Well it looks like Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Jack Straw are both quite happy to earn a nice little bit on the side. I don't mind people selling their expertise and doing consultancy work, I occasionally do a bit myself. However, I had never really looked at the Register of Members interests to find what sort of rate some MP's are picking up. Seems Sir Malcolm Rifkind has all sorts of cushy looking Directorships picking up £5,000 + for each one every month and Jack Straw has a nice little number bringing in £15,000 every quarter. I don't think these companies are only paying for expertise I rather suspect they are paying for contacts and influence of one form or another. Anyhow I do like the fact the Register of Members interests in open to the public to inspect here is the link LINK1 also a link to the telegraph investigation LINK2 and here is Rifkind explaining himself on Radio 4 LINK3
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London house prices have been zooming up and up and the average house prices is some £502,000 LINK1 while the average wage in London is around £40,000 that is a 12.5 times P/E ratio. In fact house prices in London are significantly above their levels of 2007 (see chart below). The top end of the market is nuts ! Want to buy a 3 bed flat in Holland Park for £6,079,000 ! No thank you very much. Of course, people are forgetting that we are in a ridiculously low interest rate environment that has distorted property prices particularly in London. See if that £6,079,000 price tag works out if Bank of England base rate is a more normal 5% rather than 0.5%. The high end has a rather long way to fall to get back to reality and volumes of sales are plummeting even if prices have not yet ! The independent newspaper has a nice overview of the general UK housing market LINK2   I actually know very little about the Shipping industry - except that it has done a fantastic role in the process of globalization bringing down the cost of shipping goods around the globe. Without this industry many of the foreign goods and foods we consume would cost more and we simply would not have access to some of the products. I teach international economics to Cass Business School MSc Shipping students and that was the first time I learnt about the importance of the Baltic Dry Index. It basically measure the cost in US dollars of moving the major raw materials (including coal, iron ore and grain) by sea. It looks at 23 shipping routes measured on a timecharter basis covering Handysize, Supramax, Panamax, and Capesize dry bulk carriers. It now seem the index is at an all time low of 553 the lowest ever recorded since it was set up (4th January 1985 at a value of 1000) and massively below the peak of 11,793 reached on May 20th 2008. It seems that the slowdown in China combined with new bulk carriers entering the market has led to a price crash. Is it now time to speculate on prices rising once again or do we need to hit the 500 mark ?  In the last quarter Apple made over $18 billion in profits that is actually the biggest quarterly profit in corporate history LINK1. It sold 34,000 iPhones an hour from October to December that is around 9 per second! I have used the iphone 4 and more recently upgraded to iphone 6 and I still use the ipad from time too time and kids just luv the intuition of touching the ipads and its great apps as well. All in all, I'm amazed at how clever, slick and reliable their products are. I should have paid more attention over the years to Apple as I notice in my lectures that the vast majority of students seem to use apple macs rather than the windows machines. I am still tied to to windows machines which take forever to boot up and seem to go ever slower. Maybe I should abandon windows too (except for some stats packages I use). Anyhow when you think about the global impact Apple has had and the way it has influenced many billions of people lives in a positive way you just have to admire what they have achieved. Yes they deserve their profits and their employees deserve their fat wage packets and bonuses and their shareholders deserve the share price appreciation for betting on a great company!
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AuthorThe author of this blog is Keith Pilbeam who is currently Professor of International Economics and Finance at City, University of London. 
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