Banking on apathy

7 June, 2011 at 12:20 am | Posted in It's the economy stupid | 4 Comments
Tags:

Money

In the late 1960s my wife went into her local Barclays to withdraw some money, these were the days when you would give the teller a cheque to withdraw your money, they would then look at you in a disapproving manner, as if you were imposing upon their valuable time, and retaining the icy stare would, with reluctance, give you back your own money.

But on this day the frosty teller informed my wife that the manager “would like to have a few words – if that was convenient”, and would she stand just outside his office.

Ushered into the inner sanctum of mahogany and leather the manager informed her that she was overdrawn by the princely sum of 10/- (50p) and that he would not tolerate her profligate lifestyle. It was to be a lesson she has never forgotten and to this day refuses to get overdrawn.

Since then for the past 40 years we use one of Barclays’ competitors, and it would seem that our current bank is more interested in selling tickets for the 2012 Olympics than offering a semblance of service to its retail customers, even though the British public own 43 per cent of the company’s capital.

Six months or so ago we stopped receiving our regular monthly bank statements, my requests to see the manager have been met with a polite but firm refusal, in fact you could get an audience with the Pope easier than an appointment with the manager.

After months of inquiries and telephone calls I’ve found that our bank statement went undelivered and was returned by a member of the public, and fearing the account might be compromised, in their wisdom, they stopped informing the account holders of any transactions that were processed, but they still continued to honour any genuine or fraudulent withdrawals.

Now I mention this, what appears to be an unremarkable experience, because Net Promoter Score has found London’s banks to be – how can I put this politely? – Unsatisfactory. The new Metro Bank scores 67 per cent customer satisfaction, then comes First Direct at 57 per cent, RBS at 10 per cent, Lloyds at minus 19 per cent and Barclays minus 35 per cent – that is an incredible 35 per cent of its clients would not recommend the bank to a friend but they would actively dissuade that friend from using it.

Supporting these anecdotal results, figures from the Financial Ombudsman Service show that my bank is again the most complained about financial institution in Britain, accounting for over 22,000 complaints received, responsible for almost one in four of the 97,000 complaints investigated by the Ombudsman in the last six months of 2010.

But will I jump ship to another high street bank? You bet I won’t. Despite the nation’s disillusionment people are failing to make a proactive choice about their bank, with one in five of us opting for a bank near where we worked or lived at the time of choosing and 19 per cent opting for a bank that simply had a lot of branches. One in ten, 11 per cent, are even still with the bank their parents set them up with when they were a child and haven’t bothered to changed it since. And one last sobering thought: You are more likely to divorce in England than change your bank.

Footer.jpg

CabbieBlog is published regularly under a Creative Commons License by a London Black Cab Driver. Powered by WordPress.com.
Take a look round, you might like what you find. Proudly supporting the National Trust protecting England’s heritage and coast.

CabbieBlog uses Technorati Tags:

A degree of skill

7 December, 2010 at 1:00 pm | Posted in It's the economy stupid | 2 Comments
Tags:

Private_Eye_Graduation

I was reading recently that 26.6 per cent of those graduating from South Bank University were still unemployed after six months. It was then that I had this brainwave, now, I hate to boast, but this is a cracking idea, an idea so dazzling in its simplicity that I’m surprised nobody has thought of it before. Well, stop me if you think this is silly, but instead of teaching courses based on administration, academia, or subjects which will have no relevance to student’s future working lives, let’s teach them vocational skills.

We should encourage, no let’s force employees to take on trainees, I know we could call them apprentices, make employers give them a three year structured education in return for a lower rate of salary.

The current system with the goal to educate over 50 per cent of our young to graduate level is not working, on average after completing their course over 11 per cent are without employment six months after graduating, and many who have found employment are not pursuing the career ladder they were promised at the start of their university life.

During their course 22.1 per cent drop out of university for various reasons, while for The Knowledge the dropout rate is about 70 per cent, either students at university are more focussed on completing their course or The Knowledge is overly demanding. Or could it be that some university courses are not very demanding, or Knowledge students are the lazy ones?

Those who pass The Knowledge have employment from the day they receive their license, and the majority who have pursued vocational subjects be it a plumber, electrician or IT specialist can find suitable employment within weeks of passing.

Figures released by the Office for National Statistics show that this year a record 100,000 “Polish plumbers” have arrived this year as Britain climbs out of recession. Surely it’s not beyond the ability of this Government to get our young trained to fill these posts?

Educationalists argue, with some justification, that a university education broadens your horizons and encourages the young into a lifetime of learning, but it cannot be right to supply the employment market with thousands of graduates who have worked hard for three years to gain their degree, only to find their qualifications are dismissed by potential employers as being worthless as a means for gaining employment.

In the 1960s employers of many affiliated industries were required to provide apprenticeships, with practical tuition and college days including lessons devoted to English and English literature, those core subjects should be incorporated into adult education for the 21st century. The Government should make employers take on of apprentices; giving them practical as well as academic guidance, while promoting the lifelong education ethos.

After all it’s not rocket science . . . and maybe that is another course they could provide.

Footer.jpg

CabbieBlog is published regularly under a Creative Commons License by a London Black Cab Driver. Powered by WordPress.com.
Take a look round, you might like what you find. Proudly supporting the National Trust protecting England’s heritage and coast.

Shoreditch snake oil salesman

20 April, 2010 at 1:47 am | Posted in It's the economy stupid | 2 Comments
Tags:

Like me, you’ve probably passed it dozens of times without a second glance, just another prime site ready for development. Covered by the patina of age and buddleia glowing out of every crevice, it stands on the junction of Commercial Street and Shoreditch High Street, a stones throw from the City of London and The Royal Bank of Scotland’s headquarters, derelict now, Shoreditch Station bears witness to man’s dishonesty and greed.

When in the 1830 England started building railways the profits for investors were enormous returning 10 per cent every year, within 20 years 6,000 miles of track had been laid, but after the most lucrative routes had been built railway companies had to look elsewhere, sometimes building railway lines parallel to each other.

Of all the figures thrown up by Britain’s “railway age” there can be none more fascinating than the York draper and furnisher, George Hudson. From humble beginnings as the uneducated son of a yeoman farmer he had inherited a fortune by his early thirties, using it as a springboard to launch himself into a railway speculation. His extraordinary success gave him the nickname of the “Railway King” at least until he started operating the Eastern Counties Railway in 1839 with Shoreditch Station as its terminus.

It soon became apparent the railway building bubble had burst and there wasn’t enough demand to give investors the return they were promised. As with all these financial scandals, a little “creative accounting” was employed enabling George Hudson to continue to give the dividends promised, using the sale of shares to pay for existing shareholders’ dividends until he eventually fell from grace in 1849 when, as a result, he was castigated publicly as an ill-bred bounder.

Renamed Bishopsgate station, the station continued to operate for passenger traffic until 1874 when Liverpool Street station was opened. It then became a goods depot and Bishopsgate terminal handled very large volumes of goods from the eastern ports, arranged over three levels with turntables and hoists allowing railway wagons to be moved individually around the station for loading and unloading. A fire on 5 December 1964 destroyed the station and it was closed, the upper level structures were then largely demolished and over the next 30 years much of the site became derelict.

To make way for a planned station on the East London Line Underground, to be coloured coloured orange on the Tube map the entire site was demolished in 2004, with the exception of a number of Grade II listed structures: the Ornamental Gates on Shoreditch High Street and the remaining 850 feet of the so called “Braithwaite Viaduct”, one of the oldest railway structures in the world and the second oldest in London, designed by John Braithwaite an English engineer who invented the first steam fire engine.

braithwaite_viaduct A proposed re-development of the site will be for the creation of a high-level public park above the Braithwaite Viaduct, with links to existing green spaces such as Allen Gardens, to create a Shoreditch version of the famous New York High Line park. These plans will see up to 1.7 hectares of open space created for the local community.

So at least George Hudson, though dishonest, gave us some fine engineering  in his time for us to enjoy (as seen with Braithwaite arches left), maybe the financial wiz kids of today should walk up Bishopsgate and reflect what happens when financiers become crooks.
AddInto
Footer.jpg

CabbieBlog is published regularly under a Creative Commons License by a London Black Cab Driver. Powered by WordPress.com.
Take a look round, you might like what you find. Proudly supporting the National Trust protecting England’s heritage and coast.

CabbieBlog uses Technorati Tags:

It’s the Economy Stupid

2 March, 2009 at 1:54 pm | Posted in It's the economy stupid | Leave a comment
Tags:

Mornin’ Gov’nor, had The Original Monochrome Man in the cab recently, you know The Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Picked him up outside Downing Street and by the time we arrived at his destination I had offered my opinion on how his department had let me down with my pension (more about that probably on a future blog).

He had left my cab before I could advise him on his failure at running the economy. So just in case he reads this blog here goes:

Credit Crunch is the buzz word at the moment, but the availability of cheap credit is the least of our problems at the moment, unless you are a builder or an estate agent.

Energy prices are rising faster than at any time in living memory, and if that’s not enough we are dependent on our supply from some very unstable countries, and do you know this Government have made no effort to build storage facilities so we can buy cheap gas in summer and store it for winter consumption, talk about irresponsible.

This Government has borrowed more money (£43 billion and rising) than any country in the top 50 economies except Egypt, Pakistan and Hungary.

Official inflation is now at 5 per cent, but anyone on the street is likely to tell you they believe it is more likely to be 8 per cent.

Unemployment is now starting to rise and Google are saying one of the fastest growing searches is employers finding out about their responsibilities when they make their staff redundant.

This Government has allowed building societies to loan up to 7 times a persons’ salary with no checks upon their ability to repay the loan, now with interest rates rising only slightly, we are seeing repossessions in spades . Houses in the South-East are inflated by 30 per cent, with first-time buyers looking at starter homes dearer than their annual salary by a multiple of six and not four as it has always been in the past.

But the real elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about, is the unsecured borrowing, such as through credit cards, overdrafts and loans, which has soared to £22 billion during the first three months of this year, that this Government has actively encouraged people to take on, and hopefully making them feel good and take their eyes off what a load of incompetent twats this Administration really are.

And do you know the real tragedy of all this is? Those very men and women who could run this country spend all their time driving taxis in London. What a waste!

But do you know that you only have to ask your driver for advice on economics and they are more than likely to give it gratis.

Stop Press (stop blog hasn’t the same impact)

The Government in an effort to save their jobs recently announced: It is suspending stamp duty for properties worth up to £175,000 – £50,000 more than the current threshold. Also included is a shared equity scheme, and “free” five-year loans of up to 30 per cent for some first-time buyers.

Masters of the Universe

24 February, 2009 at 3:20 pm | Posted in It's the economy stupid | Leave a comment
Tags:

I’ve lost count of the number of times “how’s business” has been said to me recently. Who do they think I am Warren Buffet? Well for all of you who have not had the advantage of travelling in my cab:

Supporters of these Master of the Universe in banking say that their international telephone number salaries are to attract the Brightest and the Best, well if what has happened this year is from the Brightest and Best, give me Useless and Stupid any day.

Margaret Thatcher once proclaimed “you cannot buck the markets” and a light touch regulation was all that was required.

In reality, the governments on both sides of the Atlantic have now had no alternative but to bail out these banks run by the Masters of the Universe, because in an ironic twist of the Keynesian maxim that if you owe the bank £10,000 you’re in trouble, but if you owe them £10 million they’re in trouble. So if these banks are not supported the likely outcome will be not a recession but a full blown depression not seen since the 1930s.

The ramifications of this financial meltdown will be felt by every person in this country for generations. In bailing out these morons the immediate effect is that the government will have to look for savings elsewhere, that that means fewer schools, hospitals, roads, and a cut in real terms in benefits. With large scale redundancies in banking we cabbies will soon feel the pinch.

2ndcab.jpg

CabbieBlog takes the view that the government should not succumb to a knee-jerks reaction, maybe a few banks should have been allowed to go to the wall. A full investigation should be launched and radical changes made to the financial sector, the most important being that it should never again be allowed to self-regulate. What the City and hedge fund managers have been doing is the equivalent of going down the bookies and putting £1 to win using our pensions for the stake money and giving themselves enormous bonuses in return. Lehman Brothers for example owed $35 for every $1 it made. You don’t have to be a financial genius to realise that sooner or later the game would be up, even your average Cabbie would have told them, if only they had asked, but they never do.

Blog at WordPress.com. | Theme: Pool by Borja Fernandez.
Entries and comments feeds.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 748 other followers