| | Friday 27 July 2012 THOUGHT FOR THE DAY  Hello Share Gang.
We are told Britain has no growth. We are growing backwards. (If that makes sense). That is what the official quarterly growth figures tell us.
But is it the whole truth? There is evidence that we are actually growing here in the UK. But the figures are not showing it.
For example, there has been a big increase in the number of private jobs. Personally, and I might make a few enemies here, I suspect a lot of public jobs are not really necessary. I understand that one of Greece's main problems is that they have too many public servants and not enough private workers.
My own local council seems rather overstaffed to me. Some of them have been producing a magazine which goes to each household to tell us how well the councillors and their workers are doing. I think that might have stopped coming through my letterbox now. That''s one good thing about the cuts. Maybe the could also stop paying top council officials quite as much dough.
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ON THE SHARECRAZY BLOG The brief market history of Noventa is truly horrendous and serves as a reminder of the dangers of gung ho mining projects in far off places.
Noventa was bought to AIM in the heady days of March 2007 by Investec at a price (in today's money) of GBP35 per share valuing the business at around GBP60 million. It raised GBP15 million and the idea was to develop the Marropino mine in Mozambique into one of the world's largest producers of Tantalum concentrate, Tantalum being a rare metal used primarily in consumer electronic products. The Fleming family and connected parties retained control.
Things went wrong almost immediately when the company announced a couple of months after flotation that problems had been encountered at the mine and that the business plan set out in the Admission document could effectively be torn up.
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Paper round Greece, Facebook, Oil companies
Greek leaders struggled to agree on required budget cuts yesterday as Citigroup raised the probability of the country's exit from the euro to 90 per cent. The leaders of the three parties in the new coalition Government met for three hours in a session at which they were meant to sign off on a plan for EURO11.7bn (GBP8.5bn) in budget cuts demanded by Europe and the International Monetary Fund. The meeting ended shortly before talks began between Antonis Samaras, the Prime Minister, and José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission President. However, the party leaders were unable to reach a consensus, The Times reports.
Facebook shares dropped 10% in after-hours trading following its latest results. The Californian company had been under intense pressure to deliver strong figures given the almost 30% drop in its share price since the $104bn (GBP66bn) flotation in May. Although revenues climbed 32% to $1.18bn in the second quarter, beating analysts' estimates, it failed to convince investors who had seen saw revenues climb 45% in the first quarter. At the same time its spending on sales and marketing more than tripled to $392m in the period. As had been forecast, the cost of share-based pay plan for employees saw Facebook report an overall loss of $157m for the quarter. But as founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg made an appearance on the company's conference call with Wall Street analysts on Thursday night, the focus was squarely on how quickly the social network site will be able to drive revenues, The Telegraph reports.
It was obvious for the past few weeks that the April-June period would be tough for oil companies. So thank you, Shell, BG Group, Statoil, ExxonMobil and a handful of others for confirming as much on Thursday in your differing but inimitable ways. There is a pattern to the oil sector's second-quarter numbers: production and operating cash flow mostly up, underlying profit mostly down. The latter was partly due to things such as maintenance costs (at Shell in particular) and partly to the volatile oil price. That will not change for the next few quarters. Oil stocks look cheap relative to the wider market, trading on a price to earnings multiple in many cases of under 10 times. That is well below the historic average. For now, however, given pricing pressures, it looks about right, The Financial Times´s Lex column writes.
NatWest has become the second financial institution to report technical problems with its systems today after up to 2m Nationwide transactions were duplicated. NatWest said on its Twitter feed: "Some customers may have issues with their online banking and using their debit cards at the moment. Working as hard as we can to resolve. We'll post updates as soon as we have more information." Cash machine withdrawals using debit cards are also affected, the bank added. Earlier in the summer the bank suffered a major systems collapse when millions of customers were unable to check their balances, withdraw cash or make payments. NatWest promised that no customers would be left out of pocket as a result of the technology problems, The Telegraph says.
George Osborne was yesterday urged to stick to his faltering economic strategy as the longest double-dip recession in modern history threatened to blow a gaping hole in his budget. Angel Gurria, the head of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development(OECD), told the Chancellor to 'stay the course' despite the 0.7% slump in gross domestic product in the second quarter of the year. It came as analysts warned that the government will borrow GBP162bn more than planned over the next five years as the economic malaise takes its toll on the creaking public finances. Fears are also mounting that Britain will be stripped of the coveted AAA credit rating it has held since 1978 and on which Osborne has staked his political reputation, The Daily Mail reports.
Lloyds Banking revealed on Thursday that it had received subpoenas from government agencies investigating the Libor rate-rigging scandal. The bank, which is among a number being investigated, said: "Certain members of the group have received subpoenas and requests for information from certain government agencies and are co-operating with their investigations". Chief executive Antonio Horta-Osorio said he was prevented from giving further details while the investigations continued but he felt there would be greater clarity on the issue over the next six months. His comments came as the bank took an extra GBP700m hit to deal with compensation claims for mis-selling payment protection insurance, The Scotsman says.
THE LATEST ON THE CRAZY BOARD The top 5 hot company threads on the Bulletin Board: Providence Resources Falkland Oil & Gas 3 Legs Resources Falkland Oil & Gas Running trading thread
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BOOK OF THE WEEK  By Jack D. Schwager
A book review by James Faulkner of WatsHot.com As of April 2012 the hedge fund industry reached a record high of $2.13 trillion total assets under management, having surpassed the previous high of $1.93 trillion in 2008 before the onset of the financial crisis. While the industry remains a relatively small component of the financial sector at large (it accounted for just 1.1% of the total funds and assets held by financial institutions as of 2009), it is often said to attract the creme de la creme of industry talent, and is home to the money of the some of the richest people on the planet.
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