Interesting Facts

According to career website, CareerCast.com, the people with the worst jobs in the US are newspaper reporters. (The five worst jobs were:- Oil-rig worker Actor Enlisted military personnel Lumberjack Newspaper reporter The top five jobs were:- Actuary Biomedical engineer Software engineer Audiologist Financial planner Poor old Clark Kent.)

According to a survey commissioned by the distributors for the film The Fifth Estate, 92% of men consider themselves to be good at keeping secrets. (However, thanks to social media, men now typically share a secret with someone within 3 hours of hearing it. The top 10 secrets men can't keep? A friend is having an affair. A friend lied about something. A boss/colleague is having an office romance. Someone is pregnant. Someone has been in trouble with the police. Someone was lying about their job or salary. Someone has had/is having plastic surgery. A friend has had a windfall. A friend/colleague is in financial trouble. A friend/colleague is having trouble in the bedroom department. (It takes women 3 and a half hours.) Just don't forget the saying, "Two can keep a secret, if one of them doesn't know about it." )

Reflected light cast by a building in London is allegedly so intense that it has melted parked cars. (According to City AM newspaper, the 37-storey tower known as the Walkie Talkie in the financial district, casts a beam of light at certain times of day that has melted parts of cars. It was designed by Uruguayan architect Rafael Vinoly, Mr Vinoly probably thought the sun never shines in the UK.)

According to data from the IMF (International Monetary Fund), in 2008 the Greek economy was the twenty-seventh largest in the world by GDP (gross domestic product). (It had the 22nd highest standard of living in the world. The public sector accounted for about 40% of GDP. The service sector contributed 75.8% of the total GDP, industry 20.8% and agriculture 3.4%. It was the twenty-fourth most globalized country in the world and classified as a high income economy. I'm not sure what the IMF rates it now.)

According to a watchdog report the great bank bailout for banks in the UK has hit 850 billion pounds. (This involved buying shares, underwriting debts and lending money to banks including Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Lloyds Banking Group (LBG) during the crisis. Northern Rock was nationalised outright. Now LBG is 43-percent owned by the taxpayer while RBS, ravaged by the credit crunch and the takeover of Dutch giant ABN Amro at the top of the market, is set to become 84 percent state-owned after the latest bailout. From a nation of shopkeepers, to a nation of bankers.)

There are only 19 countries in the G20. (There are actually 20 members of the G-20, but these include the finance ministers and central bank governors of only 19 countries. So who gets double billing? Well the 20th member is the European Union, which is represented by the rotating Council presidency and the European Central Bank.)

According to the Independent, the FSA (Financial Services Authority) has brought just one criminal case of insider dealing since its inception in 2001. (Insider dealing (aka insider trading) is the use of confidential information to profit from mergers and acquisitions. It has nothing to do with the illegal trade in spare parts for organ transplants.)

$2trn (That's two trillion dollars) of the combined worth of planet Earth's billionaires has disappeared over the past year. (Across the globe, the number of those who can boast a fortune of over a thousand million US dollars has shrivelled from 1,125 to 793. The 10 biggest dollar-losers between them have this year lost more than the annual GDP (gross domestic product) of Ireland. Of course for those of us who are struggling to hold onto our jobs, or our houses, this is barely on our radar.)

Quantitative easing is the act of printing more money to increase the supply. (It effectively means that the central bank prints new money, in order to increase the supply of money. 'Quantitative' refers to the money supply; 'easing' essentially means increasing. I tried it once, but I was arrested.)

powered by ODEO According to research released by Sybase 365, Americans are obsessed with managing their personal finances. (More than a third of them, are able to state their bank balance at any given time, and an additional 42 percent typically know their bank balance to the nearest $200. What a shame they don't watch their economy that closely.)

"Plain vanilla" is a term for basic financial instruments such as shares. (Round where I come from it's only found in cornets or with wafers. Mind you, with the state of the money markets it's quite an accurate term, they are melting after all.)