Electric cars a step nearer mainstream?

It didn't sound like Volvo, but you could be right. Mine is (approximately) 1998 vintage, though, so I don't know if anything changed in the last 10 years...

TL

Well in theory they are no different to any other market. In practice, as I said in my other post, theory is sometimes abandoned when markets collapse. But it isn't consistent - the state of the housing market is something that most of the population experience directly, and it gets a lot of media coverage, so governments are less likely to be laissez-faire about it as it more directly affects their votes. Effectively this means that if you want to take big risks, operate in a market that the government can't allow to crash, so you have the opportunity to blackmail them when it does.

Or a race where heavy betting on the favourite gives someone the incentive to nobble it. Which probably does happen occasionally of course.

Current oil prices are a bubble, but that's not the usual effect of futures. The flight to commodities are a consequence of retreat of capital from the financial markets, and commodities futures are predicting that this will continue. As with most perturbations, the system will return to equilibrium eventually.

The Natural Philosopher wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@proxy02.news.clara.net:

That would just shift the risk onto insurance capacity providers, so the government would be bailing out failing Lloyds syndicates etc. rather than banks directly. And of course with insurance the banks might have pushed the envelope of risk even more.

In message , at 10:08:06 on Mon, 9 Jun

Could be a failure of the market, but as you say a "market failure" has a precise and quite different meaning.

No "might" about it. Bond insurance demonstrated that.

No, its first guessing, and knows that it is.

And its only for money.

Ideology is far more dangerus, as it dens;t guess which way society will go, it decided s where society ought o go and then uses the most inappropiate means to get it somewhere else entirely, usually.

It is, if you like, the difference between 'betting that by 1945 there won't be a pole, gypsy, mental defective or jew left in Germany' and actually lighting the gas.

I hae the strange feelking that about 90% of football matches are fixed,

That carries the death penalty.

Lloyds names are not bailed out. Whatever happened to Hunt the Shunt?

Al right dont call it insurance, call it a liquidity fund that simply backs te ebanks as a seconfd line of liquidity. The money paid as premeiums accumulates and is what inures the customers against bank losses.

We know that bankers don't care about customers, just their jobs: this way they lose their jobs, but the customers don't lose their deposit.

The German market implies teh opposite.

Railtrack is now run optimally I think.

Northern rock is popssibly the worst of all possible worlds.

The Natural Philosopher wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@proxy00.news.clara.net:

Montoya says he was penalised for "looking at Schumacher a bit funny".

They would be if they were all that stood between the banking system collapsing and the banking system not collapsing.

Well the premiums would be passed on to the customers, so what actually is the advantage over the government providing the liquidity and then everyone paying for it in taxes? Unless it's happening every year, it's hard to see that the market is going to be noticeably more efficient at sporadic liquidity splurges.

The Natural Philosopher wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@proxy02.news.clara.net:

Well it depends who you are. As a taxpayer but non-home-owner, obviously it would be better for me to let some banks collapse and the housing market crash. Whether that's the best outcome for everyone is another matter, and if they're happy to pay the overheads for a softer landing, there's not much I can do about it.

The question is should just the customers pay or everyone? Personally I'm not happy paying the premium as a tax payer for a company that I have nothing to do with.

Please elaborate. I'm not familiar with the German bond market.

Geman banks maintain a fund to pay customers deposits back in full in the event of a bank failure.

Thanks, but that's not insurance, at least not in the same sense as in the bond market, where the risk is exported to an external insurer.