Rob

I think there is a danger here of using one fault to explain the other and vice-versa. The banking crisis effectively came to a head with the sub-prime situation in the US. That was a case of people being sold loans they couldn't afford as a result of greed by the financial salesforces concerned taking their commission payments as fast and frequently as they could. Government could have interfered in the process but didn't. To a lesser extent the same thing happened in this country as a result of the more aggressive lenders such as Northern Rock and the Halifax offering ever increasing multiples of income to stoke the overheating property market. The main offenders at this time were the former mutuals who in all probability did not have sufficient expertise to adjust to a market enforced contraction having been constrained from excessive lending by the rules of mutuality in the early 1990s. As fully listed companies they were free to tap the markets more or less as and when they wanted. The problems arose when access to funds dried up. The initial cash injections by the government into RBS & Lloyds were only a fraction of the overspend by government in recent history, though the subsequent QE measures have inflated those figures enormously with the corresponding increase in debt per head of population. Whether the banking crisis had occurred or not, the government would eventually have been brought to heel by its creditors because we all know that if you own the debt, you don't control the future. The Labour government's insistence on spending the nation's wealth beyond the tax take on its pet projects was entirely due to GBs desire to portray himself as Father Christmas. The government had been spending beyond its income levels for years, never once trying to balance its books. The suggestion that cutting back on public expenditure is due to the banking crisis is only loosely connected at best insofar as banks were no longer in a position to purchase government bonds. If the UK's expenditure was considered reasonable, those bonds could and would have been bought by creditor nations and their banks as not all countries were in the same mess, but whether they chose to do so would be based on a rational assessment of whether a government could reasonably be expected to pay back the debt. Not only did Labour not have a plan in place to balance the books, there is no evidence there was any intention to do so. Only TB's resignation allowing GB to become party leader stopped the deluge because Alastair Darling was somewhat more financially astute, but by that time unable to do anything about it. When you are in a hole it is best to stop digging. So I believe the two matters are related more in timing and general market sentiment than as a direct cause and effect. The financial services industry has always and will always be greedy, telling half truths and rarely if ever presenting the full facts. Against this is the responsibility of the individual to not stretch themselves to a point where they cannot make repayments. People have had benign economic conditions for too long with no memeory of having to juggle affordability. When I took out my first mortgage in the early 1980s, I was paying 5 or 6% on it. Those repayments soon hit double figures, so I promptly paid it off. GB said New Labour was the end of boom and bust - yeah, right, just like all the other times. Anecdote - Even after all the recent market turmoil and supposed lack of available funding, the financial service sector never fails to shoot itself in the foot. Last year we bought a buy to let. Initially we were going to take out a 60% LTV mortgage and offset interest payments against tax. At the meeting to arrange the loan, all we were asked is whether the vendor was going to live in the house following purchase. We said no, he said ok. We paid our application fee and waited for the paperwork to come through. When it arrived, one clause stated that not only was the vendor not allowed to live there, but neither was any family member. This was inconvenient as potentially the house could have ben used by one of our children. When I raised the point with the mortgage arranger he just said don't mention it. Great. Why enter into a binding agreement if under false pretences. Do I not bother making repayments on the gounds I thought the lender was having a laugh when we were told we would have to repay the loan at so much per month? We swallowed the application fee loss and the Co-op got their money. The financial adviser through whom the application was made didn't get his commission as we promptly paid cash in full and didn't take out the loan. When will they learn? Nothing changes, greed rules, but it is still incumbent on the individual to act responsibly rather than adopt a perpetual nanny state approach.

Oh that it was so simple. The current cutback on public spending is b****r all to do with the banks, but a rebalancing of the state's expenditure. When Brown was Chancellor, he presided over a state spending plan that raised 44% less in tax than he spent over a five year period. This he called prudence. Heaven knows what he would have done had he decided to be imprudent in his eyes, but I suggest the lights would already have gone out. Any Chancellor has to balance the books over the period of a parliament or at least have a plan to do so if the policies are to have any credibility. Failure to do so without a rigged voting system ensuring 5 more years in advance means the government of the day can spend as much as it likes giving lots of freebies to the voter without being held to account and having to rectify the s**t it leaves for the next election victor. Politicians being self-congratulatory animals only want public endorsement of their policies. Playing Father Christmas is the easiest way to win the appoval of Mr Average UK who is on the whole pretty thick when it comes to the wider picture. Rant over. Sorry rob, but your rant is either naivety, or partisan political. What you call "rebalancing of the state's expenditure" is nothing but Conservative Party economics. You can see this quite clearly in Osborne and Cameron's list of targets, none of which include banks (despite Osborne's publically heralded "slap on the wrist"). But despite the Daily Mail's stereotyping of a sizeable minority of the British population as "workshy scroungers" (based on demonstrably false statistics) it's the poor wot gets the blame and are hit hardest. Twas ever thus. I really do recommend that you read Sebastian Faulks' "Week In December", all the while bearing in mind that he is no leftie. It will then be clear that what individual governments are pallid nothings in comparison to the economic power wielded by the world's banking system. All politicians do is scratch the surface in order to appease the readers of one particular tabloid newspaper or another. They actually make little or no difference. All Osborne's measures, that have heaped misery upon misery on those who can least afford it - have they had any real impact on the deficit? No. Could real measures taken against the banks, at which they would cough and sneeze for a week or two, have a much greater impact on the deficit? Yes. But no politician would dare, because if the banks withdrew their credit on which all governments rely whatever political shade they are - we would be "bankrupt" overnight. "Follow the money". It isn't partisan political because I would never pay any party to be told what to think. Like most people I take the Woolworth approach to politics of 'pick and mix'. Some things I would advocate are left and some right of centre, but I do have a belief that charity begins at home. Some things are sensibly organised on a national basis and essentially constitute a public service. There is no reason to have competition in the water service industry for example - that's a utility. This country needs people to get off their backsides and set up businesses that export to other countries, - waiting for Papa State to provide is not the solution as government jobs rarely improve the trading account of the UK or any other country. Successive governments, both left and right, have failed to support UK exporters with the result that manufacturing has become moribund. Due to the expansion of the public sector under the last government, the UK economy became increasingly unbalanced because the jobs created did not directly address the problem of the trade deficit, and in fact exacerbated the situation because the people concerned all went out and bought their consumer items, virtually all of which were imported. When the state sponsored percentage of employment is on a par with private enterprise, this is unsustainable because ultimately the former jobs represent a cost to the country. Sure we all want healthcare and education etc, but these things have to be paid for from receipts. If money doesn't enter the country, funding is reliant on people's savings. The pot only being so big means this is unsustainable in the long term. That is why we need more entrepreneurs in the UK. There wil never be a grandiose body responsible for solving all the problems of the country, rather it has to come from small businesses collectively. Part of the problem here is the EU which by 'generously distributing aid to poorer regions' also ties the grants to conditions regarding business use. A recent example locally being Liverpool, which has to pay back grants received in order for ships to start and finish their voyages in the city. The crux here is that it is all right to disburse funds because an area is suffering from an economic downturn, but if anyone is imaginative enough to try an economic revival, then the receiving body is penalised. The logic is crass. The funds were supplied to aleviate an economic problem, but any potential solution must not include an economically beneficial one. That is a common theme running through state provision. There is no incentive for recipients to change the status quo if they can survive on handouts. That extends to social benefits paid for from the public purse and is why a free lunch must always be questioned. (And incidently is why I believe the tax free band should not be raised, but rather fall to zero, as it's existence also creates a resistance to earn more on the grounds that nobody likes to pay any tax. If you can survive on tax free handouts, many will do just that). The best solution for this or any other country is the creation of private enterprises because they are driven by making money. There is no other reason for somebody to be in business. State organisations on the other hand have no incentive to be efficient. The time honoured promotion based on time served still appears to work very well. An employment position's importance is to a large extent determined by how many people you are responsible for. There is no incentive in the state sector to reduce headcount because public opinion always views a public service as something worth expanding. Thererin lies the dilemma. There is no connection made between public services and their cost in the eyes of many, but as you are aware, they do cost a lot of money to every taxpayer. The big problem private enterprise has is that many on the left have tended towards state employment and disdainfully view private business as corrupt, greedy, or almost feudal in its behaviour. For some reason it is ok to pay out benefits to people but not ok to spend money setting up businesses which in the fullness of time would hopefully repay the money and more. Until government recognises that benefits are unsustainable in the long term as they currently stand and that the best way of funding them is by taxing earned profits, this country will remain in a big hole. The money needs to come from overseas in the form of a trade surplus, otherwise you are merely robbing Peter to pay Paul whilst at the same time reducing the investment pot of the inhabitants of this country. As far as the banks are concerned, I think that Northern Rock should have been allowed to go to the wall. Victor Blank should have been shot for agreeing to merge with HBOS without conducting due diligence and in the process screwing his own bank which hitherto had been quite well run. The money that has been injected into the banks in the form of QE has not been inflationary to date as it has merely been hoarded to bolster reserves under Basel III. If and when the time comes that history is forgotten and they decide there is too much capital held by the banks, I would seriously advise you to buy index linked protection before it happens. The banks are unquestionably too big because they show time after time that there is too little control over operations in diverse sections of those businesses, but that is not the same issue as blaming the cutbacks in the public sector for the banks' past excesses. The amount of money made by banks is not excessive either in my view. Estimated combined profits this year are forecast at £35bn for Barclays, Lloyds, RBS, HSBC and Standard Chartered, but roughly £20bn of that is accounted for by the last two who do most of their business overseas in Asia. Do you want to penalise them for making money abroad. The two sick men, RBS and Lloyds will probably make less than £8bn combined, which is not a huge amount when put into perspective against the total value of transactions. Reducing the UK element of the profits to say half that total would represent profits of about 1% of UK GDP, not a large amount given many of the transactions will past through their books. Not many businesses could survive on a such a low profit relative to turnover. The solution for this or any other country is to have a positive trade balance and let someone else finance your spending on the little luxuries in life. Knowing that we can't all be in the black the best we can hope for is a worldwide collective oscillation around parity, but this country has long run a structural deficit. The deficit is money that goes to our foreign suppliers and is lost to this country for good. If you have indigenous industries, at least the money is recycled and imports reduced. In the 80s the typical yearly deficit was in single figure billions, today we do that in a month, every month. The people in this country have to come to their senses and recognise that no foreign country is going to give them their free lunch, it has to be earned. That is not naivety, just a recognition that the solution lies in our own hands in the form of import substitution, exports and a tad less reliance on the nebulous free lunch.

Been using Debbie's grading scale...Very F**ked to Extremely F**ked! 5mithyg clearly has choice crap. However, one cannot fault his description that it would stand out very well in the purchaser's collection. Maybe he's a reincarnation of the guy in Cornwall who used to have this sort of material by the bucketload. Can't remember his id though (cdsteve(?) or something like that.

Oh that it was so simple. The current cutback on public spending is b****r all to do with the banks, but a rebalancing of the state's expenditure. When Brown was Chancellor, he presided over a state spending plan that raised 44% less in tax than he spent over a five year period. This he called prudence. Heaven knows what he would have done had he decided to be imprudent in his eyes, but I suggest the lights would already have gone out. Any Chancellor has to balance the books over the period of a parliament or at least have a plan to do so if the policies are to have any credibility. Failure to do so without a rigged voting system ensuring 5 more years in advance means the government of the day can spend as much as it likes giving lots of freebies to the voter without being held to account and having to rectify the s**t it leaves for the next election victor. Politicians being self-congratulatory animals only want public endorsement of their policies. Playing Father Christmas is the easiest way to win the appoval of Mr Average UK who is on the whole pretty thick when it comes to the wider picture. Rhetorical question, but why do people who are rational and live within their means as far as their own household is concerned suddenly throw financial common sense out of the window when it comes to public expenditure. The clarion calls of "Tax the rich" will always appeal to the have nots and many of those on the left, but sequesting the assets of those who on the whole are the main generators of business wealth is not the right way to go about it. Until the left learns to back business and the creation of private wealth generated through exporting this country's products to foreigners, this country is on a hiding to nothing. Yes, that means acknowledging that profit must not be a dirty word. There is no such thing as a free lunch and so if you want benefits for the citizens of this country, then come up with a sustainable plan for them whereby funding is supplied by taxing the profits of ongoing trade surplusses with A, B & C. If this country is in the s**t, then s**t we need to export until the level is low enough to keep our heads above water. The banks may have lent irresponsibly to developers and whatever, but the biggest problems are going to be sovereign loans. Countries borrow on many multiples of the loans even to large multi-nationals. The only problem is that politicians spend most of their time and government income bribing their electorates to ensure a further ride on the gravy train. This is typically presented as "investment", but is rarely is applied to projects involving private enterprises exporting goods to others, rather it is a way of ensuring that your mates are looked after at the expense of the taxpayer. You can build roads, railways, runways and other infrastructure projects all you like, but none of these will generate income from exports. We need to make the pots and pans that are currently imported. Replace imports with home produced goods. Export the same if you can. When governments are forced to take steps to balance the books they introduce unpopular plans by removing the free lunch, get voted out, and the whole unhappy cycle starts all over again. We've seen it year-in, year-out in Europe. Maximum deficit levels which are broken year after year on the grounds that this year, last year and every year for the forseeable future is/was/will be an exceptional year meaning the rules can be broken ad-infinitum. Until the west gets a real bloody nose to awaken it from the cozy existence it has embraced for the last 60 years, the penny won't drop. If people want social benefits, then set up an industrial and fiscal structure that will deliver year on year rather than introducing things by popular demand without giving due thought to funding. You cannot have a balanced economy based on spending money you neither have, nor are willing to generate. Unless Johnny Foreigner buys the goods and services of this country, people had better scale back their visions of the ongoing free lunch. The biggest danger in the current setup are the politicans who would rarely put country before party re-election - not the banks. Rant over.

I'm not saying it is a proof, rather that if the field has been polished (by hand) in the past, you will get focussed reflections off it if the optics are aligned. The metal involved wouldn't matter as long as the field was smooth to begin with. Any polishing would enhance the reflections.

I think you'll find (joke grading apart) that the gold is not losing its colour. It's the effect of photo'ing through the slab, and if you look at the second pair of pictures taken from a greater distance, the gold shows its true colour. To be honest Peck, the 2nd pair of pictures, and i'm now talking about the OBV one, does'nt look as shite as it is close up, so it must be the EF stated on the coin. No seriously, i was joking there. I don't personally believe that it's the slab, why would the REV slabbed picture show some greying around 2 parts of the coin and not the complete coin? Why would'nt the same greying or discolouring not show on the OBV if it were just the slab? The greying will probably be reflection from the field, which given the obvious wear to the obverse suggests it has been cleaned in the past. If the field is concave rather than planar you can get focussing of the light at certain distances, just like a mirror. An undulating field will show the same effect in places. Here is an example of the effect done on a scanner and a photo of the same for comparison. The reverse is prooflike in the hand but as usual for machine made coins of this era is bowed giving the focussing effect. The obverse, which is convex, doesn't show the effect as the light is dispersed. The coin in the hand has wall to wall lustre.

American AU is our EF, but no way on gods green earth is that EF. Nonsense, of course it is. Any idiot can see it's Err Fine with the reverse probably Good Err Fine.

I think that's very true. Towards the end of 1981 I was working at Philip Morris in Richmond VA. First day in the lab and doing the introductions when one person expalined where to go in the locality. Shopping mall 3 blocks down, Macdonalds or Burger King there for a meal(sic), cinema complex next door, various bars this way and that and then the church is turn right at the lights. When I explained that I didn't use them it was like being the star attraction in a freak show. "Hey, there's this guy here doesn't go to church". "That's weird". It was most bizarre and like you I find the religious norm (in the parts so inclined) quite a turn-off in a place that is otherwise nice to visit - just couldn't live there. It's not all like that though.

The Rosette-Mascle issue is probably the commonest of the Henry VI types. Full round examples come up quite frequently and with patience in top grade too.

Well, first of all it shouldn't have two obverses. My first reaction was whether the dies used were the same for both sides which would suggest a cast which has been joined, but the die fill suggests not. I would certainly expect it to show some sort of join around the edge. What is the diameter? a sixpence should weigh 3.0g in theory and be about 25mm diameter. If less than this - say 19 or 20mm, then it will be two threepences joined. Hammered coins are actually quite thin, so you should be able to see a join unless it has been filed down.

What, on his own? The most telling statistic to explain why City won the title this year was because they weren't reliant on a main scorer. For every successful team there was always at least a couple of goalscorers in double figures apart from the main man and a healthy single figure contribution from many team members. Arsenal this year were van Persie and ? Liverpool, United and everybody else appear to be in the same boat - they have to stop relying on their main striker and the other outfield players make their required contribution.

I had a period when emails were apparently disappearing into thin air. It coincided with an intermittent connection to the internet which my son traced to our IP address changing at random times. We are with BT. Don't know if that helps, but a lot of things were going awol akin to the above symptoms.

Religion is the cancer in society, continuing to foster warfare and a host of other ills under a feeble veneer of legitimacy. When will we all wake up to reality? Most of us have which is why we tend to be tolerant and indifferent to religion on the whole. The big problem with all religions is they will never acknowledge that another one has a good idea. Everything is black and white, for us or against us. It is the root cause of immigrant minorities failing to integrate and often the fundamental reason behind racial tension. Although not the full story, when a religion forbids you to inter-marry without the outsider adopting the other's religion, you have just ensured another generation of resentment by outsiders and another course of brickwork added to the wall. There are people who bridge the divide, but they tend to be in the minority and are frequently helped by a degree of affluence. Well, quite. Except for Quakers. Oh, and Buddhists. And Menonites, the Ba'hai, Sikhs, many branches of Hinduism, Taoism, Unitarians, Jains, Sufis, ... um, shall I go on? Ok, point taken. Inappropriate use of the word 'all'. But there are still more than enough of those that are inflexible to drown out the non-aggressive religions. Those religions are still the main reason for a failure to integrate into the general population.

I concur. The only other obvious offender is resources, i.e you have something I want. But that is often a diversionary tactic to deflect the political situation at home or a catalyst to start an internal conflict coupled to political differences.

Religion is the cancer in society, continuing to foster warfare and a host of other ills under a feeble veneer of legitimacy. When will we all wake up to reality? Most of us have which is why we tend to be tolerant and indifferent to religion on the whole. The big problem with all religions is they will never acknowledge that another one has a good idea. Everything is black and white, for us or against us. It is the root cause of immigrant minorities failing to integrate and often the fundamental reason behind racial tension. Although not the full story, when a religion forbids you to inter-marry without the outsider adopting the other's religion, you have just ensured another generation of resentment by outsiders and another course of brickwork added to the wall. There are people who bridge the divide, but they tend to be in the minority and are frequently helped by a degree of affluence.

I think we all agree you need some semblance of order, and yes, the separation of raw and slabbed coins to different sections of the catalogue is another gripe here too. Steve, you collect pennies which for whatever reason they have decided to list in date order - quite sensible. I bet that if you wanted to find a 1873 penny, you would look down the list until you came to those beginning 187 and finish once you had passed the date. The bone of contention in the hammered section and the collection is that once a coin becomes undated there is no attention paid to the order in which they are listed. Just as penny collectors would look for different dates, bust types or reverses, so would a hammered shilling collector for the individual bust or reverse types, initial marks or overmarks. Those busts come in a strict listed order as do the initial marks employed. It is simply chronology without the date. The catalogue only manages to sort the lots into the collection or other properties which isn't a very sensible search parameter. If they could sort it by pyx period dates that would help.

That's really interesting, Declan. Two points I note: some streets are partly green and partly orange ~ that must have been difficult. Also, the RUC station is in the green area ~ awkward. I had to go to Belfast on work related business back in 2003, and despite the Good Friday agreement and all the talk of peace, it was obvious that sectarianism was a total way of life on both sides of the divide. Very, very friendly, hospitable and outgoing people, nonetheless, with a great sense of humour, and quite a lot of humour about the sectarianism itself. At one hostelry I went in for a meal, I got talking to a guy who said to me in a quiet voice "SShhhy, I'm the only f***** protestant in this pub, and they don't know" Was a good two weeks, and I was almost sorry to leave. I haven't been there since the troubles have quietened down a lot, but still have memories of just about every visit there. I remember being on the phone to the girlfriend in the early 80s, as the wife was at the time, when she said 'What's that?' - as a large bang sounded, the windows rattled and the building rumbled, but that bang was probably half a mile away. Answer, 'It's a bomb' and then the conversation resumed. I always found it difficult to reconcile the congenital ill-feeling towards the other side. I found the same thing in Boston MA too having given a truthful answer to a question about Northern Ireland. The question was 'How would you stop the fighting in N. Ireland?. The answer was 'Well, you could stop financing it'. There wasn't a happy face the whole length of the bar so I finished my beer and left, and I never got that job in the Diplomatic Corps.

To get your foot in the door it helps if the application is written in English. The number of letters I've received over the years asking if I had any job vacancies, but where the letter approximated to a random selection of English(?) words, beggars belief. If applicants can't be bothered to write in English, it doesn't matter how good their maths is because I wouldn't bother replying. Customers, particularly foreign ones, will almost invariably use good English and so replying in tones akin to the French policeman in 'Allo 'Allo isn't very helpful to an employer. Therein lies the real legacy of the education system in this country over the past few decades whereby people are allowed to write without correction of spelling or grammar.

I think they have probably ordered them on the computer using an ascending or descending sort function because 'Charles I, silver halcrown (sic), Oxford Mint' comes before 'Charles I, silver halfcrown, Bristol Mint'. Some of the others I'm struggling to see why they are as listed. Whatever, it's a simple case of crap quality control and indifference to accuracy because there are a lot of mis-atttributions too.

OK, I can accept that everyone has their own personal preferences, but at least they usually list the denominations in date order. Any semblance of order has been thrown out the window here. Take shillings for example. It kicks off with a Group A, type 1, bust 2 mint mark cross calvary which is the second type issued as described, but the image is a group B, first bust - so the description is wrong. It dates to 1625-6. Next up is a group F, mm.(P) dates to 1643-4. Then a ® of the same issue dates to 1644-5, then back to a Group D, Tower under the King with a crown mark (1635-6), then forward to Star (1640), back to Tun (1636-8), forward to Star again, back to Rose (1631-2). Briot coinage and Exeter issues are incorporated somewhere in the middle of this mess. There is a first issue coin after 40 lots or so, but that's 20 lots after an example of the last mark issued during the reign which post-dates the first by over 20 years. They haven't kept coins with the same marks together either which is as good as ordering the list by drawing the lots out of a hat. But at least the second shilling from last (of over 100 in total) is from the second type issued, so at least we have a correlated use of the word 'second'. It's a complete and utter waste of time and the cataloguer should be shot forthwith.

This weekend is Lockdales sale over 3 days. I can't speak about the bits I haven't looked at, but the English collection selling on Monday is going to find a distinct lack of interest unless there are a lot of very patient potential bidders. There are a large number of Charles I halfcrowns and shillings which are essentially listed in random order. Because both Lockdales and London Coins list things by denomination rather than chronologically (which p's me off no end) there is little continuity in the list. This sale has compounded the problem by listing ........under Parliament, followed by ........... under the King on the grounds that 'the' is later than 'Parliament' alphabetically. The mint marks appear to be random too, so that finding a particular issue is well nigh impossible. I've given up because there are easier catalogues to read and I'm only a couple of decades away from the end of my likely life span. Could be some bargains for those with patience, but bids have to be in by tomorrow and the quality on the whole is, well ....... Both LC and Lockdales list hammered things by ruler's name, so it is quite normal to find a Byzantine coin followed by a Charles II followed by a sceat. It's completely unworkable for those of limited attention span such as myself. Am I the only one who finds this frustrating?

That's why I said negotiate. The coins tend to be ones you remember quite easily at auction, so you know what his input costs are for any specific piece. You know what he is asking and somewhere in the middle it should be possible to have a meeting of minds. It's a much clearer position than the anonymous VF coin dated 1868 which could have come from anywhere and cost anything. That particular shilling was lot 1914 in Triton XV.

You should be able to knock him down to £130-140K.

69 or 70. Link I've only got his lists for the last 10 years plus a summer 1998. If anyone has any of the missing issues I would be interested in acquiring them. Thanks.