London Rants

Wow, for the first time ever gold has reached USD $1000 an ounce. Yes, that’s right, all of about 28g. I can remember five years or so ago when in Australia they were closing marginal gold mines and mothballing them because they couldn’t cover their running costs. I seem to remember at the time gold was in the USD $200-300 range. The financial wizards are saying this is for two reasons. Firstly the crap USD and secondly due to the general health of the world wide financial markets. Gold has historically something that people have turned to as hard currency in bad times as its something they can see. Generally now days currency is electronic so hard to see and it fluctuates. I just wish the AUD$ would drop against the GBP£ but as can be seen here it seems unlikely as the Australian economy is too strong at the moment.

Welcome to the inaugural London Rant.

BAA amuses me with their increases to taxes that they’ve just been granted. I have no idea why the government has granted them an allowance to do this. From their website they report an operating profile of £577 million yet they still manage to completely fuck up the operations and security of the likes of hugely important airports like Heathrow. There have been two major security incidents in the last couple of weeks, the last one occuring as I write this. They also manage to loose more baggage than Imelda Marcos has shoes as well as not even managing to maintain things like baggage handling facilities!

How does the government allow this to continue happening? I would guess that they get a large percentage of the taxes that BAA collects so allowing them to increase the taxes allows them to collect more from the general consumer who is already paying. I recently went to New York for a holiday. The cost of the return ticket from Heathrow was £285.30 but I was interested to note at the bottom of the confirmation email was a breakdown of the cost, the flight was £102 but the the Tax/Fee/Charges was £183.30! Nearly twice that of the actual fare!

Surely their ability to increase taxes and hence their revenue should be tied to their performance, especially that of security and the basics like their ability to be able to load/unload planes with luggage. They strike me to be alot like most of the formerly publicly owned companies completely incompetent due to being filled with ex public servants but profit driven due to their private ownership.