The Quiet Group!

The economic downturn seems to have hit this group too! It is certainly true in my own case as my UK income has plunged by over 30% in a year and 16% since early Dec. This does have quite a dramatic effect on window shopping and my ebay activity has shriveled also. Have prices in the UK changed or is it that disposable cash is in short supply? The good side is that it has guided my activities into repair / redesign for which I have the parts, it may even drive me to put more effort into designing a better TOT detector!

Regards

Peter A

Reply to
Sailor
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On Sat, 17 Jan 2009 04:15:20 -0800 (PST), Sailor said in :

I work for one of the world's leading suppliers of credit risk software - if we can't make money in this economic climate then our salesforce want taking out and shooting.

Guy

Reply to
Just zis Guy, you know?

In message , "Just zis Guy, you know?" writes

Either you're selling your software to the wrong people or people who bought your software didn't use it.

Obviously, someone didn't consider the credit risk implied in buying those mortgage-backed securities before the credit crunch.

Reply to
Jane Sullivan

On Sat, 17 Jan 2009 12:53:48 +0000, Jane Sullivan said in :

Or people hadn't realised they could not afford not to have the software

I believe that only one of the failures was a customer of ours, and not on the credit risk side.

Guy

Reply to
Just zis Guy, you know?

Just a minute! 'Credit risk software' - how does that work, pray? It seems as likely that you could have sorted out the 'good from the 'bad' as you might be able to predict the winning lottery number. It is this kind of computer aided nonsense that has got us into this mess. This software will only work if people tell the *truth* about their assets and income and this clearly was not happening with the ninjna mortgages that banks were dishing out. It didn't even work with banks which got AAA ratings until the day the s**t hit the fan. I would doubt very much whether your outfit will profit in the downturn anyway as no one is giving credit to even good risks.

Reply to
Alistair Wright

"Sailor" wrote

Not that you'd have noticed Hornby have adjusted their retail prices no fewer that 4 times in the past 13 months. I'd be interested to know if anyone has analysed their price increases since 31/12/07 - my guess is that they've gone up in excess of 30%.

John.

Reply to
John Turner

On Sat, 17 Jan 2009 15:12:50 -0000, "Alistair Wright" said in :

Not really. What went wrong, for the most part, is that people did not assess the risk properly, especially they had not properly assessed their exposure to risk derivatives. I think a lot of derivatives will vanish as a result of the recent problems, and good riddance to them.

And a good bit of the toxic debt came from lending money to people called Billy-Bob in the hope that when they default you can repossess the assets and sell them at a profit - something which was torpedoed by the completely unprecedented event of property prices dropping after a long period of stratospheric growth. Nobody could possibly have predicted that. (Yes, that was sarcasm).

Guy

Reply to
Just zis Guy, you know?

Thats the detail behind it but to me its like every other fashionable financial rollercoaster - south sea bubble, railwaymania, tulips, dotcom.... Someone made some money, can start off reasonable but the next person does it cos heard someone made some money and next/next person does it.... There comes a point where its just a pyramid scheme and either people darent get off, dont want to get off or just pretend its fine - not understanding is pretending its fine. They say to themselves everyone else is doing it so it must be ok, but that translates for the individual 'if theyre making lots of money then I want some' or if its an institution then its 'if it goes pear shaped then we can point to everyone else made same mistake'. How many bankers etc will apologise, hand back significant quantities of prevoius bonus's and resign on a reduced payout/pension.

Cheers, Simon

Reply to
simon

snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

For what it's worth, my neighbour who is a venerable French paysan of

80+ observed that there is only so much money in the world so if one person gets more then someone else must get less. This is the fundamental financial truth and when everyone is getting rich simultaneously then at least half of them are kidding themselves. Bankers and other financial wizards have spent the past decade playing the money go-round where one cheque circulates between several accounts and the difference is called credit or maybe even deferred gratification. For the individual it is illegal, for the bankers it is called business. I can only hope that my pagan prayers result in something aweful happening to most of them!

Regards

Reply to
Sailor

On Sat, 17 Jan 2009 20:54:20 -0000, "simon" said in :

Absolutely. And in the City, a lot of people knew it was a house of cards - anything that looks too good to be true generally is.

When others are making huge sums it is hard to be the one to point out that the emperor is bollock naked. I seem to recall Lloyds TSB being marked down by a lot of analysts for not buying into sub-prime lending - they came out of it looking very smart, of course.

In the end, what part of "sub-prime" were they having trouble understanding? Seems to me that you can't make a good credit risk by combining multiple bad credit risks, and the first thing you have to look at with any consolidated debt derivative is: are the individual debts subject to different risks, or similar risks? The fact that most of the toxic debt comes from combining large numbers of debts all exposed to the same source of default risk, never did look like anything other than a stupid idea. The first warnings I read of the dangers of this were in mid 2006, I think.

I am not a financier so I had no idea how big the problem was or how many institutions would be caught up, but as an IT nerd with at least some understanding of the things going on in the buildings around me (in the City and Canary Wharf) I was always puzzled that subprime lending was in some way hot or glamorous. As a friend of mine pointed out, there are people who specialise in lending to poor risks, and they usually get paid, but only because they have large men with knuckle dusters to collect the money. Take away the large men and all you get is bad credit risks, which banks don't normally lend to for damned good reason.

None of them. I think we should bomb a few pacific islands just to show them we care, but as usual the rich will stay rich, the poor will stay poor and the middle classes will bear the brunt.

Guy

Reply to
Just zis Guy, you know?

It's the same the whole world over It's the poor what gets the blame It's the rich what gets the pleasure Ain't it all a bleeding shame?

[Victorian music hall song - She Was Poor But She Was Honest]
Reply to
MartinS

Is that the right way round, I always remember my father singing it :-

It's the rich what gets the pleasure It's the poor what gets the blame It's the same the whole world over Ain't it just a bleeding shame?

cheers, Simon

Reply to
simon

On Sat, 17 Jan 2009 23:27:35 -0000, "simon" said in :

And just to complete the set, I learned it as:

It's the same the whole world over Isn't it a crying shame? It's the rich what gets the pleasure And the poor what gets the blame

Guy

Reply to
Just zis Guy, you know?

In message , "Just zis Guy, you know?" writes

I learned the first version. It didn't have "bleeding" or "crying" but some other adjective, and had a lot of verses that never saw the stage of a Victorian music-hall.

Reply to
Jane Sullivan

Reply to
Bruce Fletcher (remove dentures to reply)

You can sing it any which way you want!

Reply to
MartinS

That must be the drunken singalong after the rugby game version.

Reply to
MartinS

Got it in one.

Reply to
Jane Sullivan

Remember version 1 from the site, but my father didnt sing the verses. :-)

Cheers, Simon

Reply to
simon

Yes Hornby do not appear to be aware there is a credit problem for

99% of the rest of us.

EG The last time I looked at the price of a Hornby DCC Elite Controller it was about =A3140 rrp now it;s over =A3160 !

Must keep the shareholders happy !!!!!!!

Chris

Reply to
Dragon Heart

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