps he doesns’t care – after all, most of those dying or wounded are just prols to him

Will freezing winter get global warming con-artists fiddling their figures yet again?

David Craig — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 01:33:29 +0000

The man-made global warming fanatics were having a great winter. Europe was having its warmest winter for decades. That allowed them to bleat on about how they were right and climate change sceptics were wrong. Then came the cold weather. In fact, the coldest winter since records began and over 120 people are dead. Woops. That’s not so good for the warmists. So how will the warmists at the University of East Anglia’s laughable Climatic Research Unit and other such centres of academic excellence in falsifying data react? Will there be lots of phone calls between warmists (remember they don’t dare send emails any more in case these are ever leaked) as they discuss how to massge the figures to prove that their global warming bollocks is not a load of bollocks? Prrobably. And once the cold weather has gone, will they just say that this was a small blip but really the world is warming up? Of course. So as you sit at home freezing, be happy. The world is a warmer place.

Today Chris “seven homes” (or is it eight?) Huhne could get sacked and someone with a smidgin of common sense could replace him. Then we could start to get rid of all the useless windfarms and environmental taxes. But no doubt useless Huhne will keep his job or else his replacement will be equally brainwashed by the fiddled figures of the global warming fantasists.

Rotten, corrupt Pakistan is our enemy – Mr Cameron

David Craig — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 23:29:18 +0000

A new NATO report reveals what most people have always known – Pakistan is our enemy. The Pakistani government hid Osama Bin Laden in the one place they thought he would be really safe – in a compound just beside a huge military base. They assumed (wrongly) that nobody would dare arrack Bin Laden when so many brave Pakistani forces were so close. And for over ten years the Pakistani military have been helping the Taliban kill and injure British troops. Ten years! That’s longer than the First and Second World Wars together. The NATO report also admits what most of us have always known – the war in Afghanistan has been a disaster, we have lost, the Taliban have won and as soon as Western troops leave the Taliban will take over the country and Karzai the Corrupt and all his equally corrupt cronies will flee to their luxury homes in Dubai paid for with billions looted from Western aid.

It’s time to stop all immigration from Pakistan, stop all direct flights, stop grovelling to Pakistan’s utterly corrupt government and treat Pakistan like the enemy which it is. It’s also time to bring our troops home and stop wasting money and lives on a pointless war which we have lost.

Another “triumph” for Liar Merkel and Liar Sarkozy?

David Craig — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:06:26 +0000

Since the start of the financial crisis, we seem to have had an extraordinary number of EU summits where Liar Merkel and Liar Sarkozy tell us that they’ve solved the eurozone’s problems. Then a couple of days later we find out it was all a bunch of lies and the problems get worse. But this week these two lying idiots really excelled themselves. They not only claimed to have saved the eurozone (yet again) but also boasted that they had taken action to avoid any similar crises in the future. Of course, it’s all baloney. Greece is bankrupt. Portugal is bankrupt. Italy is bankrupt. Spain is bankrupt.

There is only one solution to the crisis - make EU taxpayers in the North pay for the stupidity, laziness, tax avoidance and corruption of the Club Med countries. This will happen in two stages. First the ECB will buy worthless Club Med bonds at face value with taxpayers’ money and then mark them down to half or less of their face value, cutting the debts of Club Med and losing taxpayers hundreds of billions. Then the EU will allow the lazy, profligate, tax-avoiding Club Med countries to lower their borrowing costs by issuing eurobonds guaranteed by eurozone taxpayers in Germany, Austria, Holland and Finland. But while Club Med countries’ borrowing costs will fall, these costs will rise for German, Austrian, Dutch and Finnish taxpayers. This willl ‘solve’ the crisis and save Club Med from bankruptcy. Most German taxpayers will be too stupid to see how they’ve been screwed by their leaders and most Austrians, Dutch and Finns will be too cowardly to go against what their German masters order them to do.