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By  David Craig, on March 18th, 2012 Those great euroliars, Merkel and Sarkozy claim they have saved Greece from bankruptcy. So I have a great investment opportunity for you. Greece. The Greek stock market is way down at the moment – so if you buy Greek shares now, you’re going to make a fortune when the Greek economy bounces back to health and prosperity. Convinced? No, I didn’t think so. Are you really going to invest your hard-earned cash in the busted flush that is Greece? And I rather doubt that those who handle Sarkozy’s and Merkel’s wealth will be putting their money in Greece either.
Greece is bust, bankrupt, economically finished, as dead as Monty Python’s well-known Norwegian Blue parrot. Its debt was at about 160% of GDP before the bailout. If the Greeks all behave like Germans by working hard and paying their taxes and the Greek economy flourishes, Greek debt will still be above 120% of GDP. And not much of that is very likely. Moreover, Greek tax collectors are more used to collecting bribes than taxes.
What’s really happening is that the European Central Bank (ECB) is buying up Greek debt with German and Dutch taxpayers’ money. In about a year, the politicians will “to their surprise” find that Greece still can’t pay its debts. Then, supposedly in the interests of being “good Europeans”, the ECB will write down or completely write off Greece’s debts and taxpayers will once again find they have been thoroughly screwed by their lying leaders.
By David Craig, on March 17th, 2012 Unit trusts are probably the most popular way for savers to invest their money. They have rightly been described as a ‘breakthrough in financial democracy’ because they allowed ordinary savers to put their money with professional financial managers at very low cost. But they have become so profitable and there are now so many of them, that there are more unit trusts than there are shares and bonds for them to invest in. A few things to watch out for. Charges – usually you’ll be told a unit trust’s ‘annual management charge’ is about 1%. In fact many costs are not included and you’ll find in reality you’re paying three times that. Entry and exit costs – when you’re told the charges are around 1% a year this glosses over the fact that you often lose about 5% of your money when you buy into a unit trust in initial charges and around 5% when you sell as the price you buy your units is much higher than the price for which you sell them. You can avoid most of the initial 5% entry charge by buying through a funds supermarket. But three quarters of money going into unit trusts goes through financial advisers – they dishonestly don’t mention fund supermarkets as they get most of your 5% in commission and would lose this if you went to a funds supermarket. Closet trackers – there are two types of unit trust: actively managed which charge about 3% and index trackers which cost 1% or less. But many supposedly actively managed funds buy pretty much the same shares, so you’re paying for active management but only getting what’s called a ‘closet tracker’. Poor performance – over the longer term around 90% of the 6,000 or so unit trusts fail to beat the overall stock market. So how are you going to find the 10% which do actually perform? Making insiders rich – we pay around £59 million a day to unit trust firms to manage our money whether our investments go up, stagnate or collapse in value. The result is that fund managers become multimillionaires and we are lucky to get a few crumbs.
By David Craig, on March 16th, 2012 How our lying PM David Liar Cameron must be enjoying all the attention being lavished on him in the US. Unable to fix Britain’s busted economy, Cameron can strut around in the US pretending to be a great international statesman ( a bit like his hero Bliar). Cameron can stand on the White House lawn stern-jawed with a steely look in his eyes and “bravely” declare that he will fight on in Afghanistan “till the job is done” (or some platitude like that). Only problem is – Cameron is not in Afghanistan. Nor is any member of his family. They are all safe in London or else on luxury taxpayer-funded international trips. It’s other people’s children who are stuck in the totally pointless Afghanistan farce trying to prop up a corrupt, unpopular puppet government. And the job is undoable. The Afghans hate us. Our soldiers are being killed by Afghan freedom fighters. The Taliban will be back in power just days after foreign troops leave. And Karzai the Corrupt and his corrupt cronies will scarper to Dubai with the billions they have stolen from British and American taxpayers.
Every time British soldiers are killed, our cowardly lying PM reads out their names and pledges “they will not be forgotten” (or some similar platitude). And all our thieving, greedy MPs mutter “hear hear”. So wouldn’t it be nice if a TV interviewer was to ask Liar Cameron, or any other MP, to name say ten of the 400+ dead soldiers. I doubt if most could name more than one. Our MPs will certainly have forgotten the names of these pointless dead because like Cameron they don’t give a toss. The only thing our MPs care about is how much of our money they can steal and how much more money they can make by doing second, third and fourth jobs which they only get because they are MPs. David Miliband, the £500,000 a year socialist, was a busy man last year, but I don’t ever remember him worrying about all the people being killed in a 10-year war that his party started. Scum the lot of them, lying, greedy, cowardly, self-serving scum.
By David Craig, on March 15th, 2012 The main highstreet banks (HSBC, Barclays, Natwest etc) want to run our current accounts. They don’t make much money from this. But it gives them the chance to do what they call “cross-selling” – using their contacts with us to flog us all kinds of (usually overpriced and underperforming) rubbish. Deposit accounts, mortgages, insurance, pensions, investments and so on. But, apart from some very rare exceptions, you’d be a fool to buy any of these products from your highstreet bank. For deposit accounts you’ll usually get much better rates from the former building societies. Mortgages – go to a specialist mortgage broker. Insurance – why pay a huge commission to your bank when you can buy more cheaply direct from an insurance company? Pensions – anyone saving with a highstreet bank is going to pay so much in charges that they’re going to end up awfully poor. Investments – time after time it has been shown that banks (especially HSBC and Barclays) have cobbled together and mis-sold appalling investment schemes which have made billions for the banks and lost billions for their gullible customers. Never ever put any money into any investment being pushed by your highstreet bank!
So the lesson is – “only bank with your bank”. Only let your highstreet bank run your current account. If you do any other business with the likes of HSBC, Barclays, RBS, Lloyds, Natwest then the chances are that you are a fool and are being ripped off. You have been warned.
By David Craig, on March 14th, 2012 It seems that a popular football manager is in trouble with the PC thought-control fascists for quipping that a gentleman from the Middle East who tried but failed to buy a football club was the only Arab he had met who didn’t have an oil well in his back garden. The fascists claim this is racial stereotyping. But that’s rubbish – a person from an oil-rich Arab state is statistically more likely to have an oil well in his back garden than say someone from Swindon or Milton Keynes. Surely to be offensive a joke would have to be more along the lines of: “Q: Why are camels called the ships of the desert? A: Because they’re full of Arab semen.” I abhor such puerile attempts at humour. This is equivalent to suggesting that all the Welsh are sheepshaggers, when of course only a very small minority indulge in this hobby
Talking of offensive jokes, at the time the fragrant, charitable Heather Mills McCartney was getting her multi-million pound divorce from national treasure Sir Paul, this one was doing the rounds: There’s an explosion in a South African gold mine. Rescuers do all they can, but hundreds die and only one miner is saved. Unfortunately, rescuers have to amputate one of his legs while cutting him free. Later the miner is being interviewed by a journalist in hospital. The miner is sobbing in misery, so the journalist asks, “aren’t you glad to be alive?” “No,” sobs the miner, “what can I do now? Who wants a one-legged gold-digger?” Now that’s offensive to women, greedy women, one-legged miners and ageing rockstars
I propose that the Equality and Human Rights Commission should be allowed to hire five million extra staff. They should have the power to go into any pub or home and record what people are saying. Anyone found making a joke which makes fun of any racial group (the Irish, Scots even fat toads like Alex Salmond, or the French even vertically-challenged ones like President High-Heels Sarkozy) or of any sexual group (like Mandelsonians) should receive 20-year prison sentences. The only people who should be exempted from this new thought-control police’s efforts should be Muslims as it is their human right to make fun of and kill anyone they dislike – and that’s about everybody. George Orwell would be spinning in his grave if he could see what is happening in Britain.
By David Craig, on March 13th, 2012 Most people have now realised that our major banks (HSBC, Barclays, RBS, HBOS) will do anything to get and keep our money. Mis-selling, lying, money-laundering and tax avoidance seem now to be everyday working practices for staff at our banks who are keen to progress their own careers. But is any of our banks worse than the others? Yes. It’s HSBC. In addition to doing what the other banks do to pocket our money, HSBC ran a whole series of very profitable subsidiaries whose activities can only be described as massive, deliberate fraud. In Britain, HSBC owned the Nursing Home Fees Agency. Their speciality was going round retirement homes and nursing homes, finding vulnerable victims (preferably with conditions like terminal cancers or heart problems) and persuading them to put their life savings (on average £115,000) into longer-term and risky investments. Many, of course, died before their ‘investments’ matured (as HSBC knew they would) and this allowed HSBC to charge the victims’ heirs massive penalties for supposed ‘early withdrawal’ of the victims’ money. In the US HSBC owned Household Finance – a predatory subprime lender. They specialised in forging documents to allow them to illegally repossess their customers’ homes.
By running these schemes through subsidiary companies, HSBC bosses could rake in the profits. But then if things went wrong and their fraudulent business practices were found out, HSBC bosses could claim innocence by saying they didn’t know what was going on.
HSBC is a Chinese bank. It gets 90% of its profits from outside the UK. The sooner HSBC leaves Britain, stops ripping off British savers and focuses on screwing its customers in the emerging Asian economies the better. There is strong evidence that HSBC is our worst, most predatory bank and we should boycott it.
By David Craig, on March 12th, 2012 First there was the burning of the Koran, then a US soldier killed 16 Afghan civilians. Now the sh-t is about to hit the fan, big time. But while the loss of life is regrettable, perhaps the soldier has done us all a favour. Once again we have proof of the complete and utter futility of the Afghan adventure. More than ten years – longer than both World Wars put together – and we achieved less than nothing. In fact worse, we have just made hundreds of millions of Muslims hate us even more. And while our lying politicians bleat on about ‘winning hearts and minds’ what we’re actually doing is creating enemies. The people killing our troops are not the Taliban – they are ordinary Afghans who want to cause as much damage as they can to the foreign invaders. And they are winning.
Bring our troops home now. Bring them home today. We have lost this war. Everyone knows we have lost this war. Time to call it a day. But that would require courage from Cameron and Obama. Some hope!
By David Craig, on March 11th, 2012 Over 400 British troops have now been killed and thousands more wounded in a 10-year war to keep the puppet government of Karzai the Corrupt and his drug-traficking. aid-stealing cronies in power. So what are our MPs doing? Are they furiously demanding a debate on this pointless war and the meaningless waste of lives? Are they bollocks! They’re far too busy filling their own pockets.
The (in my opinion) fat, sycophantic, self-serving slug Sir Ian Kennedy, the IPSA chairman, has allowed MPs to increase their staffing budgets from £115,000 to £137,200 for non-London MPs and £144,000 for those representing constituencies in the capital. The (in my opinion) lying, repulsive slug said, “This will help them in the service they provide to their constituents.” But hold on a minute. Our MPs have so little work representing their constituents that most have extremely lucrative second, third and even fourth jobs. For example, socialist David Miliband reportedly pocketed about £500,000 last year. And that wasn’t from helping his constituents.
Once again, we see our politicians and those they employ as a bunch of greedy, self-interested, lying, hypocritical scum. We don’t need 645 MPs any more. We don’t even need 600. In fact, 200 hundred would be quite enough – and a cut like that would save taxpayers hundreds of millions, Mr Osborne.
By David Craig, on March 9th, 2012 Y – You. Many savers get fooled into believing that banks, financial advisers, insurance companies and fund management firms are offering impartial investment advice. But most financial services staff are just salespeople ordered to sell a small range of products which generate the greatest level of commissions and profits for their employers, or themselves if they are self-employed. We have to realise that apart from a very few rare exceptions, nobody is on the side of ordinary savers. The interests of the professionals are usually diametrically opposed to ours. To maximise their earnings, they have to take as much of our money as they can. Only once we understand that financial services staff cannot be trusted and that we have to take full responsibility for our own finances can we have a chance of protecting our money from the industry’s predatory behaviour and maybe even get a reasonable return on our savings. With governments deeply in debt and employers closing final-salary pension schemes, you are the only person who is responsible for ensuring your own financial future. If you are not spending at least an hour a week increasing your financial knowledge by reading the personal finance pages in the newspapers and some books on investing, you’re likely to lose a large part of your money from being sold inappropriate and expensive financial products.
Z – Zero. For the next five to ten years, economic growth in the West is likely to be pretty low as the incompetent, over-regulating, overspending political pygmies who rule us fail to provide any real leadership and just fill their own pockets with our money. So if you have put your savings in unit trusts which will take 3%-4% of your money each year or traditional pensions that will charge you about five times what you would pay in Holland or Denmark, then the growth in your savings is likely to be absolutely ‘zero’. Similarly, if you put your savings in a SIPP and then shove this money into unit trusts so you’re paying both the SIPP and the unit trust fees, then expect ‘zero’. Though of course those taking your money will all become multimillionaires. There is only one way to make your money grow – look at the shares held by the top-performing unit trusts then buy those shares directly yourself and hold them for years. After all, who do you want to make rich – yourself or some slimey, lying, greedy financial services insiders?
By David Craig, on March 8th, 2012 W – With profits. We have about £400 billion in various so-called ‘with-profits’ financial products, mostly pensions. The name ‘with profits’ sounds great for savers. After all, everyone hopes their savings will make lots of profits. But too often these have been extremely profitable for the companies but not for savers. The theory behind ‘with profits’ savings is that the companies offering them can hold on to some of the profits made in good years and use these to pay savers a return when investment results are not so good. The problem is that savers have no idea how much the companies are keeping for themselves. As one expert explained, ‘with traditional with-profits funds, insurance companies can take as much as they like in expenses from the fund. You do not know how much that is.’ Not only do the companies pocket massive management fees, they also play the ‘inherited estate’ game. This involves holding back profits made in good years till the companies have built up billions which actually belong to savers. This money is called ‘inherited estate’. By law the companies should give 90% of this money to savers. But what companies do is make savers an offer where they can have say a third of the inherited estate immediately if they give up their rights to the rest. Not knowing they are being conned, most savers agree and the company can then steal two thirds of the billions they have in inherited estate.
X – Exaggerated projections. Most financial products are sold by people using exaggerated projections of the likely future growth. Deregulation of the pensions industry in the 1980s led to millions of workers in safe, inflation-protected final-salary pension schemes being sold risky investment-based pensions by commission-hungry salespeople using fanciful examples of likely investment returns. Savers lost over £20bn. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, around five million of us were sold endowment mortgages which would supposedly pay off our mortgages once they matured. Again, salespeople used grossly unrealistic growth figures to lure us into taking these products. When the returns were lower than expected, millions found themselves with large shortfalls which they had to pay off. All in all, endowment mortgage customers had to find about another £40 billion to clear their debts. Over the long term, pension funds grow at about four per cent a year and unit trusts around five per cent. But most of this growth gets eaten up in management fees and other costs so we’ll be lucky if we get 2% a year. The FSA allows pension providers to do projections of anywhere from 5% to 9% a year, even though this has never been consistently achieved and most have lost money over the last decade. If any seller is talking of growth of more than 2% or at most 3% a year, you should be more than suspicious.
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