Ross Parker

my personal homepage and blog

Bailing in depositors

by Ross

I am following the proposed depositor haircuts in Cyprus with interest. In general, I am in favour of haircutting bank creditors, including (some) depositors. It is something I pushed for when I worked for the Independent Commission on Banking. Needless to say it was considered far too radical for the UK. Which perhaps it was. However, I was glad to read this piece by Izabella Kaminska on the FT’s ever-excellent Alphaville blog, which gives a clearer exposition of my line of thinking than I could produce myself. An extract:

…I’d argue that what it really represents is the inevitable shift away from a debt funded economy to an equity funded one.

That’s not to say the shift has been managed fairly or logically. I’m with Willem Buiter on the point that it would have been better if small island depositors had been spared. But I’m also with him on the point that this is ultimately a step in the right direction.

It all comes down to the need to capitalise failing banks with equity, and to get creditors taking responsibility for their bad investments.

It’s worth reading the whole piece.

Maximalism

by Ross

I have discovered that there is a name for the kind of interior design I like. That name appears to be maximalism.

Auto-sizing photos in WordPress

by Ross

For anyone who is struggling to get images to auto-resize in WordPress, the solution is to add the following code to the site’s CSS. You can do this in the WordPress Control Panel, under ‘Appearance’.

p img {
  width: 100% !important;
  height: auto;
}

With thanks to the WordPress support forums.

Corporate access

by Ross

The FT has a piece today on corporate brokers charging investors for access to their CEO clients (or should that be clients’ CEOs?) The general feeling appears to be one of outrage, despite the fact that this has been common knowledge to anyone is the City for years. I remember it being something that came up during my early work on the Kay Review back in 2011.

I do think that many of the comments miss the point here. There is one question about on which terms CEO (and CFO, etc) time should be made available to current and potential investors. There is another question about who intermediates that exchange, and how openly. I am at least as interested in the second question as the first.

If corporate brokers can resell CEO time for £10,000 per hour as a matter of course, it seems to me that CEO time is undervalued by their own organisations. Allowing corporate brokers to market this time and pocket the fee is tantamount to corporates throwing a lucrative freebie at their brokers. Where this happens, corporates should write this off against brokerage fees. Either that, or hire a secretary specifically to disintermediate and sell CEO time directly. Three hours sold would make that broadly cost-neutral.

Overview of Davos 2013

by Ross

I am glad to present my overview of Davos 2013. I was there for the skiing, not the posturing.

Django digested

by Ross

I watched Django Unchained last night. I enjoyed it, mainly for Christopher Waltz’ character. There is some interesting analysis here, some more marginal analysis here, and a guide to references here (also see the comments on that post).

For me, its interesting that Candie’s question, “why don’t they kill us all?”, hasn’t been picked up more widely (although this post and its comments are good on the topic). For me it fits with a central motif of the film: the way in which cruelty can be legitimised by law. This is evident first in the need for receipts to follow slaves (and even freedmen) to prove their legal status, most obviously in this disparity of consequences that arise from mistreating a black and white human (and the shock to this easy dichotomy that the notion of a free black man creates), but most intriguingly in the way in which all characters respect the law as utterly authoritative.

The Marshal’s deputies and later Big Daddy’s hastily gathered possé both back down instantly at the sight of a piece of paper. Waltz’ character is meticulous in his respect for the law. The mining company workers debate the authenticity of the ‘Wanted’ handbill, but never question the fact that the people listed on it are legally entitled to be shot. Even Candie respects Django’s freedom as a kind of legal curiosity, and treats him accordingly (even when it rankles Big Daddy, and most of Candie’s acolytes). The time period of film is important: in less than two years, this ostensible respect for the supremacy of federal law would be thrown aside when it stopped authorising the continued subjugation of a large proportion of the population.

Prince Philip on fine form

by Ross

Prince Philip remains my favourite royal.

“The Philippines must be half empty – you’re all here running the NHS,” the Duke of Edinburgh told a Filipino nurse during a visit to Luton and Dunstable Hospital, where he opened a £5.5m cardiac centre.

The 91-year-old royal, who called himself “the world’s most experienced curtain puller”, was said to be in a “jovial” mood during the visit and asked when the hospital would get a helipad to save him a journey by car.
via BBC News – Prince Philip cracks Filipino nurse joke.

I am imagining the conversation at a dinner party with the Prince, Boris Johnson and Silvio Burlesconi.

Royal bodies

by Ross

I don’t think Hilary Mantel will be getting a gong any time soon. I heard recorded extracts from this LRB lecture on Today this morning, and the full weight of the words is increased by their having been spoken aloud, to an audience. While one can understand the points Ms Mantel is making regarding the role of royal consorts, I cannot see that there was any need to make such spiteful personal comments against the Duchess, or the late mother of her husband. Royalist or republican, everyone should retain a little decorum.

Update: An interesting perspective of the content of Mantel’s speech here, although it lets her off the hook for her style a little too easily.

The end of flight mode

by Ross

Turning your electronics off on a plane is silly. I have stopped doing it. I have yet to crash. Now the US’s Federal Aviation Administration, which sets the de facto world standard, is being pressured to drop the rule.

Ms McCaskill, a member of the Senate’s transportation committee, is fed up with the slow pace of change at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). She has warned the agency in a letter that she is “prepared to pursue legislative solutions should progress be made too slowly” on allowing the use of electronic devices throughout a flight. The FAA, which has given various evasive explanations for the ban, is under the jurisdiction of the committee and so has reason to take this seriously.

via Electronic devices on planes: The end of flight mode | The Economist.

Three cheers to Senator McCaskill.

Baker Days

by Ross

I find this argument for the reform of inset ‘Baker Days’ in British state education quite persuasive. I also recognise some of the descriptions of poor training sessions, which are certainly not limited to the teaching profession.