Snouts in the Trough

Argentina started the 20th Century as one of the richest ten countries in the world. For a while its economic position in the world was comparable to that of Germany today. It had a per capita income much higher than that of Japan and Italy and comparable to that of France. However, it ended the [...]

NATO’s big bosses are meeting in Brussels for two days of eating, drinking and whoring. Sorry, what I meant was two days of talks. They claim they’re going to discuss how to pay Afghan security forces after foreign troops leave. Currently, the figure of about a billion euros of our money a year seems to [...]

You might have woken up this morning, looked out at the driving rain and wondered how an island  – land surrounded by water – renowned for its miserable rainy weather could be short of water. The politically-correct BBC tells us that it’s because we had a dry winter. Bollocks, it’s really because the supposed water [...]

After over 10 years of war, the US and Britain seem to have achieved absolutely nothing in Afghanistan. The corrupt, incompetent Karzai puppet government is loathed by most Afghans. And now Karzai is talking about holding elections in 2013, before the foreign troops leave in 2014. In this way, he can resign and scarper with his [...]

For legal reasons I have to be a bit careful here. In May 2005 I sent an email to the Bank of England. A few days later, I received a reply and was informed that a senior official at the Bank would be phoning me. The reason for me contacting the Bank of England was that [...]

There may be some honest spread-betting companies. There may even be people who can make money spread betting. But my experience investigating spread betting while writing Pillaged suggests that spread betting is a massively profitable scam. When writing Pillaged, I opened several practise spread-betting accounts. These allow you to learn how to do spread betting [...]

Every few months Yahoo seems to “upgrade” their email system. And it seems that every supposed “upgrade” makes their email system worse. After one upgrade, it was no longer possible to save emails as drafts. After another “upgrade” I had to type my whole email address and password every time I wanted to check my [...]

Not being an economist I may not have fully understood the disaster the useless, lying euroleaders are causing, but I think it goes something like this: 1. The PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain) are all well and truly bankrupt. 2. Merkel would never get away with making German taxpayers bail them out, so she has [...]

I watched some dreadful football over the last few weekends. Team after team faffed around for 90 minutes apparently without a clue as to how to score a goal. (By the way, passing the ball backwards is not the best way to score). But the one thing our overpaid, thuggish footballers were good at was constantly fouling [...]

It seems like half the BBC news at the moment is taken up by yet more trouble in Africa – sham elections, coups, civil wars, brutality and of course a famine or two. It is now over half a century since most African countries got their independence and in almost all cases, while the rest [...]