Behind a paywall
I found this link https://archive.ph/GOadw to it via reddit.
2 Likes
very informative (concerning ?) article.
They werenât the first Oxford clique to have ended up running the country. The poor job theyâve made of it might mean itâs longer than usual before another one gets the gig.
Then again Keir Starmer (St Edmund Hall, albeit âonlyâ for his postgrad degree), Rachel Reeves (New) and Yvette Cooper (Balliol) mean that three of the four shadow holders of the Great Offices are ex-Oxford too. David Lammy was at SOAS, then Harvard Law School. Ed Davey (Jesus) is another one.
If you wanted to be at the top one day then it was where you aimed for. Maybe it still is.
Quite probably. As the French system did, it definitely needs to change though.
Which fuckwit is defence secretary these days? (I know itâs the fail but FFS)
I donât know enough about the French system to know how bad it was before and how much better it might be now. The choice between Macron and Le Pen doesnât fill me with confidence though.
Or did you mean the events of 1789 
?
Itâs the same in any field, Iâm afraid. As well as learning in an environment of subject excellence, if you want to make maximum progress itâs also good to make contact with the other bright sparks of your generation just as early as you can. That happens more easily if theyâre concentrated somewhere, be it Chethamâs School of Music or Southampton FC Academy (Iâm way off my patch here - are they still good ?) or Oxford. And if they are then you need to be there too, so the competition to get in tends to make it self-preserving.
I was contacted by work recently and theyâre interested in a settlement for my illness insurance. I have an income that is a proportion of my salary, and it increases annually by rpi.
Obviously inflation has been in the news a fair bit recently. But this offer has made me look at the 10 year swap rates on rpi. Hereâs a chart from the FT:
The swap is at 2.21. This means that the current market view is that this period of inflation will continue for ten years: itâs a compound rate of 8% for ten years.
Obviously markets are all bollocks - just a few months ago the rates were really low, so they clearly know nothing.
But just imagine if we do have this kind of inflation for a decade. Your mortgage and loans will deflate away, and it wonât be worth saving money unless investment returns go up dramatically. Itâll be financially very different from the last 40-odd years.
Well ⌠thirty-odd years perhaps. My mortgage interest was pretty scary from the 80âs through into the 90âs.
1 Like
Only if your income increasesâŚ. Which seems to be the bit of inflation they actually want to stop
Quite, I remember in the late 80s paying over ÂŁ600 per month on a a ÂŁ25k mortgage.
At the time we had two incomes, roughly equal. After tax one paid for the mortgage. The other one paid for absolutely everything else.
Savage
Itâs an interesting point. The mortgage market is very different now to how it was then. Now people buy fixes, then it was mostly variable rate, I think. The advice now might be to buy a fairly long fix, if youâre up for renewal.
Meanwhile I imagine lenders are rapidly withdrawing current deals and replacing them with higher rate, higher fee products to take particular advantage of borrowers seeking to flee from uncertainty.
Yes.
Of course, comparisons arenât of much value. Back then inflation and interest rates were high and we planned and lived our lives around that. Those factors kept property prices somewhat lower. It was just the way things were.
What really troubles people is change. When youâve sorted your life out so that things work in one set of circumstances and then thereâs a big change to those circumstances even responsible people can find themselves facing a challenge.
1 Like