Hard News: Debacles and Disgraces
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Danyl, it's all well and fine to be critical after the shit has publicly hit the fan, but where was the coverage before now?
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October I found I'd effectively lost 25k tied up in a NZ trust. basically my lifesavings. Didn't feel much anger as much as regret at not having been prudent enough to just leave it in the bank.
Anger well..
When we live in a world we're we sincerely celebrate being able to buy music on a format that still sounds worse than the standard format of 1967. When we have bought some of our favorite stuff on every new format offered betwixt then and now. over a steady decline and slight lift in sound quality, then it must may slowly dawn on us, that we haven't been so prudent for many years, and we'll take whatever the king deigns to offer us.whilst enjoying the freedom of getting a bit hot under the collar about things, when we find we need to replace the needle.
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we're=where
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The only crookedness is when the amount of risk is misrepresented.
Not quite the only crookedness: using your finance company to buy yourself a yacht is pretty crooked; not necessarily illegal, but certainly crooked.
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whilst enjoying the freedom of getting a bit hot under the collar about things, when we find we need to replace the needle.
Or by a new record. On the quality, I tend to agree that a brand new vinyl did sometimes sound better than a CD. But my old vinyls sound scratched and worn, and my old CDs just sound as they always did. Losslessly compressed MP3 files are totally indistinguishable from them.
The drop in quality that I most lament in the digital age is that of film. Actual film is still much higher quality than digitally captured movies, and I hate that massively high budget films think they can get away with it, particularly for anything fast moving, dark, or slow motion.
Naturally I'm not talking about digitizing film that was captured on actual film, that's a brilliant idea, the very best way to back up footage and the most convenient way to manipulate it.
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So thinking about digitizing. I've just taken possession of a terabyte hard drive, and am in the process of replacing my DVD player and video. I'd welcome any suggestion for the best (low size, excellent quality) sound format to start my backing up process :)
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Not quite the only crookedness: using your finance company to buy yourself a yacht is pretty crooked; not necessarily illegal, but certainly crooked.
Buy oneself a yacht is crooked. Buying a yacht as an investment is just a risky venture. Very risky, I'd say, but if it's a small part of a large portfolio, then only hindsight says it's a bad investment.
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which they?
They as in the investors, I'd have thought that was obvious from the context.
any time someone loses your money they are incompetent and possibly crooked
Why? investments have risk. If you put money into a startup venture, for instance, then you will probably lose it, even if the principals are skilled, competent and honest. Sometimes they will also be lucky and you'll get lots back.
The only crookedness is when the amount of risk is misrepresented
That's about the crux of it.
I think people are very quick to seek for a scapegoat, when in fact the general public *wanted* to believe they could make large amounts of money without applying intelligence or effort. The government could have acted to suppress the property boom, but didn't because it would have been unpopular. They could have introduced tight regulation of companies taking investments from the public, as in the EU. they didn't, due to residual ideology and not wanting to be seen as party poopers.
The voters who drove government into these policies are just as blameworthy as the bankers who took advantage of them. Maybe we should jail the voters - we'd need big jails.
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James, it really depends how much music you have and what format it's currently in.
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Rik,
beneficiary's as usual miss out on everything as the undeserving poor they never get tax cuts, as the govt lowers the base rate
Does anyone believe this?
So "beneficiary's" had a good run under Labour...obviously on the flipside someone else was having not such a good run and now that will be addressed.
If you look at the population of NZ and take out those that don't pay any tax (retired, kids, sickness beneficiaries, welfare beneficiaries, prison inmates, Hotchin/Watson and their ilk) it doesn't leave all that many people to fund the country through tax and you have to wonder sometimes why some end up shouldering the burden more than others.
The whole concept of a beneficiary receiving a tax cut makes me sick - if you're not putting anything in, how can you expect to take anything out? Sure you may have paid your way in previous times and sure you should be looked after by the welfare safety net but don't cry foul because you don't get the same treatment as an income-earning, tax-paying member of society.
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James: I'd recommend FLAC. It's lossless, which means the sound will be stored exactly as in the original data. It isn't small, but at maybe 50M a minute you'll get a fair amount of music into that terabyte.
You can always batch convert the files to MP3 or Vorbis to use them with low capacity devices.
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Rich, it's really a matter of semantics, but I'd say that losing money can never be done competently. But as we both accept, you can't know beforehand, and that's what risk is all about.
I tend to agree that people who get scammed are never themselves blameless. But financial literacy appears to be something we can never expect from large proportions of the population, and sometimes measures have to be taken to protect those people.
I think of the mother of my (very wealthy) business partner who consulted him early in the year about whether she should take a large position in UDC Finance. He said no way, absolutely not. This was based on:
1. She did not understand the investment at all
2. The subprime problem was biting badly in the US, and every indication in NZ was that property was overvalued.
3. She couldn't afford to lose the moneyShe did it anyway. Not one of those reasons was enough to convince her, even coming from a self-made millionaire who she had every reason to trust the advice of. She simply preferred the story being told by the company.
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That is good news on the iTunes thing.
I used to claim that I couldn't hear the difference between a decent AAC and a .wav file but actually that was rubbish. No form of digital compression sounds as good as full audio. And as for like 128 mp3s, eeek they are disgusting.
I recently drove through a good chunk of california listening to digital radio. Okay so its its quite fun having all those specialist stations, but they sound terrible. What I'm not sure about is wether sirius and xm just play all their music off some whack mp3 database or if the digital broadcast medium involve some crazy digital compression. Bad anyway.
Most albums that i have purchased recently (on vinyl) have come with free downloads. The great thing is that all of these downloads have been zip folders with full audio .wav files. Then you can import them into itunes and choose to keep as big proper files or compress them at your leisure. Of course these are from small record companies who probably don't see much return from iTunes anyway.
...the finance company stuff is depressing to comment on...
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there's more, but it's a long article. No link to post, sorry
WINEBOX WINNERS AND LOSERS. By BRIAN GAYNOR.
28 August 1999. New Zealand Herald
Revenue Minister Sir William Birch made depressing comments after last week's High Court verdict that overturned key findings in the Winebox inquiry. He claimed that the $12 million spent on the inquiry had been a waste of taxpayers' money.
But Sir William's $12 million calculation is loose change compared with the spoils extracted from the Winebox companies by their major shareholders.
These profits are well documented because the big players in the inquiry - Bank of New Zealand, Brierley Investments, Capital Markets/Fay, Richwhite and European Pacific Investments - have all been listed on the stock exchange.
While individual shareholders have lost money in all these companies, individuals particularly Sir Michael Fay and David Richwhite, have walked away with big profits.
A sizeable portion of these profits were leveraged from tax avoidance deals investigated in the Winebox inquiry.
The story begins on September 24, 1986, when European Pacific Investments (EPI) was incorporated in Luxembourg. Its directors were Mr Richwhite (chairman), Paul Collins, David Lloyd and Francis Hoogewerf of Luxembourg. Mr Lloyd was responsible for convincing the Cook Islands Government to establish a tax haven.
On December 4, 1986, EPI increased its capital from 100 to 25,000,000 shares and Brierley Investments (BIL) and Capital Markets were issued 12.5 million shares each at 200USc (390c) per share. Sir Michael and Mr Richwhite were the principal shareholders of Capital Markets.
A few days later the original shareholders sold seven million shares to BNZ for 885c per share, 500c above the original issue price. Later that month BIL and Capital Markets sold a further four million shares to the New Zealand public at $11.85 a share.
Investors were attracted by the prospect of "an international network combining trustee and banking services" and were told that "to date, activities have been based in the Cook Islands." In other words EPI was established as a tax avoidance company.
Within a month, BIL and Capital Markets had a realised profit of $67 million from the partial sale of their EPI investment. After these share sales BNZ, BIL and Capital Markets all owned 28 per cent of EPI and the public 16 per cent.
EPI was listed on the stock exchange on January 6, 1987, and quickly reached a record high of $40. The euphoria was short-lived as the New Zealand Government took steps to close tax loopholes.
These tax law changes had a negative impact on EPI's profitability and share price. In October 1989, Mr Lloyd acquired shareholdings of the BNZ, Capital Markets and public for US255c a share.
The offer was above the original price paid by founding shareholders but well below the price paid by BNZ and public shareholders.
The outcome of EPI's three-year listing was:
* EPI's minority shareholders lost $30 million.
* BNZ lost $32 million.
* Capital Markets made a profit of $36 million.
BNZ was also a big participant in the Winebox inquiry.
In February 1987, 103 million new BNZ shares were issued to the public at 175c each.
Two years later the bank had to be recapitalised - because of bad decisions similar to the EPI investment - and new shares were issued at 70c each. These were issued on the basis of seven new shares for every existing 10 shares.
The Government gave Capital Markets an entitlement to 428.6 million new shares and the company controlled by Sir Michael and Mr
Richwhite acquired a 30.4 per cent holding in BNZ at a cost of $300 million.
After a second recapitalisation of the bank in 1990, which involved Capital Markets but not the public shareholders, National Australia Bank made a successful takeover offer at 80c a share.
The outcome at BNZ was:
* BNZ's minority shareholders lost $91 million.
* Capital Markets made a profit of $41 million.
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Buying a yacht as an investment is just a risky venture.
Buying a yacht as an investment is just silly. Yachts are money sinks. You buy them because you love what they give you, and don't mind the thousands of dollars they cost to keep 'ship-shape'.
Buying a brand new yacht as an investment makes about as much sense as buying a brand new sedan car as an investment.
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Kyle, that's not true at all. You can make money renting out yachts. Just as Hertz makes plenty of money buying brand new sedan cars as investments.
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Yachts are money sinks.
Helps if one works for the Hospital, Kyle...;-)
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Danyl, it's all well and fine to be critical after the shit has publicly hit the fan, but where was the coverage before now?
Chris Lee, the Kapiti Coast investment adviser has been on the finance companies case for years.
Just a random click on his September 2007 archive shows him referencing articles in The NBR about nefarious goings on connected to Bridgecorp.
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Yachts are money sinks. You buy them because you love what they give you, and don't mind the thousands of dollars they cost to keep 'ship-shape'.
A friend of mine once had an ocean going yacht he named 'Penury' to remind himself where it was taking him.
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Thanks, Bob. That's the kind of coverage I meant.
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Kyle, that's not true at all. You can make money renting out yachts. Just as Hertz makes plenty of money buying brand new sedan cars as investments.
I don't think Hertz will call their cars investments, in the same way that you'd call putting money in a bank an investment.
Yes, you can make money off an asset by renting it out, that's stretching 'investment' a long way.
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Yes, you can make money off an asset by renting it out, that's stretching 'investment' a long way.
My late grandmother made all her "investments" at the TAB, bless her.
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I'd recommend FLAC. It's lossless, which means the sound will be stored exactly as in the original data.
I'm not planning on getting rid of the original sources. Just my CDs are getting a bit scratched, and it is often very hard to find the one I want, or the music that I'm in the mood for. Of course I only have a couple of hundred CDs, so I could FLAC them, and still have room in the hdd for my tv recordings (to be fair, I somewhat expect to buy another big hdd for the unit, and am also thinking of moving to a solid state system disk at some point). Torturously, most of the parts are sitting in the corner of my office, but the case & keyboard are not likely to be here until tomorrow or Friday.
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Yes, you can make money off an asset by renting it out, that's stretching 'investment' a long way.
Really?
Isn't that what all those people with "investment properties" are trying to do?
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Isn't that what all those people with "investment properties" are trying to do?
Well in recent times the rental yield doesn't cover the mortgage, so any gain relies on asset inflation more than covering the loss.
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