Mark Deans, Moneycorp
Mark Deans, Dealing Manager at Moneycorp
15 February 2011
The Ministry of Defence has certainly not been left behind by the era of instant communications. A couple of days ago it used the news media to notify trainee RAF pilots they would lose their jobs.
14 February 2011
Critics accuse the coalition government of being devoid of new ideas and say the Big Society is just a relabeling of the old ways. But what about this new Big Society Bank? It will lend money to uncreditworthy borrowers and pay derisory rates of interest to depositors.
11 February 2011
A survey of UK retail customers has found that only 40% of them are unhappy with their bank. The banks themselves are delighted that the level of dissatisfaction is so low. A spokesman for one of them said the survey result would be an encouragement to make savings on customer service...
10 February 2011
Twenty general practitioners in Surrey are testing a system that uses a call centre to handle appointment requests. Perhaps such an arrangement could allow the government to sidestep the controversial European court ruling that gives convicts the vote...
9 February 2011
The French newspaper Libération clearly does not take its own title too literally when it comes to matters of national security. It has chosen the British ski instructor to replace the Polish plumber as a blue collar hate figure.
8 February 2011
In an effort to divert his citizens from their protest the Egyptian president has agreed a 15% pay rise for the public sector. Looking at the US$960 million set aside to cover the increase, and assuming it is an annual sum, the average government employee will see his monthly pay go up by $13 to $102
7 February 2011
On another planet, the Spanish housing minister is appealing to Britons to help her out by buying up the houses and apartments which remain unsold as a result of the financial crisis. She makes the perfectly sensible point that that there are some real bargains to be had...
4 February 2011
Labour party leader Ed Miliband wants to see a "British Promise" equivalent to the "American Dream". He might be on shaky ground. The American Dream seems to consist of a quixotic optimism that trillions of dollars worth of quantitative easing and cheap dollars...
3 February 2011
In a battle between two of the most prominent internet search engines Google is accusing Bing of copying its results. Google fabricated a link between the word "hiybbprqug" and a theatre seating plan. Bing returned an identical result. Google cried foul.
2 February 2011
Italian hunters are allowed to roam at will and to fire their weapons anywhere they wish, as long as they are not within 50m of a road or 150m of a house. This "light regulation" leads to accidents. In the past four months 74 people have been hit by rifle or shotgun fire, 35 of them with fatal consequences
1 February 2011
Police.uk is a new website that allows you to punch in your postcode and find out how crime-ridden your area is. Crimes individually categorised as burglary, anti-social behaviour, robbery, etc., are lumped together as "All crime and ASB" for the month of December 2010.
31 January 2011
To publicise the success of its new J-10 stealth fighter China showed film of it shooting down an "enemy" plane on television last week. It did not take long for someone to spot the uncanny similarity between the J-10 attack footage and a sequence in the movie "Top Gun".
28 January 2011
A row has erupted surrounding a BBC documentary in which 20 dogs defecate on the footpaths of a street in Preston. Ministers object that it is an egregious waste of taxpayers' money. The BBC defends itself, saying the film is simply the pilot for a much larger project in the Ashdown Forest involving 800 bears.
27 January 2011
On the 100th anniversary of its invention in Ogden, just north of Salt Lake City, Utah has introduced the Browning M1911 semi-automatic pistol as its official "state firearm".
26 January 2011
For a man who, even on a bad day, makes Leonard Cohen sound like Coco the Clown, Mervyn King was on peak wrist-slashing form as he danced on sterling's grave yesterday evening. The governor was giving a speech in Newcastle, justifying the Monetary Policy Committee's (MPC's) stance on inflation.
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