Gormless Gove worse than Moron Lammy?

Michael Gove talks the talk and even writes very pretty english, as he once proved while a Times newspaper columnist before that species opted for purdah and chose to go largely unread behind Murdoch's internet pay-wall , but when it comes to planning ahead he yesterday proved he is as clueless as his predecessor with responsibility for the Universities the self-proclaimed moron David Lammy, remind yourself of that disaster from here.

As should have been expected from an effete waffler whose fashion sense since becoming a cabinet minister has been displayed as white silk linings for dark pinstriped suits and whose friends seem to be selected from a small group of former Oxford Bullingdon Club bully boys and rowdies, Michael Gove clearly has no clue as to the effects of globalisation on the world. Consider his proposals for students to now pay up to three times their present fees for the rubbish education modern graduates presently too often demonstrate they generally obtain from Britain's universities. A quote from the linked article:

Graduates would pay back loans at 9% of their income once they were earning £21,000, at a rate of interest equal to the Government's cost of borrowing, which could leave them facing many years of debt.

The 'best' universities will charge the most, but will be competing for the best candidates on a worldwide market of all the best universities. British students on graduation will have a worldwide market of job opportunities many in much more desirable locations than the austerity wracked UK! Even British firms employing British graduates overseas in the City of London's replacement financial centres in idyllic overseas settings could be subject to government pressure to recoup the loans from those earning above £21,000. Therefore foreign employers will be the preferred choice thus curtailing even national insurance contributions from the brightest of British graduates, and once they have contributed for a few years to foreign welfare provision they could thereafter be lossed forever as assets to the nation that partly paid for their tertiary education let alone the costs for their primary and secondary schooling.

Only an empty-headed, vain and gormless fool could contrive such a scheme, ministerial evidence enough that Britain's present education often produces, anything but, world-class graduates. Welcome to the world of Moronic Ministers Mr Gove.

Mortgage walkaways - the next crisis!

What starts in the USA soon spreads across the Atlantic as we learned in the ongoing sub-prime mortgage inspired credit crunch and Britain's developing bankruptcy and national debt default.

As I predicted the problem several months ago and on several different occasions, I chose to call the action "walkaways", or described those involved as "mortgagees handing back the keys". The US has chosen the term "Strategic Mortgage Defaults" read here. The following extract from that article describes the situation:

The number of strategic defaults is far beyond most industry estimates — 588,000 nationwide during 2008, more than double the total in 2007. They represented 18% of all serious delinquencies that extended for more than 60 days in last year’s fourth quarter.

Strategic mortgage defaults are nothing more than a very calculated financial maneuver primarily by people with high credit scores. These people are literally walking away from their homes, and the mortgages on those homes, with little to no warning or indication of stress typically identified by increased delinquencies on the mortgage payment or other credit payments.

Why are people doing this? To fully understand the reasoning behind people strategically defaulting, we need to understand why people bought these homes and took out these mortgages in the first place.

The likely result, as predicted in the same article is another crisis, quote:

Have loan officers, bank examiners, and regulators factored these strategic defaults into their financial models and loan loss reserves? Rest assured, the thought of strategic mortgage defaults was not incorporated into a bank risk model prior to writing the loan. Now loan officers, bank examiners, and regulators are likely working overtime to incorporate the actuality of this phenomena creating a vicious cycle downward for housing just as the actual lending practices and accompanying purchases of homes drove the housing market higher over the last decade. Did Secretary Geithner incorporate this phenomena into the Bank Stress Tests? Not if we checked the default assumptions on HELOC (Home equity lines of credit) relative to the actual statistics.

Have UK politicians considered the likely impact of similar actions in the UK. I earlier predicted such defaults would kick in when price falls began to exceed 20 per cent, a point now reached and with the next downward plunge about to commence as the currency tumbles and Schedule D property taxes look certain to return as one of the few sources for government revenue, a rout to sell at any price appears a possibility.

Those walking away from unaffordable mortgages and their homes will start to be such a force they themselves will become a factor not to be ignored.

As the non-resignation of Baroness Scotland, supported by the Prime Minister, this evening clearly illustrates, the ministers and leader of this UK administration have not one single moral principle in their make-up. Their financial ignorance in the face of the obvious fact that money has been their sole obsession for many, many years, makes their incompetence and lack of any foresight in the area of economics even more incredible.

More on the moronic Lammy

My post on the Minister of State for Higher Education and (wait for it....) Intellectual Property of 29th December last year was prepared without the benefit of having recorded the Mastermind Quiz in which David Lammy, the aforesaid minister proved himself a complete dimwit.

This caused a certain fuzziness in the reporting of some of the worst General Knowledge answers the Minister supplied. This absence of clarity has now been rectified by an article in The Independent by Matthew Norman, who did record the show and has hilariously supplied more detail on the complete twit still serving, completely uselessly no doubt, at the heart of Gordon Brown's completely incompetent government! Surprise, surprise!! NOT.

Read the article from here.