Insurance Companies buy more UK Government Debt
The Bank of England has just announced that the latest efforts at so called Quantitative Easing involves the injection of another £25 billion of made up money in the circular flow of money system, which means that since the recession Britain has generated £200 billion of made up debt!
So Where's the money gone? And what is Quantitive Easing anyway
It turns out that QE as the press now like to call it, is radically different from the Pump Priming developed by FDR in 1930 to get the States out of the Great Depression!
And this explains why you and me, the small and medium sized enterprise and it's workers are not getting any credit or money!
Truth of the matter is QE is designed to shore up the internal arteries of the international banking system and not leak any money out. To leak money by the creation of credit to the general public and increasing the money supply would introduce both inflationary and currency exchange pressures that would be far from welcome in the current economic climate.
So here is how QE works - The UK Government decides to make up some more cash to shore up the banking system. It creates £25 billion pound worth of bonds that it says you and me will repay! It then instructs the Bank of England which sells them to Banks. They make a nice profit by selling them onto - have you guessed it yet?
Yes 95% of the guilts and bonds go to INSURANCE COMPANIES! Very little money is being released to the public system.
It just means that today the Government decided that You, Me and Everybody! - in the UK, now owes another £25 billion of made up money plus the made up Interest, to Aviva et al.
So QE cannot have any beneficial effects to the likes of you and me, Joe Public, except the potential ability to stave off a second wave of recession by keeping the banks ticking over!
Pump Priming conversely is a 'lets spend our way out the crap' solution which would only work in the UK if the money is diverted into the public sector.
Why just the public sector?
Because only large national institutions have enough employees to spread the money to all parts of the system before it returns to the investment banks.
Like all system solutions they have to be top down and bottom up!
The recession will not come to an end in this country until we start pumping it into the bottom!
Labels: Bank of England, credit crunch, Insurance companies, money supply, Money System, pump priming, Quantitative Easing, UK government
UK TV Ad Revenue Underwritten by Car Insurance Price Comparison War!
When Insurance Blogger was a nipper.....
Back in the 1960's if you were lucky you had a black and white televison - the box!
with an aerial that looked like a sea mine or something out of Doctor Who sitting on top of it.
There were 2 UK TV Channels:
The BBC - Mother of the Nation and voice of the world......
& ITV - which was a loose consortium of regional independent television companies that broadcast on their own frequency AND network distribution relay.
This meant that every time you changed channel, which was a process of turning a huge dial until you got a fuzzy ghost image - you had to turn the aerial as well to switch to a different signal supplier.
This caused much distress in every UK Household with people arguing over aerial placement whilst trying to watch fuzzy images of man supposedly walking on the Moon.
The Independent Television Companies were funded by advertising revenue for commercials placed in programme 'intermissions' known in the UK as 'Commercial Breaks'. This allowed companies like Granada to fund their own programmes and make 'soaps' like Coronation Street.
Product placement was banned on The BBC and was also severely limited as to the acceptable use of on screen products, within ITV programme drama of the day.
This ban has very recently been lifted and you might soon even see the BBC's Phil Mitchell on Eastenders popping down to his local Post Office TM for some Travel Insurance or visiting a car insurance comparison website for his Jaguar insurance, coming to our screens as desperate TV production companies try to raise additional funding in hard times.
Even the BBC will not remain immune in the face of falling TV viewing figures and the rise of integrated digital services.
Today ITV is still reliant upon revenue sourced from intermission commercials, however with global distribution opportunities for selling programmes abroad they are now able to find sponsors for most popular shows.
According to a recent survey by business intelligence group DataWatch Monitor UK, Insurance adverts account for 52% of the total advertising revenue spend on UK TV commercials and specifically
car insurance which accounts for 63% of that.
So Who is spending all this money, millions of pounds that is underwriting some great UK independent TV productions?
Well unless you live under a rock or don't own a screen (Boxes are consigned to pre-history along with the Dodo and the Betamax by the way!), you can't have failed to notice that there is a
car insurance price comparison site war going on out there at the moment with the BIG 4 all trying to outdo each other on spend and it's getting dirty..........
So who are the big 4?
Well in no particular order , though Google has one....
Money Supermarket.com
Confused.com
Compare The Market.com
Go Compare.com
So who is winning this war?
Well it's hard to give a definitive answer because campaigns are in a constant state of flux and one month it might be the furry
meerkat toy rodent or the next month, the fat opera singer at No.1 in the Sales Charts. It is difficult to COMPARE!
The TV ads always tell the prospect car insurance purchasers to visit their website, so a fairly accurate measure of website usage over time by website name search, can be extracted from Google and here are the results....
WACKY RACES
As you can see, that annoying pompous man from the Dragons Den is leading the way by far at the moment with the furry rodent bringing up the rear. This is likely to change at Christmas when Compare The Market bring out the talkng meerkat. Looks like the fat annoying tenor over there Ad is working!!! For Now!
To see how your website compares to the big boys do your own visitor comparison with your competitiors over at
Google Trends for Insurance Price Comparison giantsLabels: advertising, car insurance, compare car insurance, Compare The Market, Confused, Go Compare, insurance comparisons, insurance marketing, MoneySupermarket, price comparison
UK Consumer Law Tested for Loan Protection
Insurance Blogger loves a peoples champion and as this test case has shown UK consumers may now have far more rights and
loan protection under UK Consumer Credit Law than was previously realised....
And the UK Courts will probably be filling up with cases as fast as those dealing with the mis-selling of loan and
mortgage protection insurance products as other legal firms jump onto the bandwagon.
Once again it will be Insurance that underwrites these ridiculous anti-social court cases......
Last week, a debtor secured a five-year block on his home repossession in a claims management case against his lender Blemain Finance, after consumer credit law was used to challenge his secured loan agreement.
The firm acting for Cardiff-based Peter Bentley, claims management company, Cartel Client Review, used the meaning of unfair relationships under Section 140A of the Consumer Credit Act (CCA) 1974 to claim that his loan contract with Blemain Finance was an unfair one.
Blemain also agreed to charge no further interest on the GBP 40,000 loan and cut his repayments from roughly GBP 550 to GBP 150 a month. At the High Court in Cardiff Judge Milwyn Jarman also prevented the lender from levying any charges or legal costs.
The judge barred Blemain for enforcing repayment via repossession for five years, but even after this period, it can only bring repossession proceedings if there are at least 12 months’ arrears on the new level of payments.
Bentley’s lawyers, Consumer Credit Litigation Solicitors (CCLS), successfully argued that Blemain had loaned the money to Bentley irresponsibly and that the agreement took advantage of his desperate situation.
CCLS argued that shortcomings in the decision making procedure on granting the loan, such as in the under writing, affordability checks and valuation processes, led to the credit agreement being unfair.
Andrew Settle, solicitor for CCLS, said: "The relationship between the parties was an unfair one within the meaning of Section 140A of the CCA 1974. CCLS is utilising a significant number of legal arguments, like those used on behalf of Mr Bentley, in thousands of cases on behalf of our clients."
CCLS successfully demanded to have the loan account re written, which is believed to be the first time a loan account has been rewritten under settlement, as a result of the unfair relationships test.
Carl Wright, chief executive of Cartel Client Review, claimed that Blemain made the offer to Bentley in a bid to prevent a judge in a High Court setting a legal precedent against its lending practices.
He added: "The consumer credit rule book is being re-written as a result of High Court settlements like Blemain Finance Limited v Bentley. With consumer victories won recently in the Courts and landmark cases settled, and further cases to be determined by the High Courts, the consumer financial landscape will change irrevocably as we move in to 2010.”
Mr Bentley’s financial problems started when his mother died in 2007. He began part-time work to look after his father, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s, and then took out a GBP 40,000 secured loan in February 2007 to alleviate his financial predicament.
Bentley later fell behind with his repayments and by the time the case was heard in court, the debt had risen to GBP 47,000.
Labels: Consumer Credit Law, credit cards, credit crunch, Debt, loan protection, loan protection insurance, loans, recession, Secured Loan Insurance, UK Courts
Compare the Meerkat ? Buy a Meerkat Toy!
You've got to admire the marketing people behind the Compare the Market - Compare the MeerKat campaign.
They've tapped into a vein of the British love of wildlife, first made popular by the BBC's 'Meerkat Manor' programme, and made it their own. I am still amazed how the TV adverts turn the heads of all kids present every time the 'cuddly' little creatures appear on our screens.
However even with the long term success of the TV campaign and both the Compare the Market and Compare the Meerkat websites sitting in the top 50 of Google for car insurance, even the people at BISL, usually ahead of the game appear to have missed out on this one.......
FOR
MEERKAT TOYS CLICK - SIMPLE!
You can now buy lovable Meerkat toys and dress them up like the famous Alexsandr Meerkat and play compare the meerkat all day long!
Sure to be a massive hit with kids all over the UK this Christmas it looks like BISL may have missed the boat on this one!
With the number of meerkat characters created on Compare the Meerkat you would think this would be a massive opportunity to extend the marketing campaign by doing a joint venture with a soft toy manufacturer like TY!
What's more http://twitter.com/Aleksandr_Orlov has over 29000 followers who they could immediately meerkat, sorry market to!!
So are BISL planning to bring out a branded
Meerkat Insurance version of the soft toy!
They Sure are. Apparently an exclusive deal has been done with Harrods who will release a limited edition of 5000
Talking Aleksandr Meerkat soft toys and dolls this December. Latest word has it that pre-sales have already accounted for every meerkat soft toy they can produce! Meekat Mania is sweeping Britain!
The soft toy market is hardly 'soft', especially at Christmas, and incredibly these things become very collectible quickly and command huge prices on auction sites such as Ebay.
They could even give away a set of meerkat toys with every car insurance policy sold!
Seemples!
You can find out more about the
Meerkat Soft Toy here
Labels: car insurance, Compare The Market, meerkat soft toys, meerkat toys, meerkats
