Saints forum, the place for good financial advice...

[Guided Missile]

...and advice which that well known cheese eating, surrender monkey of a bank should have heeded. I'm talking about BNP Paribas, Jonah's employer. Yes, they're French, they're smelly and they couldn't help sniffing condesendingly in our direction, when it came to the state of our respective economies.

 

I was thinking of this thread that was an attempt to describe the actual strength of the UK economy, when compared to the shifty French and their shoulder shrugging approach to debt. In particular, over 2 years ago, Jonah posted, in reply to me:

 

This is a normal response for someone that has adopted the main characteristic of the French, namely an inflated sense of national pride, despite all evidence to the contrary.

On the subject of credit default swaps, I'm pretty sure that the German, French and UK government bonds are about as risk-free as any investment could be.

 

Now, if we talk about Irish, Greek, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian bonds, they are only slightly safer at the moment, than shares in Southampton Leisure plc. I'm sure your colleagues are watching those CDS's rise nearly as quick as unemployment rates in the City....(sorry about that one)

 

Well with Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Spain on credit watch they are unsurprisingly high. What will be interesting is to see if any of them get downgraded below A- rating by S&P (temporarily lowered to BBB-) which would exclude their sovereign debt from acceptance by the ECB (oh dear).

 

Meanwhile a good round of redundancies will do the City no harm, there is a lot of dross at the moment and these culls clear a lot of it out.

 

 

 

Ah well again I would disagree with you there, you cannot keep grouping the UK in with the less risky sovereigns. Markit shows the latest G7 spreads and the UK is twice as expensive to insure against as the US, Germany or France and three times as costly as Japan:

 

http://www.markit.com/information/news/commentary/cds.html

 

And we're deteriorating at the same pace as Italy which can never be a good sign. In fact, UK Ltd is considered more risky and therefore more expensive to insure against than corporates now...

 

Well, Jonah's own bank, BNP Paribas recently reported holding the most Greek debt of any of the French banks, about 5bn euros of sovereign debt and has set aside 534m euros to cover its Greek exposure.

 

My forecast? Watch a French banking crisis emerge over the next few weeks and whether Sarkozy and the French government can bail them out. 534m euros set aside for the Greek debt? Try 1.5b euros and you might be closer to the mark....

 

Of course, my opening post about Saints avoiding administration by paying off the £5M overdraft to Barclays was completely wrong, but I'm more of a broad brush, macro-economic kind of a guy.....

Edited 13 September, 2011 by Guided Missile
typo...

[Johnny Bognor]

Bloody Hell GM, you don't hold grudges do you? (that thread was from January 2009, over two and a half years ago)

 

(I do agree with you BTW)

[Guided Missile]

Bloody Hell GM, you don't hold grudges do you? (that thread was from January 2009, over two and a half years ago)

 

(I do agree with you BTW)

Don't think I've forgotten about the comparative performance of our two companies, Johnny Big Bo££ox....

[Johnny Bognor]

Don't think I've forgotten about the comparative performance of our two companies, Johnny Big Bo££ox....

 

LOL, I knew that was coming and that was back in June 2008 FFs!!!!

 

Anyway, haven't you sold yet and how's the golf swing BTW?

Edited 13 September, 2011 by Johnny Bognor

[dubai_phil]

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/jeremywarner/100011929/europes-banks-are-starring-into-the-abyss/

 

Ah taking out the fact this simply seemed to be a personal attack on a poster I think I start to understand what GM is on about.

 

Watch Inside Job (movie) then it starts to make sense.

 

Think the phrase is

 

We are all fooked