Bob's blog - the realm of threalm

What do bankers get paid for again? Yeah, I know there's an element of schadenfreude in commenting further on this parochial little cock up by the Commonwealth Bank in fumbling its $2 billion excluded-offer equity placement to institutions on Tuesday afternoon, but it truly shows again how "experts" can stuff up. What is it that all those thousands of spectacularly highly paid executives, lawyers, corporate governance consultants and compliance advisers at Merrill Lynch and the Commonwealth Bank do for a living when a mistake as fundamental as this can occur during a placement of this size in a market as skittish and as vulnerable as we have at present? As I understand it from the press : On Tuesday afternoon, with CBA stock still being traded on the ASX at around $29 a share, Merrill Lynch received acceptances to place $2 billion of CBA shares from institutions at $27 a share. This placement was apparently to top up CBA's tier one capital adequacy levels to ...

Just who is it that is denying climate change here? James Randerson in The Guardian tells us: " The relatively chilly temperatures compared with recent years are not evidence that global warming is slowing however, say climate scientists at the Met Office. “ Absolutely not ,” said Dr Peter Stott , the manager of understanding and attributing climate change at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre ." That "Absolutely not" is crying out for an exclamation mark, but it also lends the "Hadley Centre" an appropriately Alice in Wonderland feel. Let's just slip down a credulity hole into some playful Lewis Carroll universe if the going gets awkward. As the people at Climate Resistance point out, Dr. Stott is more than just over-egging the pudding a bit with this stentorious absolutism. In what universe does the experience of colder weather this year than last year, that most of us have just lived through, not constitute, like you know, actual evidence that globa...

UK Government uses anti-terrorism police to arrest shadow minister of immigration over a leak of government information about immigration Even the leaders of the oldest democratic institution in the world no longer seem to have even the vaguest notion what freedoms the West is fighting for in resisting terrorism. In the same week that Pakistani Muslims invaded India on a carefully planned and executed suicide terrorist raid targeted at western tourists in Mumbai and killed and tortured over 180 people, the Speaker of the Parliament in Westminster allowed an anti-terrorism police unit to raid an Opposition parliamentarian's Westminster offices. This was apparently because he was getting access to public service information leaks on immigration data. Of the many things that really stick in my craw about this astonishing descent into totalitarianism by the UK Government, the one I'm having most difficlulty dislodging is that this police operation was presided over by the Assista...