The next to fall from grace

The american-financial pandemic has infected europe.

The Guardian

Time runs out for Bradford & Bingley

Last-ditch talks aim to avoid second nationalisation

• Heather Connon and Richard Wachman
• The Observer,
• Sunday September 28 2008
• Article history

The future of Bradford & Bingley is on a knife-edge this weekend, as frantic efforts are made to rescue the buy-to-let lender and prevent it from becoming the next victim of the credit crunch.

The Treasury and the City watchdog, the Financial Services Authority, are seeking a 'white knight' to stave off the possibility that the government will be forced to nationalise the bank in the same way that Northern Rock was put into public ownership in February. A well-placed source said that 'the priority, as with the Rock, will be to protect depositors'.

But there is now a consensus that B&B's days as an independent financial institution are coming to an end, with analysts saying that either a sale, possibly to a 'lifeboat' consortium of rival high street banks, or nationalisation, is the most likely outcome. A break-up sale is also a possibility, as is a combination with Northern Rock.

Although the bank says it is well capitalised, the company is badly exposed to the sickly buy-to-let market and analysts say it may struggle to survive in the current global financial crisis. It was perceived to be 'clearing the decks' ahead of a sale last week when it announced it was shedding 370 jobs, writing off £134m of toxic assets and paying £13m to rewrite the contract under which it had to take on buy-to-let mortgages from rival GMAC. But its share price continued to plunge, closing on Friday at 20p.

Its five high-street banking rivals own 30 per cent of its shares, after they were forced to step in to underwrite its £400m rights issue, and it is believed that the FSA has already canvassed the support of HSBC, Barclays and Santander - which owns Abbey National and has just taken over Alliance & Leicester - to support B&B. While none of the three is likely to be keen to take on B&B on its own, they may be prepared to take on parts of the bank under a break-up deal.

B&B has been under pressure since it launched the rights issue, just weeks after denying that it needed one. Since then, it has revealed mounting bad debts on its portfolio of buy-to-let mortgages - it is the second largest lender in this market - a slump in new lending and a series of asset write-offs. Last Thursday it said that it was removing mortgage advisers from all its branches so that all new inquiries would have to be dealt with at a central processing unit in Bingley.

But the bank denied that meant it was effectively closed to new lending - only a tenth of its mortgages traditionally come from its branches, the remainder through intermediaries. It said that its branches would now concentrate on raising retail deposits.

Bradford & Bingley was formed in 1964 as a result of the merger of the Bradford Equitable building society and the Bingley Permanent building society. In 2000, it demutualised and floated on the London Stock Exchange with former members receiving shares of up to £5,000 each.

Many former building societies that abandoned mutual status have fared badly in the crunch: Santander took over Alliance & Leicester, HBOS was forced into a merger with Lloyds TSB, and Northern Rock went bust.

Economist Review

Malaysian politics

Economist

Bluff and counter-bluff

Sep 18th 2008 | BANGKOK
From The Economist print edition

Playing poker for the right to form a government

EPAFollow me, says Anwar

FOR months the entire country had been nervously awaiting Malaysia Day, September 16th. And not just to celebrate the 45th anniversary of Sabah and Sarawak, Britain’s colonies on Borneo, joining with the Malayan peninsula to form Malaysia. The opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, had been promising, since his alliance’s strong showing in a general election in March, that by Malaysia Day he would convince more than 30 parliamentarians from the governing coalition to switch sides, thereby giving him a majority and allowing him to take power. Mr Anwar’s sweeping victory in a by-election last month heightened the speculation that he was on track to keep his promise.

The big day arrived. The prime minister, Abdullah Badawi, and his deputy, Najib Razak, ostentatiously went about their business, ridiculing Mr Anwar’s threat as a “mirage” and a “deception” respectively. Mr Anwar called a press conference to claim that he had “firm commitments” from enough government MPs to win power. He demanded a meeting with Mr Badawi to discuss a smooth handover. But still he did not name the supposed defectors. He has since called for parliament to be recalled from recess to hold a vote of no confidence in the government. Mr Badawi seems unlikely to agree to this or to meet Mr Anwar. The ruling coalition, led by the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), has run the country uninterruptedly since the peninsula’s independence from Britain 51 years ago. So is Mr Anwar’s boast the bluff of the half-century?

Malaysians might have concluded thus had it not been for the signs of panic from the government over the threat from Mr Anwar, and its deep and widening splits over Mr Badawi’s leadership. The “sodomy” charge brought in June against Mr Anwar by a male ex-assistant looked suspiciously similar to the bogus charges that brought him down in 1998, when he was the deputy, and chief rival, to the then prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad. Eight days before Malaysia Day, UMNO packed off dozens of its MPs on a supposed study tour of Taiwan, a blatant ploy to keep them away from Mr Anwar.

Then on September 12th three thorns in the government’s side were arrested under Malaysia’s Internal Security Act, a relic of British colonial rule that allows indefinite detention without charge. They included a pro-opposition blogger who had made sensational allegations against Mr Najib and an ethnic-Chinese opposition MP whose supposed offence had been to ask her local mosque to turn down its loudspeakers (she denied this).

The third detainee, released after 18 hours, was a journalist who had accurately reported racist comments by a minor UMNO official. The official had called the country’s Chinese minority “squatters” and said they were power-hungry “like the Jews in America”. The unrepentant official himself was not arrested, just suspended from party membership. This prompted the Malaysian Chinese Association, a party in the ruling coalition, to hint that its patience with UMNO’s ethnic-Malay supremacists was close to exhaustion.

The detentions looked like the start of the wider crackdown that some fear a cornered UMNO might yet launch, to save its skin. But they succeeded only in widening the splits in the ruling party. The cabinet’s leading reformist, Zaid Ibrahim, appointed recently to overhaul the politicised justice system, resigned and announced he now had an “open mind” about joining the opposition. Muhyiddin Yassin, the trade minister, called for the prime minister to step down early (he has already promised to hand over to Mr Najib in 2010). Several other ministers openly criticised the arrests.

Dr Mahathir—who has become a bitter critic of his successor as prime minister and had recently quit UMNO in a sulk—marked Malaysia Day by letting it be known he was rejoining, presumably to foment an internal coup against Mr Badawi. The next day the prime minister said he might hand over to Mr Najib early and, in the meantime, would give him the finance minister’s portfolio, hitherto held by himself. Shortly after, the Sabah Progressive Party, a small Borneo party with two MPs, said it was quitting the ruling coalition to go “independent”.

For the opposition, the prospect of Dr Mahathir helping UMNO destroy itself is “exciting”, as Nik Aziz Nik Mat, a leader of the Islamist Party, a member of Mr Anwar’s alliance, gleefully put it. The disarray in the ruling party will do no harm to the opposition’s hopes of gaining power. But it remains unclear if it has pushed enough disaffected government MPs to make the jump to Mr Anwar’s camp. Malaysian pundits think Mr Anwar has lined up a fairly large group of potential defectors. But they reckon he can keep voters waiting only a little while longer before they start to wonder if he is no more to be trusted than the government he loves to lambast.]

FYI

Freedom (is) when you lift your hand. And then (when the) lifting of your hand touches those of other persons, that's when your freedom ends.

A New Dawn

A new dawn! they exclaimed!
Ah Nua says, THEY will be brought down,
While the rakyat ask and prod,
Have we been conned all along?

OoOoooOoh Boleh-land!
Where art thou?
Flags are already flown upside down,
And you still dare scream "ISA!"?

The economy is in total bull****
Many hope for something new.
With Lehman gone, Merrill gone,
I wonder, who else will be drown?

When tomorrow comes,
A new dawn is lit,
But for me tonight, it's all matrices and cofactors,
And determinants and more numbers!

Because I want and need to score,
to beat those cruel curves!!!
Ahaha, and that I hope,
Is the new dawn for me!

Hello World!

Inexcusable salubrious salutations -- the sundried and sun dried Sunday kind!

For some reason, the night here is much warmer than the day.... this morning's temperature was 75F and it's now 84F???? Hmmm, probably one of the side effects of the pretentious global warming?......(Hail Al Gore! ahaha)

For the past few months, I was rather lazy (its summer okay!!) and did not feel like blogging about anything at all. There's simply nothing interesting in my life to share (i think).

Of course, there're issues in M'sia while i was there , but I'll let you know that those are just idiotic and idiosyncratic statements or comments that have been made by ***** people ahhhh......And none certainly deserved the coverage given ! The papers (and media) have became a tool for mass-intellectual-destruction (MID) through its overly-saturated ****shit to the extent that you feel like vomiting after reading them over and over and over and again and again..... G.W. Bush should seriously consider this MID as a weapon of WMD (though i'm strictly NOT suggesting that he should wage a "shock & awe" assault on --------) ahahahaha...just some random "thoughtless" thought (see, it has affected me already..aha..and of course, don't arrest me under ISA laa)
On a lighter note, my petition to have 7 Course Units has been rejected. I tried overiding it by petitioning against the decision again last week but to no avail. Aha, i guess 6 CU is more than enough for me this semester with 2 labs et al.

Oh, and one more thing, a late "B-lated B'day" wish for my brother's 23rd (very old horr..). For the record, you could also drop by his blog which can be accessed through the Link section (free publicity here =) ) to wish him though i'm pretty sure his blog is as "alive" as mine.

And also to Ryan (another publicity stunt here) who now holds the world-record of "most-censored-comments-by-lXl-on-facebook", for whatever reasons that are *unknown* to me. Ahaha..he's gonna whack me soon ....

So yeah, back to the initial subject, feel free to drop comments if you want my worthless (2 cents) opinion on anything or if you have a question that requires an answer (duh! not like i could provide one anyway). At least that would give me something to blog about =)

Vigil for those in need

Go Light Your World

There is a candle in every soul
Some brightly burning, some dark and cold
There is a spirit who brings a fire
Ignites a candle and makes his home

So carry your candle, run to the darkness
Seek out the helpless, confused and torn
Hold out your candle for all to see it
Take your candle, and go light your world
Take your candle, and go light your world

Frustrated brother, see how he’s tried to
Light his own candle some other way
See now your sister, she’s been robbed and lied to
Still holds a candle without a flame

So carry your candle, run to the darkness
Seek out the lonely, the tired and worn
Hold out your candle for all to see it
Take your candle, and go light your world
Take your candle, and go light your world

Cause we are a family whose hearts are blazing
So let’s raise our candles and light up the sky
Praying to our father, in the name of Jesus
Make us a beacon in darkest times

So carry your candle, run to the darkness
Seek out the helpless, deceived and poor
Hold out your candle for all to see it
Take your candle, and go light your world

Carry your candle, run to the darkness
Seek out the hepeless, confused and torn
Hold out your candle for all to see it
Take your candle, and go light your world
Take your candle, and go light your world
Take your candle, and go light your world