Thoughts on Finance, Current Affairs and General Consumer Ripoffs - Damn Lies and Statistics

It's been revealed that 2 of the companies that have used money from Blackmore Bond have now gone into administration. Blackmore Bond is structured as a company borrowing from bondholder and lending money to many other Blackmore SPV (Special Purpose Vehicle) companies that are each supposedly developing different property sites around the UK. It's important to note that the SPVs are not independent and are mainly run by the same directors as Blackmore Bond itself. The two SPVs that have gone into receivership are Blackmore SPV 13 Ltd and SPV14 Ltd that are meant to be developing land in Birmingham and Liverpool. Reports suggest that little has happened with the development but that is unconfirmed. According to the paperwork submitted to Companies House, the Receivers were appointed by the lender to these companies called KSEYE Capital Limited Blackmore SPV 13 Ltd https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/10855805 According to the accounts filed up to 30 December 2...

Has Blackmore Bond been given a get out of jail free card? At the daily Government press conference on 28th March 2020 it was announced that the rules relating to insolvency and business failures were being relaxed to help support businesses through the Coronavirus pandemic. While this is clearly welcome to help protect jobs and assist companies through the current financial storms as a result of the surge of infections it also looks like it could mean Blackmore Bond can use it to further delay their payments to investors and continue to avoid any process that involves the company going into administration. Blackmore Bond Saved By Government? https://www.itv.com/news/2020-03-28/coronavirus-business-help-insolvency-alok-sharma/ Probably the aspect of most concern for investors in Blackmore Bond is the temporary suspension of wrongful trading provisions for company directors to remove the threat of personal liability which is backdated to 1st March 2020. There is no further...

The government advice is that you should be at least 2 metres away from other people at all times, something that has been called social distancing. But why is this needed? It's not very obvious when you are inside or in warm weather but every time you breathe your lungs are giving out water vapour which can contain the Coronavirus that causes Covid-19. The one time that it is visually really clear that you are breathing out water vapour is in the colder weather when you see a cloud in front of your face. This is what could be breathed in by someone else and is why you should be at least 2 metres away from other people so any possible transmission is reduced. Have a look how far the water vapour cloud moves from your mouth - it's quite a long way but over 2 metres it drops and by then the virus will have reached the ground. The reason the distance matters is that the vapour spreads out according to the inverse square law so if you double the distance the amount halve...

The government has plans for national emergencies and one of those is pandemic flu. For different emergencies there are plans drawn up about the process of handling the response. These plans are routinely tested with exercises to check readiness. However it's not much use if the tests for the plans are ignored and not acted upon. The foreword of the Flu Pandemic plan from the government reads: The prospect of a flu pandemic is one of the highest risks faced by the UK. Ensuring the country is fully prepared and able to respond quickly and effectively is a top priority for PHE and, of course, for the government. In addition the document also states: Given the uncertainty and the potential impact of influenza pandemic, pandemic influenza has been classified by the Cabinet Office as the number one threat to the UK population.  It's quite incredible that this risk has been identified as the number one threat to the UK population yet the current outbreak still has so many i...

The UK government changed tack this week and dramatically took measures that will massively impact the lives of the population. The paper produced by Imperial College seems to have been critical to this decision and there are some scary details in it. The final paragraph sums up in this way: A minimum policy for effective suppression is therefore population-wide social distancing combined with home isolation of cases and school and university closure.  The graph below shows the deaths over time with a peak in June. For the UK it predicts 510,000 deaths if no action is taken.  Interestingly it doesn't account for other deaths due to lack of health service capacity so there will be more on top of this where critically ill patients cannot get an intensive care bed say if they've had a heart attack or car crash. Another quote from the report: For an uncontrolled epidemic, we predict critical care bed capacity would be exceeded as early as the second week in Ap...

I can't really add anything to this but it's a very good paper on the numbers around Covid-19 https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca I've now done a blog about this