Foreign Perspectives

Ordinarily, construction jobs would be amongst those doing fairly well in a recession as whilst people may not be moving house quite so often, they will tend to improve and extend what they already have. However, as ever, this time it’s different.

Those house improvements aren’t happening because people don’t have the cash to do it. Cash is exactly what they need too as the builders can’t get credit from their suppliers so the whole system has made a sudden lurch from credit based to cash based which is painful for everyone.

Other signs up improvement would be in the computer field as websites and whatnot would tend to need created as the economy improves. That too seems a little flakey this time around.

Of course, all this assumes that the economy will experience an upturn and, no doubt, it will. The big question is: when?

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Stories like the 30k couple with 11 kids are appearing with increasing regularity in the press these days and, as usual, it’s collected the expected collection of comments expressing various degrees of indignation that these people feel that the state (ie us) should pay them to look after their kids full-time.

But, why would they bother to look for work if they were getting 30k coming in for doing nothing? Actually, it’s somewhat more than that as there’s the 15k to add on for the house and together that’s equivalent to a pre-tax salary of at least £60,000. Even with the best will in the world to find work, they’d need great qualifications to find a job paying anything like that level anywhere in the country. Thus, they can quite validly say to the benefits office that they are unable to find suitable work.

As most of these people say, it’s not their fault that they’re entitled to so much. Despite the comments that such cases always attract, they are quite correct once they’ve reached the situation of having double digit numbers of children. That’s not to say that it’s right that they should be entitled to so much though because it just isn’t. Where the benefits system falls down with people like this is that it’s designed for reasonable people who are expected to have the intention to behave in a reasonable way in regards to their family, looking for work, etc. Reasonable people don’t expect other people to pay for enormous families but there is no limitation in the rules that says “five is enough” or anything similar. Thus, in principle, you could have a family with, say, 20 kids pocketing over £100,000 and perhaps there is such a family out there.

How many would be “enough” children though? Would it be, say, three because that’s just over the average for the country? That seems a reasonable point to start reducing benefits for numbers above that. However, what do you do with someone like Miss Shepherd (the case mentioned above) who has had the children to three different fathers? You might think that would be difficult to deal with but it’s not really if you allocate the “reasonable number” of kids to each parent ie not “three per family” but “1 1/2 per parent” so you could quite easily allocate the allowances.

Whatever way such changes come in, as they surely must do, there are going to be screams from those benefiting from all that money now. It’s never going to be easy to get such people to change their attitudes because they’ve built up over such a long period but the “someone else can pay” attitude needs to get stamped out and soon.

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If they’re honest, most people would say “not much” whether it be for their holiday spending or for their business dealings.

The practical reason for that in most cases is that Forex margin management is something that can be quite a complex subject to get your head around but these days currencies are moving around so much that it’s becoming essential for many businesses. Although in normal times exchange rates are fairly stable, we’ve not been in “normal times” for a while now and we’ve seen the British pound going from almost $2 to $1.40 over the last couple of years.

Such wide variations in exchange rates generally lead to wider foreign exchange margins too which means that it’s more important than ever to at least get the margin you’re charged down and try to get some control of the exchange rate itself through the various forex products available these days.

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