Following the problems in the sub-prime lending market in America and the run on Northern Rock in the UK, uncertainty has now hit Japan.

In the last 7 days the famous Origami Bank has folded, Sumo Bank has gone belly up and the Bonsai Bank announced plans to cut some of its branches.

Yesterday, it was announced that Karaoke Bank is up for sale and will likely go for a song. Today shares in Kamikaze Bank was suspended after they nose-dived and 500 staff at Karate Bank got the chop.

Analysts report that there is something fishy going on at Sushi Bank where it is feared that customers may get a raw deal.

Note: This is a joke. Just in case you hadn't realised yet.

The Commons Standards and Privileges Committee said there was "no intention" of MPs having to go "into any detail" about the work they pay family members to do. Erm, why? We, the poor suffering taxpayer, are paying for them so why should we not know what work they are doing?

Besides, what exactly would the point of just having a register of who has family members working for them without any further details? The issue with Derek Conway wasn't that he was employing his sons, but that he was paying them over the odds to do work that they weren't actually doing. If the details are not known and recorded, why bother creating this register? It's a waste of everyone's time and our money in that case, and worth nothing except as an attempt to appear transparent rather than to be transparent.

And it seems that even the European Parliament - despite it own great problems over Members finances - are to go a significant step further than Westminster and ban MEPs from employing family members.

This is a step too far in my opinion. All that is needed is a proper register of what family members do and the payment they received - not a piss-poor attempt like that suggested for Westminster, but a proper full register. Otherwise there's no point.

Do it properly or not at all. Half-measures help no-one.

They're just not content with charging every students thousands upon thousands of pounds every year that we are at university. They want to cost us graduates an extra £500m per year interest.

It will take me more than five years before I start paying off the capital on my £9,000 student loan [plus, of course, my student account overdraft]. I will start paying off the hundreds of pounds that has been added as interest on my loan next month, so I will be about 28 before I even start paying off the capital on my loan.

Why is this? Because in 2003 the government decided to change the official measure of inflation from the Retail Price Index (RPI), to the lower Consumer Price Index (CPI) - but without changing the Student Loan interest rates. Luckily for me, I am earning more than the minimum amount for graduates to start paying off their loan - £15,000 - already, so I'm less screwed than many.

Graduates are to be used to plug the holes in the government's finances. Because we're easy to target and have no choice. What a bunch of bastards.

I also haven't received any information from the Student Loan Company in at least two years. So the bastards can't even be arsed to let me know how much I owe them, yet they're going to start taking it out of my paycheck anyway. I hate the lot of them.

A. Tory has got out his "Excel geek" hat, put it on, and analysed MPs expenditures for the last parliamentary session. He has then awarded those who have shafted the taxpayers - that's you and me, folks - the most. And unsurprisingly all of the winners bar one are Labour MPs. And the only non-Labour MP? Angus MacNeil of the SNP. And the winners are:

Total expenditures: Shahid Malik, spending £185,421 of our money
Office and staff costs: Barry Gardiner, spending £123,852 of our money
Car travel: Janet Anderson, spending £13,851 of our money
Rail travel: Alan Milburn, spending £15,785 of our money
Air travel: Angus MacNeil, spending £30,560 of our money
Staff travel: Mohammad Sarwar, spending £4,500 of our money
Stationery and postage: Siobhain McDonagh, spending £49,107 of our money
IT: Liam Byrne of the Labour Party, spending £2,545 of our money
Staff cover and other costs: Joan Ryan, spending £19,068 of our money.

That's one hell of a lot of our money. Visit Letters From A Tory for more details, even though he hasn't published the entire Excel spreadsheet [which he should].

All the expenses claimed by MPs are to be published. Good. If they're spending our money, we have a right to know how it is being spent. What shocked me was the 'John Lewis' list:

And money can be claimed by MPs for this in the following ways:
How the hell can this be justified at all?! I don't begrudge MPs being paid some money off-set the cost of a second home - which their job requires them to have - but unless this money claimed on a second home is to be paid back when the second home is sold, it effectively amounts to a very nice payment of at least £22,000 extra per year. Plus any profit made through the increase in house prices.

With second homes, either Parliament should own them and just allow the MPs to use them or MPs should pay us back at least the savings/benefits that they generate from owning a second home at the taxpayer's expense.

MPs should also have to provide a receipt for every single claim they make on expenses. If it is too small for them to bother with a receipt, it's too small for them to mind paying for themselves.

The expenses that MPs should be subject to audits to ensure that they are not defrauding the taxpayer. I doubt that many are on a massive basis, but when it is our money that they are spending it needs to be checked. The expenses should also be made public on at least a quarterly basis, so that we know what the representatives that we elect are charging us.

The very idea of ID cards is bad enough. But that we would actually have to pay to give the government all of our personal details out of our own pockets just adds insult to injury.

I don't want an ID card. My life is more than can be summed up in just a magnetic strip. And there is no fucking chance that I will pay them to have one.

So long as there is any compulsion in any way to have an ID card, it should be completely and entirely free, including no tax levy to pay for it "indirectly". If they want me to have an ID card, the very least they can do is pay for it out of their own wallets, because there is sure as hell no way that I am.

ID cards are pointless and intrusive. At the very least, I will not be forced in to paying for one.

So Gordon Brown has ordered a review into the Barnett formula which gives Scotland £1,500 extra per person than England, paid for inevitably by English taxpayers. To be honest, I doubt we'll hear anything back about it, in either a few months or a few years. Certainly so long as Labour remain in power, reliant on Scotland for their majority.

As much as this is a good thing to hear, under a Scottish Prime Minister elected in a Scottish constituency bugger all will be done, no matter what the conclusion made is. Especially considering that the Chancellor is Scottish as well.

Not to mention the SNP being right up Labour's arse, too.

So, no matter what Brown says, bugger all will actually happen.

The minimum wage. It's all well and good.

But raising it to £5.73 just when economic turmoil is predicted to about to strike is an exercise in sheer stupidity.

The a higher minimum wage will mean that those in work get paid a little bit more. But it doesn't help those not in work get a job. In fact, the very opposite. After all, if your current workforce is costing you more without any increase in output or efficiency, you're hardly going to increase it.

Raising the minimum wage won't do what the Unison general secretary wants and "protect the poor from the constant price rises in essentials like fuel, food and housing" but the very opposite [yet again], and drive those very same people into problems with paying for essentials such as fuel and food. After all, who produces these things? Yes, those working on [or close to] minimum wage. And if the cost of their labour goes up, so will the price of their product.

So no benefits will be achieved from this raise, bar fewer recruitments and maybe some redundancies.

Why do MPs have until April 1 to declare details of family members they employ? Why do they need so long? Why shouldn't they have to declare them by the end of February? Next Friday? Or even, why not this Friday?

It's not like MPs either employ that many people or have so many relatives that it would take three months to list them all. MPs should know who of their employees are family members and how much they are paying them. It's not like I object to MPs employing family members, just that they should have to declare them, and immediately.

There is no excuse for MPs not to declare how many - and who - of their relatives they employ right away. Any who wait until the deadline to make their declaration should be viewed with great suspicion by the electorate.

The only reason I can think of to pick April 1 as the deadline is to thumb their noses at us Fools.

Seventy Conservative MPs - including David Cameron - and "about 12" Lib Dem MPs employ members of their family. Gordon Brown and the Labour Party have made no declarations of the number of their MPs who employ family members, though 33 Labour MPs are said to have admitted they do.

I can't see any issue at all with MPs employing members of their family. Derek Conway wasn't "employing" his children, but just passing them money under the guise of employment. But actually just employing them to do a job is no problem - so long as they are actually doing the work. Like I wrote before:

This is what appears to be happening voluntarily in the Conservative and Lib Dem parties, and piecemeal with Labour.

However, the fact that David Cameron is employing his sister-in-law "as a correspondence secretary in his private office... paid £15,000 a year out of Conservative funds to work three days a week at the party's headquarters" is a complete non-issue. This money is not coming out of the taxpayer's pockets, but out of the donations made by Conservative party members and donors, like myself. There is no compulsion to donate in the first place, and I for one have no problem with him employing a member of his family so long as she is doing the job she is being paid to do.

So Derek Conway has resigned. He really had no choice after the revelations that he had employed both of his sons at the taxpayer's expense for minimal work, and Cameron withdrew the whip from him. Personally, I appreciate Iain Dale's stance on Derek Conway: he's a friend, so anything he wants to he'll say to Derek's face. Simple human decency. It appears to be a dying breed.

But after the furore that has risen around Conway, there appears to be suggestions to ban MPs from employing family members. Really, this is a very bad and frankly stupid idea. So long as the relative is doing the job they are paid to do [and properly], I can't see any reason why they shouldn't be allowed to do so. Rather, we the taxpayer are likely to get more work of - and thus better value for money - from MPs relatives working for them than a non-relative on the same level of pay.

There is also a large number of administrative issues with this idea, as pointed out on the Three Line Whip blog:

Rather than a blanket ban, it would be far better to instead make it necessary that all MPs declare all employees with whom they have a blood or legal relationship with, what the relationship is - and how much they are paying them to do the job. You could also say that any relatives should only be paid at the bottom of the advised parliamentary pay scale for their role.

A blanket ban on all MP relatives working for them, however, is a very bad idea indeed. Instead of banning it, just make the process transparent.

The plastic police (PCSOs) have been awarded the full 2.5% back-dated pay rise that has been denied to real police officers. The Police Community Support Officers, who have no real powers - not even to arrest a suspect - are simply a waste of money. They have no real purpose, and yet are being awarded a greater pay rise than those who actually do the job that needs to be done, and are actually trained to do it properly.

Why are these pointless plastic policemen being awarded more than the real kind? I just can't understand it. Not only is it hypocritical and divisive to offer a greater pay rise to a less qualified part of the police service, it is also utterly wrong.

Source: BBC

Christmas shopping, the busiest time of the year for retail outlets and the most expensive time of year for customers. And luckily I have very nearly completed my Christmas shopping, with all bar one of the presents I need to buy bought. And, unlike many other young people, I am spending more than last year [only a bit more, though, and simply because I am actually earning now, rather than being student like I have been for the last four Christmases].

That many young people are reducing their expenditure on presents isn't really much of a surprise. Everything is so expensive nowadays! And the great and growing possibility of a credit crunch, coupled with the reducing availability of credit, is preying on minds - what happens if something goes wrong with the economy? Those who are very much in debt won't have it easy then. Also, I think that many are now understanding the implications of having lots of debt, and the issues with credit, with the collapse and effective nationalisation of Northern Rock proving a case in point - even banks are vulnerable.

Elderly people are increasing their spending because this credit crunch matters little to them. They have few debts and usually own their houses outright, so they can afford to splash out a bit more.

Young people are also suffering from debts forced upon them by labour - Student Loans. It's not nice to have that much debt hanging over you, believe you me.

So in a "clampdown on spending" the NHS has turned a £547m deficit last year into a £1.8bn surplus this year. But at what cost to the public? Why do they have this money if not to spend it and use it on bettering facilities and patient care? if they don't need it for that, cut taxes and give it back to the taxpayer!

However, is this surplus good for the NHS? I doubt it. How could it have turned a large deficit one year into an even larger surplus the next year without something happening to the level of service provided? This "clampdown on spending" has probably led to a lack of investment where it is needed and sacking [or just not recruiting] staff wherever possible, no matter the effect on the overall level of care to the patients.

For this financial turnaround in the NHS to have happened to such a large degree is impossible without the lowering of standards. After all, there's no other way that they could have done this since all their income comes from our pockets!

It may look good on the news for the NHS to have a surplus, but it's not good for the NHS on the ground.

Source: BBC