Motorists urged to vote for their Golden Garage

As an increasing number of people are dissatisfied with the service they receive at the nation’s garages, a competition has been launched to find the best services.

Motor Codes is encouraging drivers to make their nominations at www.goldengarages.co.uk, which will help others ensure they choose a reliable service in the future.

Chris Mason, Motor Codes Director, commented: “Despite there being many very good UK garages, the public’s bad experiences with some has brought about a lack of trust.”

He noted that more than 6,200 garages across the UK are currently subscribed to Motor Codes, with customers having a 91% rate of satisfaction when visiting them.

Mr Mason added that the car repair sector has long had a bad reputation when it comes to costs.

Research from Motor Codes recently found that 45% of motorists feel they have been ripped off at a garage to the tune of around £2.4 billion.

Nobel Prize-winning economist and Columbia Business School professor, Joseph Stiglitz argues in this interview that we are headed for another collapse.  His arguments are sound and should be listened to.

If you do not feel like watching the full video, we’ve broken down the argument he offers during this interview into a few key bullet points:

• Stiglitz’s first point is that almost nothing has been done since the last disaster to reform the way Wall Street does business.  The practices that led to the recession are still allowed and so we can expect another disaster.
• We still have ‘too big to fail’ financial institutions which, because we will bail them out, are like one-sided bets:  if they make a risky investment and it pays off, they win, but if they lose, then it’s the taxpayers who lose because we’ll bail them out.  Moreover, these ‘too big to fail’ banks are now even worse competition for smaller banks since they get bailed out when they take bad risks, whereas a smaller bank at risk of failing cannot expect a government hand out.
• Our policy towards ‘too big to fail’ banks has forced us to slip into a moral hazard:  we’ll bale out everyone involved no matter what their responsibility for the problem.  So, the people running these institutions know that they can engage in risky behavior without having to take the repercussions personally.
• This most recent collapse wasn’t out of the ordinary:  it was not only predictable but it was predicted.  The banking industry would have taxpayers believe that the current recession is a “thousand year storm” but, in fact, it was the inevitable repercussion of bad banking practices and deregulation that had been causing damage to the global economic system for decades.
• The devastation was caused by our lax regulation which encouraged banks to engage in risky behavior.  Our regulation is still lax.
• In the short run, Stiglitz expects problems because the government hasn’t dealt with the last crisis effectively: we’re still seeing real estate problems and high risk speculation.
• In the longer term, in 3-7 years time, Stiglitz predicts that the incentives still  offered for excessive risk taking due to lax regulation will cause another collapse.
• What we need for effective reform is more transparency, better incentives for proper behavior, and the invocation of the Volker Rule to prevent conflicts of interest—no speculative trading by depository institutions.
• We also need to restrict high leverage trading (Credit Default Swaps).

The food stamp program used to be issued on actual stamps that could be redeemed at grocery stores for food items. However, the 21st century converted the stamps to special debit cards. Some people who rely on this kind of assistance are relieved that a debit card replaced the actual stamps. It is very difficult for people to see whether you are using a food stamp debit card or a regular bank debit card. Because of privacy laws, an average citizen such as your neighbor or a friend won’t know you’re on food stamps for unemployed unless you tell him or her.

The first food stamps were issued in 1939. Today, the government service is officially called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and is run through the U.S.

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I saw some news story that Tiger Woods was going to publicly apologize.  Why?  What did he do to me?  He is either good with his wife and kids or he is not.  The rest of us are irrelevant.  I suppose he could apologize to us for letting us down by under-performing his public  image, but in turn we should all apologize for feeding like emotional vultures on his family’s personal problems.   Besides, he has taken a $100 million a year hit for the damage he did to his own image.  I am willing to call things square between us.

Consumer credit problems are taking their toll on more and more people, according to bankruptcy numbers released recently.

The National Bankruptcy Research Center (NBRC) reported that bankruptcy filings in November 2009 were up 12 percent from November 2008 figures. November 2009 also marked the ninth straight month that the number went past 100,000, as more than 110,000 bankruptcy filings were tracked.

Comparing the first 11 months of 2009 to the same time period in 2008, filings were up by 32 percent and have gone beyond the 1.3-million mark.

“Nationwide, the filings to date amount to almost 11,500 filings per million households,” the NBRC report stated.

Furthermore, the center saw Chapter 13 filings go up by 12 percent, while Chapter 7 requests increased by 42 percent.

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