Should he avoid appearing as though he is enjoying the crisis? After all he has gone through in the past twelve months you can perhaps forgive Brown for feeling a sense of relief that he has now an issue to deal with that apparently plays to his strengths. But is he looking too pleased with himself? He appears to be enjoying the crisis just a little bit too much. Isn’t there a danger that his demeanour might be seen as…
How are the pension funds going to cope? Just trying to think through the consequences of the massive global crash that we have seen in the past few days is awesome. One group of many that come immediately to mind, as several remarked on the previous thread, are those for whom today marks the end of their working life and the start of their pension. For thirty or forty years they will have been ploughing money into their pension pot…
Is now the time to try this form of betting? With an Obama victory looking more and more certain the focus is moving away from who’ll be the next President to how many electoral college votes the two contenders will win. An interesting way to bet on this is through the spread markets. Here you “buy and sell” electoral college votes as though they were stocks and shares and the more you are right with your forecast the more you…
They placed a bet, they lost and should be hung out to dry? One thing that nobody seems to be saying about the Icelandic saving bank situation is that those who invested with the banks were either stupid or greedy or both. Didn’t any of the individual or institutional investors stop to think and ask why the banks were ready and willing to pay interests rates that were way ahead of anything else that was available in the UK? Didn’t…
Have the UK betting markets got this one right? We are just over three and a half weeks away from the big day but punters on UK betting markets seemed to have made their mind up – Senator Barack Obama is on course to be the 44th President of the United States. The chart shows the McCain price change, expressed as an implied probability, over the past month when at one stage he was heading towards evens. Now you can…
This is an original cartoon by Marf for LondonSketchBook.com The spread markets start moving against the Tories There’s been a sharp move back to Labour on the commons seats spread markets where the Tory levels have dropped six seats and Labour moved up the same amount since the weekend. The latest numbers from Sporting Index are CON 344-350: LAB 232-238: LD 43-46 seats. What’s interesting is that this hasn’t been sparked off by any new polls but Brown’s confident public…
On the Betfair next chancellor market the Lib Dem treasury spokesman, Vince Cable, has moved into the favourite slot after speculation by the Mole Column in the First Post that he could be the next chancellor. As of the time of posting he was at 2.15/1. Wow. The Mole, who I generally quite rate, writes: “..Would Brown do it? Those advancing the idea reckon that his current mantra that he will do “whatever it takes” is a political as well…
Is Gord 10% ahead or 7% behind? No doubt in the next few days we will see another round of “economic confidence” polling where respondents are asked to rate who they trust the most. There’s a tendency for so called “expert” commentators to regard poll findings such as these as a commodity – that they are all the same and that one can be compared with another. That is total tosh and the following examples show how these non-voting findings…