Centre-right defeated in Moldova!

The ruling Communist Party has lost its majority in parliament in Moldova in a defeat for the centre-right:

The ruling Communists (in reality, a centre-right party)

Union pensions stuff

1. The TUC has produced a rather useful response to some of the guff talked about public sector pensions. You can download it here.

2. GMB pensions supremo Naomi has issued the latest communique from the Worple Road command bunker. Full text below:


Sun hats and waterproofs at the ready and welcome to the summer edition of the Pensions Q&A. A little pension based sunshine in an otherwise grim world. This month some thoughts on what to do when you reach 65, presuming you don’t have the Latin to become a judge.

WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU’RE 65

1. Retire
Well it’s an idea. Not necessarily possible if your pension proves itself to be insufficient to fund even the most frugal of existences. You may of course have no choice in the matter. At the moment with six months notice your employer can say “Happy 65th birthday, don’t come into work again” – but this could be changing, see below…
At retirement of course you will be expecting your employers (old and new) and the state to throw money at you so you can enjoy the fruits of your labours. When you wake up you’ll realise there are a bunch of financial decisions to be made and which yacht you’re going to buy isn’t one of them. If you have a defined benefit pension (either from the company you’re retiring from or an earlier job) you will have a statement saying how much annual pension you’ll receive, whether you’ll get any cash automatically and if you can get more cash by trading some of that annual pension. If you have a defined contribution scheme you may need to buy an annuity (anorak word for pension). Either you’ll be pointed towards one or be able to choose from all the products those lovely insurance companies have to offer. Usually good to shop around when in this situation, you wouldn’t get a mortgage from the first bank you find on the high street, treat your pension the same way. You’ll need to decide what sort of pension you want, one with survivor benefits if you die, one that keeps pace with inflation? These will reduce the annual amount of pension at the outset but in the long term might well be worth it – your choice.
If you’ve got a full national insurance record, the government will pay out £95.25 a week to you. If you’re on a low income you should also claim Pension Credit, your taxes pay for it, if you qualify you should claim it. Too many people don’t (two million at the last count).

2. Work
If you’re a creature of habit and don’t see any reason to stop setting the alarm clock each day you may want to carry on working. There may not be much option if your watered down defined contribution pension hasn’t built up enough money to buy a decent pension or your defined benefit scheme has been so diluted that decades of saving has resulted in just enough cash to stop you qualifying for Pension Credit.
Fortunately, and not before time, the government has realised that having a default retirement age, that is an age at which you can be forcibly ‘retired’ (or sacked in normal language) isn’t such a good idea. They’ve announced that the review (removal) of the default retirement age will happen next year instead of in 2011. The government’s stated reason for this is the current economic climate, seemingly the catch-all justification for anything these days. Clearly removing it because that’s the right thing to do completely escaped them as a course of action.
GMB has been arguing for its removal since it was created in 2006 (the default retirement age I mean, not the union – 1889 since you ask). A two-tier workforce based on age is as bad for the economy and society as one based on gender or race etc. The default retirement age has allowed employers to offer worse terms and conditions to older workers, to dismiss older workers and to refuse to hire older workers. The sooner it goes the better.

3. Emigrate
Denmark apparently has the most content population, they also have a basic state pension of £139 a week which probably helps. Before you all make a dash for the land of beer and bacon I should warn you that you have to live in Denmark for 40 years to qualify (there’s always a catch).

AND FINALLY…
Before you get to 65, perhaps it’s worth thinking about where you’re spending your money today. One of the more suspicious/interesting surveys in recent times examined the amount people save for their pension compared with the amount they spend having affairs. Apparently, and the mind boggles how they worked this out, your average unfaithful partner spends £291 a month on their affair but puts only £59 a month into their pension. Of course if their expression of wish form isn’t up to date, the spouse/civil partner could at least be in line for some death benefits…

So there you have it, more amazing information and news on the pensions page of GMB’s website: www.gmb.org.uk/pensions

I'm feeling brain dead

So in lieu of writing summink myself, here's a nice bit from the preface to a short primer (so really the most basic, simpleton's précised version of his ideas possible!) on Pierre Bourdieu that I bought because of this post.

[L]inguistic and cultural production, despite what they might claim to be, are not concerned with truth or reason (or the sublime, or beauty) . What is at stake is primarily belief, the consecration of utterances as legitimate and/or true. The criterian of argumentation of proof that are invoked during this process are arbitrary - defined within and by the field in question - and only apparently disinterested. The legitimation of utterances is a product of the power, authority and reputation of their author(s) in the field in question. This epistemic power is both means and end in the competitive struggles - analogised by Bourdieu as games - which characterise any field, and is constructed using a range of capitals: economic, cultural, linguistic, symbolic and social. These varied forms of capital are similarly means and ends in strategies that carry forward the pursuit of distinction within the field.

I'm only about a third of the way through this, but it clearly looks like it will get into the issue that I briefly blogged very briefly about (a bit more here) last year - the legitimation of ideas.

A few snippets

The FRC has issued its progress report on the Combined Code review which you can download here. There are some questions in there that go further than Walker, will post examples later.

That led me to a report on shareholder engagement here, which looks like it could be interesting.

Sir David Cooksey has been appointed as the new chair of UK Financial Investments. No I don't know who he is either.

Interesting Pesto piece on markets.

An attempt to use the Interweb to disintermediate investing. (Hat-tip: Paulie)

Happiness

Interesting post from Nigel.

Two inaccurate things before lunch

This is off-topic, but I'm currently reading Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast which has been a massive disappointment given the potentially fascinating topic. There's no coherent argument sustained throughout it, it's more like a stream of consciousness, and whilst there are some interesting individual bits of research referred to in the text the lack of footnotes (though there are endnotes) adds to the feeling it has been thrown together. In short, I don't like it.

But there are also a couple of examples given in the text that I think are actually plain wrong. So I'm posting them up to check if I'm being a dumbo or not. First up (and I notice this one has been picked up by an Amazon reviewer) is on page 6:

No unhealthy food have cholestorol.
Some unhealthy foods are fried foods.
Therefore no fried foods have cholestorol.

Valid or not? My guess is that your left frontal and temporal lobe belief system was activated, and so the conclusion seemed invalid. But it is valid logically.

Errr... no it isn't, is it? Based on the premises the conclusion is not valid. You can say 'some fried foods have no cholestorol' because it is stated that 'Some unhealthy foods are fried foods'. But it is not stated that 'all fried foods are unhealthy foods'. So how can you reach the conclusion that no fried foods have cholestorol? Am I missing something, or has he got it wrong? There are certainly examples of logic puzzles like this where we tend to accept or reject the logic depending on what the conclusion is - but this isn't one as far as I can see.

Similarly on page 96 I think he gets the 'four card problem' wrong. He says:

In Peter Wason's classic experiment, subjects are asked which card to turn over to test the rule that if there is a vowel on one side, there is an even number on the other. The four cards are Ace, King, 2 and 7. Most turn over the ace, just trying to confirm the rule. But then they can try one more card, and most turn over the 2, which tells us nothing; only 4% turn over the 7, which could falsify the rule.

There is something wrong with his version, surely? In the original experiment two cards had a letter facing up, one with a vowel and one with a consonant (say an A and a B), and two had a number facing up, one odd and one even (say 2 and 7). So the correct way to approach it is to turn over the vowel and the 7.

In his version you can't disprove the rule from the letter perspective, since no cards are letter-up. So effectively by turning over the Ace and 7 you are trying to disprove the rule the same way twice. So it's not the same as the orginal experiment, where people tend to turn over the A and the 2, because they wrongly seek only to confirm the rule. By turning over just two odd numbers you may well end up still not having disproved it if both cards have a consonant on the other side.

But that's assuming he thinks the Ace is an odd number card (which it always is, isn't it?) Actually, and more fundamentally, he seems to think an Ace is an even number card ("Most turn over the ace, just trying to confirm the rule.") and in doing so I think he demonstrates that he hasn't grasped the point of the experiment in first place. Because turning over the even number card can't disprove the rule (whereas turning over the A and the 7 can).

Innit? Or have I missed summink? Is the point that "Ace" and "King" are spelt out rather than being the card itself, and as such both contain a vowel in the word on the card? But then there's no consonant only card.

NB - the headline is slightly misleading as I actually posted this after eating my lunch. I was thinking of going with the alternative 'Dude, where's my proof-reader?' but hey.

Last week's votes

There were a couple of interesting (honest) AGM votes last week. First up Tory-funding investment trust Caledonia Investments once again passed a resolution authorising spending shareholders' money bankrolling Conservative campaigns in marginal seats. The resolution attracted over 18% against (AGM results available here as a PDF), plus marginal abstentions, which was slightly up on last year. But the important thing to remember is that the Cayzer family have a controlling stake of (from memory) about 50%, so a sizeable proportion of the free float voted against. However still a large block voted in favour, so I will be posting up the names of fund managers backing Tory donations once some data is available. As I pointed out previously, it's possible that a part-state owned asset manager supported this...

Secondly, I had to have a bit of a chuckle at the result at Yell where almost 30% voted against the remuneration report. Yell had been telling journos last week that investors were behind the remuneration policy. The interesting point to note is that under one of the harsh diktats laid down by the Walker Review, if the remuneration report at a BOFI gets more than a 25% vote against then the chair of remuneration committee should stand for re-election annually. And this is one of those recommendations where there is no good reason why it should not apply more widely, so I expect to see it in the FRC's next announcement on the Code. Which would mean Yell's rem chair will have to face an annual vote (unless they 'explain' why they aren't complying with this guidance of course).

UPDATE: Actually I made a mistake on Walker, the report doesn't say rem chairs should face annual elections if the report gets under 75% (of "total votes cast" btw, which might imply abstentions don't count), it says they should stand for re-election the next year. And having looked at Yell it seems that the current rem committee chair is already on an annual re-election cycle.