by The Investor
on October 10, 2009
More French office workers are dying by suicide every day. I don’t mean they’re wasting time in dead-end careers. They’re jumping out of windows.
The Guardian reports:
France Telecom, now Europe’s third-biggest phone company, has seen its brand name, Orange, suffer a public relations disaster as 24 workers have killed themselves in shocking circumstances in the last 18 months, with at least a dozen others making failed attempts to take their lives. Some staff were found dead in their workplace or left harrowing notes blaming the company for “management by terror” and bullying.
In the latest death, a 51-year-old threw himself off a bridge in the Alps after being moved from a back-office job to one in a call centre. Previously, a 32-year-old jumped from her office in front of colleagues at the end of the working day. Both left notes blaming unbearable working conditions and enforced job changes.
It’s possibly a statistical quirk. France Telecom employs 100,000 people, and unfortunately a percentage of any big number of people kill themselves annually, as The Independent points out.
But if the suicide notes are to be believed, then the news is even sadder and more frustrating.
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by The Investor
on October 8, 2009
Despite the vast size of the bond market, there are only a few user-friendly information sources about corporate bonds online, especially compared to all the noise about equities.
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by The Investor
on October 6, 2009
A quick reminder that the annual ISA contribution limit has gone up to £10,200 a year if you’re lucky enough to be 50 or over between now and April 5th 2010.
(Let’s be honest, eh? We’d all rather have the riches of the young!)
The rest of the populace will have to wait until April 6th 2010 for the new ISA limit to apply.
I’ve written in detail why all UK investors should try to exploit this new maximum ISA limit to the full, by investing in stocks for the long-term.
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by The Investor
on October 5, 2009
I am not sure I like David Cameron, the UK Conservative party leader and the likely next prime minister of Great Britain.
I’m more sure I don’t like his sidekick George Osborne.
Yet I do feel sorry for them.
I don’t pity them because of how the media paints them as gilded toffs (it seems accurate), or because they have to sit facing miserable Gordon Brown in Parliament (talk about a bad day at the office!)
Rather, I feel sorry for them because now they have successfully moved the issue of spending cuts onto the public agenda — despite the efforts of the obfuscating Labour front bench — they have set off on a path that will see them slashing expenditure both wasteful and not so wasteful, which they need to do if Britain is to remain solvent.
If they manage to get our economy back into balance without riots, they’ll deserve the knighthoods they’ve probably been writing in front of the names on their diaries since age 13 and 3/4.
But we should give them their knighthoods now.
Because if we wait ten years until the deed is done, they’ll be so hated by the forgetful and hard-pressed British public that all the duck moats in their backbencher’s mansions won’t save them from the mob.
This is Cameron’s curse — to do the right thing, to save the economy, and to be hated for it.
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