Best accountancy picture caption ever!
Posted by Christie Malry on October 24, 2011 at 9:53 pm
Oh yes, they really did.
Ritchie logic
Posted by Christie Malry on September 20, 2011 at 10:47 pm
Er. Suppose, just for a second, that Ritchie has just proposed something butt-clenchingly stupid. Such as nationalising all the banks, or any of the myriad of other suggestions he has made over the years.
You might sigh patiently, and say that that's not such a great idea. And Ritchie, being Ritchie, will say "Saying you're wrong isn't debate. You need to provide some evidence." So you provide that evidence. In the case of nationalising all the banks, that evidence could be a bank such as HSBC, which didn't need to be bailed out by the government then and still doesn't now.
Aha! But that's no longer good enough. Because, far from proving that Ritchie knows nothing about economics and has got it terribly wrong again, your counter-example in fact proves that he was right all along!
//Facepalm.
There really is no end to his chutzpah, is there?
Goodbye Times
Posted by Christie Malry on June 25, 2010 at 7:00 pm
The Times makes a pretty dismal effort to convince people to give them £1 a month for their crummy blogs:
Comment Central is on the move. You can find it here.
The blog will remain the same, but be part of our new website. That means that when you first go to the new site you will have to register.
And soon, there will be a charge. However, the good news is that a full week of Comment Central only costs £1 for 30 days when you first sign on and £2 a week after that.
And, even better, I have managed to persuade The Times to allow Comment Central subscribers to read TheTimes.co.uk free!
Yeah, or you could just save your money and unsubscribe from their RSS feed. Which is what I'll be doing until The Times goes back to its old model.
EXCLUSIVE: The AICPA's new website is really unpopular
Posted by Christie Malry on May 18, 2010 at 10:42 am
So, the AICPA (American Institute of Certified Public Accountants) has launched a brand new website. And it looks pretty good, all in all.
However, there is one amusing feature. On most pages there is a function that allows you to rate each page. As of the time of writing, this function is broken, meaning that every page has a ranking of 0.5 stars out of 5.0... i.e. fantastically unpopular. Even pages that have only one user ranking have an average of 0.5, so it must be a bug. It's a pretty funny and unfortunate error on what's otherwise quite a neat site.
Reasons not to vote Labour #83 - the supercasino that wasn't
Posted by Christie Malry on April 25, 2010 at 10:05 am
Another "don't get me wrong" post. I never supported the idea of a super-casino. Gambling is an idiotic pastime that only mugs play. And it was always a cruel idea to introduce a super-casino and lots of large casinos elsewhere, given what it was likely to do to poverty and deprivation. Gordon Brown deserves a tiny bit of credit for stopping the super-casino in its tracks.
However he also deserves our complete, undistracted derision for dithering for months before doing so. In doing so, this cost many local councils hundreds of thousands of pounds that they had spent preparing for the bid. He even voted in favour of the super-casino in the Commons. Fail.
Prem Sikka and every accountant's favourite typo
Posted by Christie Malry on April 24, 2010 at 10:32 am
Prem Sikka's bunch of crackpots over at the AABA possibly cause a diplomatic incident with our friends in the AAA:
Reasons not to vote Labour #96 - British jobs for British workers
Posted by Christie Malry on April 23, 2010 at 1:00 pm
In 2009, Gordon Brown pledged "British jobs for British workers."
So what's happened since then? Let's hear from the lovely Stephanie Flanders:
But we can say that the vast bulk of net job creation since 1997 appears to have benefited workers not born in the UK.
So that's another Brown fail.
Ritchie double-takes Repo 105
Posted by Christie Malry on March 30, 2010 at 9:28 pm
Richard Murphy notes that the SEC has written to several financial services companies to enquire whether they were using transactions like Repo 105.
This is actually very bad news for Ritchie. His article on Repo 105, as you'll recall, argued that Lehmans was trying to undertake GAAP arbitrage between UK GAAP and US GAAP. So the fact that the SEC seems to believe it didn't fly under US GAAP on top of the FSA's comment that it didn't work under UK GAAP either is a comprehensive torpedoing of Ritchie's theory.
Better luck next time, Ritchie!
Austin Mitchell's EDM 1138 is populist nonsense
Posted by Christie Malry on March 19, 2010 at 8:03 pm
Via Twitter, I spot that Austin Mitchell, sometime scourge of the accounting profession, has scribed an early day motion on the credit crisis.
INTEREST FREE CREDIT
Mitchell, Austin
That this House believes that HM Treasury should alleviate the effects of the recession and prevent the continued escalation of debt by matching the amount of money created through quantitative easing by the Bank of England with interest free cash for financing works in the public interest, thus addressing the enormous imbalance between interest bearing credit and interest free cash in the overall money supply.
How exactly does making debt cheaper "prevent the continued escalation of debt"? If he wants to reduce debt, he should be calling for a repeal of quantitative easing and higher interest rates. Giving money away for free will only encourage more bad borrowing.
Worst argument for Robin Hood tax ever
Posted by Christie Malry on March 18, 2010 at 10:29 pm
It looks like the Robin Hood campaign must be in trouble. Because they've had to resort to toe-curlingly embarrassing nonsense like this:
As campaign leader Richard Curtis has noted, Tobin and Robin differ by only one letter, underscoring the sound provenance of the campaign ideas
This former Harvard professor cannot argue the pathetically flimsy case for the Robin Hood tax, so he's had to resort to linguistic gimmicks. What a twit. Which, underscoring the sound provenance of my analysis, differs by only one letter from...
