Welcome Aboard The Black Pig - Shipping & Freight Blog

Greece - How to Solve the Crisis of the Eurozone Bubble (or How to Solve the Bubbles’ Eurozone Crisis)

This week’s blog is by Guest Columnist Seaman Staines, Mate and Quartermaster aboard the Black Pig.

 

Hello and Welcome to my first guest blog which the Captain says won’t be the last!

I am Seaman Staines, as quartermaster acknowledged as the resident financial expert aboard the Pirate vessel Black Pig. (Captain’s Note: Take this bloke with a pinch of salt; I let him buy the beans, nothing more).

Many of our crew are of Greek lineage and, needless to say they come to me for advice about the developing Euro crisis (Yeah Right! El Capitain) and despite the fact we still get our pittance in doubloons on occasion mostly it’s in the local scrip.

When my fellow bubblonian crewmen ask me to help I explain my simple scheme to ensure all their hardworking, taxpaying relatives in fair Hellenis (E.C. Wot???. and while I’m at it, Where???) don’t get shafted by the crafty Hun hordes who are about to sweep down to repossess their Tavernas’ and crockery shops (they use an inordinate amount of plates apparently). 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a graph produced by Reuters today – that Blue line that’s Greece’s current debt – apparently running at over 125% of GDP – that means for every euro they earn they spend 25% more.

 

 

 

Even the Captain with his out of control cutlass purchases on Pirate e Bay doesn’t achieve that (carry on – it won’t just be last post but last plank matey boy - C.P.)

 

At the moment the Bookies are offering 6/4 on that Greece exits the Euro by the end of 2012. 

 

 

Now I speak as a man who has often taken on the masters of the turf and the fact I still sail on a tatty scow with a half mad skipper (Oi!) shows how adept I am at placing a wager.

 

 

 

The way to ensure your future wealth if you are a Greek resident however is painfully simple. The thousands of Euros currently residing under your vine leaf stuffed mattresses are presumably there for three reasons: 1) the interest rates offered by the banks are rubbish 2) the Greek banks are rubbish anyway and liable to vanish overnight quicker than a decent bottle of Ouzo (Captain’s note: there is no such thing) and 3) you didn’t declare any of this dosh to the taxman.

 

Right –

pay attention –

Take all the cash from beneath the bedding and pack it in a holdall, suitcase whatever. Take a trip to Germany by whatever method and, once there, open a bank account or three and deposit all the money – and be quick about it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

But NO you say!               I need my moolah, in readies what’s more.

That’s the clever bit. If you notice this ‘Universal Euro’ isn’t universal at all, a quick glance will establish where that note was printed. The big con behind the euro is simply that there is no universal head of state or similar on the notes to guarantee payment – this means it is not the ‘universal currency’ it was sold as by the Eurocrats.

Trust me, when judgement day comes those Greek notes will all get stamped up ‘non negotiable’ or similar and be devalued against other currencies – in short they won’t be worth a carrot. You on the other hand, my Greek crewmate, will have withdrawn all your savings in solid old Deutsche geld, currently valid anywhere in the EU and likely to remain so when the bubble economy literally bursts and the trireme sink below the waves of austerity (Is that in the Sea of Tranquillity? Ed).

Trust me, I am after all - Your Mate.

Photo:  ‘Destruction’ the fourth from the five painting series ‘The Course of Empire’ by Thomas Cole.

Thieves, Villains, Receivers, Banks and B**stards

One of the stories today on the Handy Shipping Guide was of the demise of an Australian trucking company which closed effectively making 1000 people unemployed.

As usual we had the press implying things they know little about, unions shouting about ‘Fat Cat’ bosses and distressed workers explaining to anyone who would listen that they didn’t know where the mortgage payment was coming from.

In this particular case an administrator had been appointed a week or so ago to regularise the company’s affairs and suddenly the main source of funds, a financier called Coface Australia withdrew their support despite the administrators, deVriesTayeh, reportedly saying only the day before to staff that ‘there was enough money to keep paying them for weeks to come.’

This is the management of deVriesTayeh, maybe they ate the budget that night for dinner. The skinnier bloke in the middle who looks like Michael Vaughan should be feeling nervous too.

Now the Captain has a bit of form in this sort of scenario, only as an innocent bystander you understand, one in a thousand you might say having worked for a company (in a junior role) many years ago which suffered a very similar fate.

Check the similarities: The bosses of both lived in very big properties bought during the fat years; it was a time of recession; both companies had been easily able to borrow the working capital they needed following successful trading records; they both had the rug pulled by the people who had capitalised them.

 

According to many onlookers this latest case is all the fault of Stephen Brown the Managing Director of the failed express freight group, called incidentally 1st Fleet, and yes, apparently Mr Brown lives in a place most would envy bought no doubt at a time when things were better.       

 

 

 

 

 

According to Mr Brown he financed the firms cashflow through a company called Coface Australia ‘rather than a bank overdraft’.

Well news for anyone interested - that was a bank overdraft, and it’s a really a bank by another name that pulled the rug having allegedly cut its exposure from A$7.5 million to A$5 million in the past week whilst, according to the same source, there is A$10.5 million sitting on the firms sales ledger.

So who is it put this apparently viable enterprise under?

Coface Australia it turns out is part of the Coface Group, which is part of the Natixis Group which in turn is part of Groupe BPCE which, as the second largest banking group in France has its interests split between two French banks, Banques Populaires (is that name a joke?) and Caisses d’Epargne who obviously are up the proverbial ruisseau de merde sans pagaie.(non French speakers see illustration).

So is this any less of a scam than that Nigerian General who keeps trying to give me money and how does it work?

Fairly obvious if you ask me; Mr Brown, who has made several statements since the crash lambasting his bankers, seems genuinely concerned that the demise of 1st Fleet has seriously impacted on the lives of so many people and has expressed exactly the sentiments his ex boss did as witnessed by the Captain all those years ago.

Bewilderment, humiliation followed by outrage probably sums it up.

One thing you can be certain of, Coface (better called about face) have seen that they can close down this company and capitalise their asset, if the workers don’t get paid they’ll leave it to the Government no doubt, this at least is what seems to inevitably happen in the UK. The administrators/receivers get guaranteed first dibs on everything so, at a time when their balance sheet is probably looking as dodgy as everyone else’s (comparatively), they can ramp up rates per hour to make your eyes water   

whilst they ‘sort out the company affairs’.

. . . . . . . . . . .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This will include charging everybody who has stock in the 1st Fleet warehouses or owes for any transport costs etc. for letting them have their own goods whilst chasing anyone who owes the firm, to the ends of the earth if necessary, to get in money owed. This process will stop when enough money has arrived to pay off the people that matter i.e. Twoface and dePeesTaker and most likely the taxman.

At the point that the administrators decide it is ‘uneconomic’ to continue to chase cash, in other words when they can’t justify the large fees for little reward, they’ll crawl off somewhere and do the sums (still charging the account of course). These will magically result in very, very little or no money being available to pay the 400 or so subcontractors, many of whom have devoted life and capital to working for 1st Fleet, some with thousands of dollars invested in vehicles registered in the company name and may, unreasonably it might well turn out, blame poor old Mr Brown.

So the trick to this is to look after the dust settles at the bills raised by the two groups who stand to gain most by the collapse of what was hitherto an effective transport company trading through an incredibly difficult period on the narrowest of margins, watching fuel costs rise out of their control. How much did they get? And how much for the real creditors? All moot obviously by the time the final figures are announced possibly in years to come.

So what to do to avoid such a scenario? That too is easy to work out and almost impossible to put into practice. Take a boss like Mr Brown who, from his public outbursts seems to be a reasonable bloke. He was running a company, successfully, for years. Hard times start to bite and he did what directors have done the world over for centuries, he tried to trade through it.

This is a glib term that comes easily off the tongues of accountants, analysts, journalists etc. Basically anyone who has no experience of the sharp end of commerce or the human relationships which are essential to start, nurture and grow a successful company.

No, what Mr Brown should have done was be a hard nosed b**tard, cut jobs early, laid off contractors and basically stuffed staff and customers alike.

You never know, by now he might have been running a supermarket chain – or better still an administrators practice or even a bank.

 

 

 

 

Rupert Murdoch – A fine caring Australian example of how an MD should behave when running a company. Go on – you’d buy a used car from that face wouldn’t you?

Another Old Transport Chestnut Rises and Falls

Where do they get these people from?

That is a question the Captain continually asks himself these days whilst listening to politicians, looking at road schemes which fail to ease congestion, and seeing abject idiocy when matters of planning are involved.

 

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One of the penalties of getting older is watching generations rising and making the same stupid mistakes the previous lot already did a decade or so before.

 

It seems a university degree qualifies some to design road systems that don’t work when any commercial driver could have drawn up a better scheme on the back of his fag packet (even more room if they take off the brand name).

 

 

Politicians spout about the ‘common man’ when they’ve never had a proper job whilst the common man wants someone more experienced and better educated in the ways of the world than he himself to run the show.

 

 

Please Note:  TWO spelling mistakes!

What has started the Captain on this, his Oh too usual rant?

The ‘Hampshire Co-ordinated Freight Community project’ that’s what.

This is, yet again, the theory that to cut freight traffic in an area all you need to do is send it somewhere else, unload it onto other ‘vehicles with ’spare’ capacity and then send it where it was going in the first place.

Only later.

And having been handled by we know not whom.

Presumably free of charge.

Yeah, that sounds like a plan. Local press managed to get a quote from a Mandy Atherton, of DB Schenker, one of the firms that has ‘so far pledged funds for the HCFC’. Mandy says:

“It’s the type of thing that has been talked about in the haulage industry for ages but was always dismissed as ‘pie in the sky’.

But now we’re trying to make it happen. It’s great for business and it’s great for the city.”

 

 

. . . . . . .No Mandy, it’s crap, it is in fact ‘pie in the sky’ to coin a phrase.

 

 

 

 

 

Don’t think it’s just the local council who’s cuckoo however, they managed to get an application to fund this white elephant passed by the EU’s regional development fund for a cool million quid, trouble is they didn’t know how to raise the 400 grand that they had to stump up to see this insane dream through to its inevitable demise so the EU told them time was up.

Unabashed, Frank Baxter, travel and transport manager at Southampton City Council, announced the EU’s intransigence and promptly turned to the Department for Trade for funding (yeah, good luck with that).

The local rag, describing this as ‘a ground breaking multi million pound scheme which could become a model for other port cities and would potentially boost Southampton’s green credentials at the same time as helping increase profits for firms using the city’s busy docks’ was, I’m afraid simply too much for the skipper of the Black Pig.

This is simple folks, in the words of the immortal Rod Tidwell:

‘Show me the money’, how in Hell is anyone going to increase their profits taking the stuff to an out of town centre, having it tipped and reloaded, all managed by some mysterious management system that identifies loads, reveals details of haulage companies clients to their rivals, sees goods handled by staff who need to be permanently employed, insured and yet, at the moment are totally unnecessary.

Answers on a post card (or better still in the comments column underneath) please.

Oh.

And can the multifarious firms who keep trying to beat our comments spam filter to sell shoes/bags/Viagra etc. please give up; you’re boring, try getting a job with Hampshire Council.

East vs West on the Road Which is Best? – You Choose

It is a painful reality that, no doubt for their sins, some of the Handy Shipping Guide staff have to make a round trip every day of around 160 miles (yes, that’s how good an employer we are). The only good point about this is that your Captain ain’t one of them.

The really bad point, and believe me it’s bad, is that the bulk of this journey is via what dear old Chris Rea would call the ‘Road to Hell’ i.e. the infamous M25. Now Chris hails from Sheffield, known as Satan’s pied de terre by many and therefore is unlikely to invoke the name of the Lord of Darkness’s main residence lightly (in Sheffield He’s known as the Lord of Dankness probably due to the weather).

The big problem with the M25, and actually it has got marginally better lately after much widening, no doubt to impress the four people coming for the Olympics, is the undoubted efficiency of the Police and other emergency services. The usual run of events is that some numpty (actually occasionally one of our own numpties) manages to have a nasty ‘incident’ often involving a foreign lorry driver but usually due to an old English pastime known as ‘Drivinriteuphisass’.

. .TYPICAL SCENE OF M25 FOLLOWING A SMASH.

 

This ‘game’ involves a series of middle class men, frustrated by their impotence when unable to race past everyone else on the outside lane, join together in an almost unbroken line of vehicles. This process should not be confused with the ‘continental’ style of driving where Luigi, Pierre or Manuel has their own attitude to positions on the road. These often involve wild gesticulations with thumbnails inexplicably being flicked from behind the convoy member’s front teeth or clenched fist shoved upward stopped only by the opposing hand on the opposite upper arm.

Not so on the M25 race of disaster, usually, unless wild lane changes are involved, the combatants are content to tailgate until they either

a) reach their junction where they peel off inside like the member of the fighter squadron they dream of being in. or

b) stop their vehicle by a convenient contact with the preceding driver as he brakes/swerves/crashes unexpectedly.

As the Handy Shipping Guide we also maintain an office in Thailand and on a recent twice yearly visit I observed once again the liberal style of driving adopted by the sons of Siam. Here it is customary to drive in a much more relaxed style where the occasional horn blast replaces the shouted curse with drivers maintaining an inscrutably polite attitude despite some truly heinous practices being visited upon them by other road users.

 

 Yes - This driver did think it a good idea to park his sanitation truck on the outside lane of a motorway whilst he nipped out for something in the garage opposite!

. . . . .It is nothing to witness the suicidal practices of schoolgirls riding their mopeds carrying two friends riding side saddle behind them, or pick up trucks carrying loads which for height alone would not disgrace a 40 foot semi trailer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Or, perhaps worst of all, to drive at the dead of night, the brightest object in the headlights the trees occasionally painted white at the road side to grant a clue as to where tarmac ends and field commences when, out of the gloom, comes a convoy of small motorcycles each laden with a family group, travelling unlit on the wrong side of the carriageway heading towards one in the sure and certain knowledge that any resulting carnage, should God forbid you plough into them, will be certainly attributed to you as a ‘farang’ simply because you have more money/status etc. In this scenario one should note that of Father, Mother and the 2/3/4 kids, only Dad wears a crash helmet.

 

 

There is however a point at which the Thai’s score more heavily when matters of the road are concerned (besides their ability to mount seemingly impossible amounts of vulnerable human flesh upon a totally unsuitable vehicle or their capacity to gawp at accidents which seemingly remains a global constant) and that is the way they react to incidents which in the UK would have a 12 mile queue of vehicles with drivers waiting impatiently backed up along the motorway whilst they sit stationery and prod the screens of their sat navs.

 

 

. . .As this picture the Skipper took clearly shows, no matter what the problem, one can simply drive round it. Whereas in Britain a ‘Road Traffic Officer’, i.e. a bloke in a hi vis jacket with a Range Rover and half a copper’s salary, will simply stop all movement on the highway thus creating the huge backlog we’ve come to know and love, the Thai’s will simply slow to get a good look at the carnage then drive, off road if necessary, to merrily continue on their way.

The Modern Myth of Job Creation

With news today the Government might look to Halton Borough Council for some cash should the freight and logistics park they are developing together with Stobart and Prologis called ‘3MG’ (stands for Multi Modal Gateway and there’s three of them responsible for it – surely 3 MMG or 2MG) fail to live up to expectations it’s time to consider the ramifications.

Firstly Mr Nick ‘I want to be popular’ Clegg announced last month that the Government’s Regional Growth Fund was to put up nine million quid to assist development of the project (so hang on – surely that’s 4MG, or as it’s partly our money 62,300003MG or thereabouts).

Last year we had the pleasure of visiting the new port at London Gateway on the Thames being developed by DP World, and very impressive it is too. We also had the pleasure of speaking with Nick’s old buddy Vince Cable who was delighted to tell the assembled company that the scheme would create up to 6,500 jobs.

Now apparently noises are being made that we (I use the phrase loosely) want our cash back from the Halton Council if the scheme doesn’t result in the predicted 2,700 plus jobs (Stobart’s website says 5000+, Prologis don’t even seem to call it 3MG).

Well Mr Clegg and Co. the Captain has a word of advice about this.

These are not jobs being created.

To create a job, one has to implement something which is entirely new i.e. in our game (UK plc export division) make something new.

These are exactly the same as other jobs created, what they mean to say is transferred.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nooo my Liberal buddies, sorry to tell you but if you genuinely couldn’t work out this particular equation then, put simply, you’re too thick to be in Politics.

 

 

 

I’m sure however that isn’t the case, I’m sure this is just the usual duplicitous double shuffle with Nick warming the assorted cockles of unemployed hearts in Widnes without the onerous task of telling anyone else, particularly neighbouring Liverpool or even his own lovely Sheffield exactly where these jobs would emanate from just as Vince, who represents Twickenham, won’t have to explain to dockers in Felixstowe and Southampton why they might get laid off.

 

So good luck with that Nick, the chances of you bowling up to Halton in eighteen months with cap in hand to explain why you were going to cause local rates to rise?

If you live there I wouldn’t lose any sleep.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Incidentally, as we in the UK HSG office are all Essex and East London boys and girls this isn’t having a go at Stobart.

Yes. That’s the new rail station at Southend Airport (Sorry, LONDON – Southend airport, after all it’s only 40 miles away)

 

 

The development at Southend Airport and associated rail station WILL create jobs simply by opening up new opportunities and enticing more business into the UK as well as out, so hats off, when the development started we (that is the Handy Shipping Guide), like many others thought it might be a poorly disguised extension of the groups freight services entirely unsuitable to the local area.

What we actually have is the possibility with those true entrepreneurs who run cheap flights and associated businesses to provide new opportunities – and all in time for the Olympics!