UK News

Country-house opera wonders where it will get its next million

There’s more to the English summer social calendar than sport – but it is in danger of being drowned out by the cries of disappointed football fans and sapped by lack of cash.

During the June and July evenings when much of Britain grinds to a halt to watch World Cup matches on giant screens in pubs and smaller screens at home, a different style of audience escapes to the countryside, wearing evening dress and carrying picnic hampers, for the 2010 season of country-house operas.

While the most famous are at Glyndebourne, a younger rival Grange Park Opera in Hampshire has also earned critical acclaim.

It is undeniably elite, but that does not mean it does not have money issues.

Whereas football is guaranteed enormous audiences and sponsorship deals, often in defiance of the quality of play, Grange Park ticket sales fell last year against the backdrop of global recession and funding cuts to the arts.

It was the first time they had not shown annual growth since the founding of the festival in 1997.

from The Great Debate UK:

In football, the biggest losers win

“Football is just a business nowadays, isn’t it?”

Well, actually no, it’s not, and it never has been - at least not if a business means an enterprise intended to maximise shareholder value.

In the “good old days” – so called because they were bloody awful – football clubs were financed by a Big Sugar Daddy, often the millionaire who owned the local mill or maybe a small chain of shops in the town.

As Chairman of the Board, he would treat the club as his little indulgence, a rich man’s hobby, an alternative to collecting old masters or old mistresses.

In return, he would behave as if he owned the club (which he did), his name would probably be on the main stand and his real business – the one that generated the money - would advertise in the match programme and on boards around the touchline.

With players’ wages subject to a Football League limit so low as to have become a joke (or a national disgrace) by the 1950s, the BSD had little to lose, even though there was no income from TV, only peanuts from sponsorship deals and match tickets cost less than you’d pay nowadays for a half-time coffee.

What’s changed? Everything, except the role of the BSD. Millionaires or the simply rich need not apply nowadays, at least not if a club entertains serious ambitions in the English Premiership (or the Spanish Primera Liga or Italian Seria A).

Punters cash in on Darling’s budget tie choice

Smokers and top earners were clear losers in Britain’s budget this year, as the government hiked taxes on cigarettes and the highest incomes.

But a lucky few must have been cheering in front of their televisions during the 51-minute speech.

Budget-watchers who bet hard cash that the chancellor of the exchequer, Alistair Darling, would wear a grey or blue tie to his address got a welcome bit of stimulus from the budget.

Betting firm Ladbrokes was giving odds of 3/1 and 16/a for a blue and grey, respectively. Perhaps aware of the odds, Darling put on a blue-gray striped one, and Ladbrokes paid out for both colours.

Can MV=PT solve credit crisis for BoE?

Britain could begin a telling exercise in classical monetary theory on Thursday as the central bank gets set to test a newly minted policy of “quantitative easing”.

In an effort to pump more money into the financial system and encourage banks to get lending again, the Bank of England has been given the green light to basically create more money.

 It will use the electronic funds to buy short- and long-dated gilts and a host of commercial debt in the hope that that will free up other capital to the banks, allowing them to lend more.

At root, the exercise is based on MV=PT, known as the Fisher equation of exchange and a mainstay of Keynesian monetary theory.

In the equation, M is the quantity of money and V is the velocity at which it travels around the economy. P stands for the general level of prices and T equals the number of transactions performed over a given accounting period.

In theory, V and T are more or less stable, meaning that all other things being equal, the amount of money in circulation has a direct impact on prices and/or the number of transactions.

By pumping more M into the economy (or at least making more M available), the central bank is hoping that economic activity will pick up (T will increase) and the economy will be reflated (P will pick up). In theory.

Stripping off for money

A colleague tells me of a quick way to make cash for anyone who wants to. His neighbours discovered a pile of old taps and central heating pipes they had lying around had more value than they thought. A scrap metal merchant gave them £75 for them. ”It’s a bubble,” the merchant said.

It may be a bubble, but it’s proving a lasting one and one that’s causing problems in unexpected quarters too. In my salubrious part of Surrey, local churches are struggling to keep their roofs on and it’s not because of the volume of their congregations’ singing either. Thieves are stripping lead roofing and flashing to melt down and sell on.

It’s become a multi-million-pound problem across the country. Police have urged residents to call them if they ever see someone climbing on church roofs. And the churches themselves have decided they can’t afford to turn the other cheek. They’ve tried stake-outs and security patrols. Now, some are investing in special coatings that leave a unique lasting chemical impression on anyone who comes into contact with them.

It doesn’t solve the crime immediately, the police still have to find and arrest suspects for that to happen. But it’s a hefty deterrent – if they catch anyone climbing on roof tops they can carry out a quick check to discover if they have any traces of the chemical on them – if they do they can then be linked to specific offences and prosecuted.

There’s a line in the Old Testament of the Bible where Moses warns the Israelites, “Be sure, your sins will find you out.” I’m not sure he had this kind of technology in mind. But perhaps churches ought to be putting it on warning signs.

Could you live on a pound a day?

When Kath Kelly complained to friends in the pub she was so broke she couldn’t afford a wedding present for her brother, she decided to take drastic action.

She made a bet that she could defy the credit crunch and live on just one pound a day for a year.

After paying her landlord 3,000 pounds in advance for rent and bills, the teacher from Bristol radically changed her way of life.

Out went her mobile phone and clothes shopping, replaced by trips to jumble sales and foraging for berries in hedgerows.

She visited book launches and lectures that had free buffets and scoured supermarkets for discounted food close to its sell-by date.

Shampoo at 27p a litre and bars of soap for 6p each took the place of designer toiletries. 

She rode a bike instead of getting the bus and had a holiday in France by hitchhiking across the Channel.

Of course it’s genuine — I made it myself

Everyone, surely, would love to have a licence to print money. Well, one man has taken the concept to a whole new level. It might sound bonkers, but Sheridan “Shed” Simove has created his own currency.

“It makes the world go round. Oh, and it’s the root of all evil. Although strictly, the love of it is actually the root of all evil,” he writes in his new book, “Ideas Man: The Amazing Real-life Adventures of a Modern-day Creative Genius“. “Yes, I’m talking about the basis of our capitalist society, the units of exchange we use to obtain material goods — MONEY.”

Simove has always been fascinated with the concept of money — not high finance or currency markets so much, more the bizarre concept of ‘cash’ in its physical form. It all began with a history lesson at school on America’s Great Depression, soaring inflation and the devaluation of the dollar that necessitated wheelbarrows of money just to buy a loaf of bread.

Years later, the advent of computer games in which players accrued points to “buy” weapons and powers for their characters became the inspirational trigger for a new challenge — especially after one “bright, enterprising spark” got the idea to sell his character’s virtual weapons for real cash. “A fire was lit within me,” says Simove. “And boy, did it burn brightly. If something ‘unreal’ could be sold for cash, could I do the same?”

And, so, the Bank of Shed was formed and the “Ego” was born — an apt name, some might say, for a currency adorned with Simove’s picture and images that sum up his character: a full English breakfast on a plate to represent time working on “The Big Breakfast”; an image of Walt Disney, one of his inspirational idols; and a picture of a lightbulb to convey “the power of ideas”, his “passion”. The names of Simove’s family are also embedded through the background pattern of the note. This “graphic resume” of his life also doubles as an effective business card; his telephone number is the banknote serial number, and his email address is printed in tiny type on the reverse.

Then came the real challenge. Would people buy for hard cash something that had no actual value in the world as we know it? Simove wrote a sales pitch and uploaded some photos of the currency on auction Web site eBay. Amazingly, the buyers flocked from far and wide. Some were simply curious to see what he’d done; others were banknote collectors from around the world. One auction went to 5.50 pounds for a single Ego; an art student from Glasgow bought 20 notes for 15 pounds; while quite a few sold for just the starting price of 10 pence. After a month, the Ego had an average exchange rate of one to 0.74 British pounds.

Seemingly, though, the Ego — unlike the dollar, either back in the Great Depression or now – is appreciating in value. The latest auction saw the note exchange hands — to a user called “Molly the dog” for 1.53 pounds. But, before you think of rushing to the printers to run off your own currency, here’s a word of warning. A two cent coin that Simove later had minted has a cheeky message. The “heads” side of the coin depicts the “ideas man” himself. The “tails” side depicts a bottom (presumably his), and the following words: “The bottom may fall out of this market.”

Let’s talk about debts, baby

Money matters are climbing the list of the talks parents feel they must have with their children: the subjects of debt and saving for the future are now deemed to be more important than educating our offspring on sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), racism or religion, research by Engage Mutual Assurance shows.

Debt is the most common financial topic of parental education (64 percent) followed by saving for the future (62 percent). That ranks them fifth and sixth in the top 10 topics for parental “chats”, ahead of racism (58 percent), illness and death (53 percent) and STDs (52 percent). The only “facts of life” considered more important than these money matters in children’s at-home education are drugs and alcohol (78 percent), personal hygiene (74 percent), talking to strangers (73 percent) and the “birds and the bees” (71 percent).

The findings, from a poll of 2,000 people, are encouraging as financial education — for adults as well as children — climbs the political agenda. But they are a worrying reflection of the current environment. Britons’ debt mountain has tripled in the past decade and families are under increasing strain to make ends meet. A string of hikes in the cost of living — petrol, heating, food and transport — has compounded the problem.

Three-quarters of the population voice worry about the impact of the credit crunch on their purse-strings, according to research from BrightHouse Stores. Almost 60 percent are reining in spending on non-essentials, 43 percent are worried they won’t be able to put anything away into savings, others are spending less money on food and socialising, and 9 percent have even cancelled a holiday.

 Against that backdrop — and as recession looms – any advice on managing money should stand the generation of future adults in good stead. Perhaps, then, they will eschew that appetite for cheap credit exhibited by their parents before them.