Is it time to stop bashing bankers? Continuing revelations of "cringeworthy behaviour" suggest not.

Is it time to stop bashing bankers? Have the crooks already been biffed out of the ring? Are we just hindering the new saintly bankers? As they clean up after the few bad apples who spoiled it for everyone else?Of course not. And in saying this we are in good company: Even the Governor of the Bank of England no longer believes in the "few bad apples" theory of rotten bankers. In November 2014 the Governor, Mark Carney, said:"The succession of [banking] scandals means it is simply untenable now to argue that the problem is one of a few bad apples....

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Potentially lethal food poisoning bacteria in 70% of supermarket chickens? That's not the big story...

Fee explains the real story to KJ...SOURCE DAILY MAIL: Named and shamed: The supermarkets where up to 78% of fresh chickens are contaminated with potentially lethal food poisoning bacteriaThe bug is responsible for an estimated 280,000 cases of food poisoning each year and as many as 100 deaths.  The study revealed that Asda was the worst performer, with a contamination rate of 78 per cent. More than one in ten of its packs – 12 per cent – carried the potentially lethal bug on the outside. The second highest contamination rate was for a group...

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Rip off News round-up. Our pick of the last week's media (Thu 27th November)

300,000 paid less than minimum wage. Yet in the past year, no companies were prosecutedThe Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings for the Office for National Statistics recently found that about 287,000 workers were paid at less than the minimum wage in 2012, although the TUC puts the figure closer to 350,000. But despite ministers’ claims that the government is getting tough on under-payers, the last successful criminal prosecution was in February 2013. That was one of only two prosecutions during the government’s entire term of office to date, according...

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Graphs at a glance: Will fracking bring cheap energy to Britain? The evidence suggest not.

There has been a lot of talk about fracking the UK. Our government is so keen it has considered changing the law on trespass to make it easier for companies to frack under our properties. Would it be a good thing? Even if there is absolutely no risk bits of our green and pleasant land  may disappear down multiple sinkholes? The graph below from a parliamentary report, "The Impact of Shale Gas on Energy Markets", shows how fracking caused the price of gas to plummet in the USA. Benchmark natural gas prices in the USA (Henry Hub) and the...

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Rip-off News round-up. Our pick of the last week's media (Thu 20th November)

Tuition fees: Three quarters of students won’t be able to pay off their debtStudent debt is now so high compared to average salaries that many graduates in respectable public sector professions will be unable to repay their fees even by the end of the 30-year repayment period, the Higher Education Commission warns. This funding "black hole" is forcing the Government to indirectly subsidise higher education writing off billions of pounds in student debt - even though the point of £9,000 a year fees was to make universities less reliant on the taxpayer....

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Our sky high energy and food inflation hits the poorest hardest. Our rock bottom mortgages hardly benefit them at all

SOURCE GUARDIAN: 300,000 more people live in poverty than previously thoughtThe study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation said the government method for calculating absolute poverty – the number of people living below a breadline that rises each year in line with the cost of living – incorrectly assumed that all households faced the same inflation rate. But in the six years from early 2008 to early 2014, the cost of energy had risen by 67% and the cost of food by 32%. Over the same period the retail prices...

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Graphs at a glance: Who's afraid of the big bad bankers? Apparently, the regulator.

According to the Guardian newspaper between 2009 and 2013 banks paid £166 billion in fines and compensation for sins ranging from LIBOR fixing, to PPI mis-selling, to money laundering, to gold price fixing, et cetera. This figure doesn't include fines from 2014 onward including FOREX fixing et cetera.According to the Office for National Statistics £136 billion was paid in bonuses to UK staff in the financial services sector between 2004 and 2013, when much of the dodgy dealing was being done.Fines are paid by shareholders (for Lloyds and RBS that...

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Rip-off News round-up. Our pick of the last week's media (Thu 13th November)

300,000 more people live in poverty than previously thoughtThe study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation said the government method for calculating absolute poverty – the number of people living below a breadline that rises each year in line with the cost of living – incorrectly assumed that all households faced the same inflation rate. But in the six years from early 2008 to early 2014, the cost of energy had risen by 67% and the cost of food by 32%. Over the same period the retail prices index – a measure...

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