Flawed analysis

Some new research from Newcastle Business School leads to an obvious objection.

Accountancy reader Richard Slack surveyed mainstream financial analysts, and found that they pay no attention to the social and environmental disclosures in the annual reports of UK banks. This, he says, 'will trigger fears over capital market analysts’ understanding of the broader challenges facing business and their attitudes to issues such as climate change'.

Mr Slack said the study, conducted jointly with Newcastle University, left question marks over analysts’ attitudes to the environmental challenges facing business. “Social and environmental reporting was universally considered irrelevant and incapable of influencing a financial forecast,” he revealed. “There was total dismissal of the importance of environmental issues in taking decisions such as giving loans to potential polluters, for example, and I would suggest that analysts are not taking potential climate change and environmental impact seriously enough.”
Mr Slack continued: “Our findings show that analysts are dismissive of anything other than financial metrics, and they deem large sections of voluntary narrative reporting as useless or worse. Analysts have been shown up to be narrow in their approach, often formulaic and rules-driven, and highly unlikely to be a source of change in respect of social and environmental issues. Their approach should be a major concern to wider market participants given analysts’ crucial role in the information supply chain.”

While, there's little doubt that analysts can be too focused on narrow metrics of questionable relevance to anything resembling real market conditions, it might be unfair to blame them for ignoring environmental and CSR reporting. Repeated studies by academics and pressure groups have shown that such reporting efforts are often meaningless, and little more than greenwash. Obviously there's exceptions to that, but ignoring the stuff that runs closer to self-promotion than to disclosure is hardly damnable behaviour. Still, it's never a bad idea to look beyond the analysts for information...

Plagiarism of the robot pumpkin Daleks

With the research assistance of the wife (an actual doctor of robotics and such), I've uncovered a quite shocking case of academic plagiarism.

The University of Essex is flaunting its creation of what can only be described as a robotic pumpkin Dalek, to be formally revealed today on that important outlet for research dissemination, the Richard and Judy show.

But the robo-wrangling missus has a nose for prior art, and has called shenanigans! There's this from a year ago on Crafty Crafty. Even more shockingly, the original research dates from even earlier, as per this posting on Flickr -


Back to your robot laboratories, so-called researchers of Essex, and get on with the important work of meddling with things with which man should not meddle with. And to the rest of you, happy Halloween.

[photos copyright University of Essex; 'oskay']

Bish bash HBOS

A worrying time for my home town of Halifax, with a significant number of local jobs sure to disappear in the wake of Lloyds' white knight takeover of HBOS. Exact numbers have yet to be announced, but I'd guess at least a thousand in the town - maybe more.

Lloyds has said that preserving jobs in Scotland will be a priority - job losses there were also small when the Halifax acquired the Bank of Scotland back in 2001, with most of the limited cutting then done at lower levels, and Edinburgh also had the honour of hosting the head office at the BoS's historic HQ on the Mound. So saving jobs there seems fair enough - the Guardian reports that the group has 6,459 employees in Edinburgh, a fairly significant chunk of well-paid employment in a city of 450,000.

But what's worrying is that nothing's been said about jobs in the Halifax' eponymous home. HBOS also employs around 6,500 in and around Halifax - and this is a town of just 90,000, with far fewer other major industries than the Scottish capital.

There are obvious political motives for favouring Scotland, which will put Labour into even more disfavour locally. Fair enough, most will say.

But the potential economic impact on the town and the surrounding area is likely to be terrible. The presence of the bank here - its head office until the BoS takeover and, after, the base of the expanded retail operations - has been the main factor in protecting the town from the worst of the industrial decline and saved it from being quite as bad as, say, Burnley. Any major reduction of HBOS employment would, alongside the general downturn, easily make it as bad as, say, Barnsley when the mines were closed. Not a happy prospect.

It might not be that bad, of course. There's inevitably going to be swingeing cuts at the common operations of the two merged groups, but it's a question of deciding how that's going to be split between Lloyds and HBOS. I'm less familiar with Lloyds' operations, but I'd guess the bulk of their operations are in London. It might then be an attractive option for them to cut jobs in that more expensive employment market, and keep them in the more cost-effective West Riding.

But even if that happens, I'd guess that in Halifax they'll be cutting from the top; and in London, from the bottom. Fewer well-paid, professional jobs here in finance, IT, management and so forth, but we'll likely still get the minimum-wage call centre and data input end. Not a great deal.

More generally, it's been fun to see the scrabbling for scapegoats to blame for the deeply shite state of the banking markets, and the faux outrage over the antics of the short-sellers and speculators who we are shocked (shocked!) to find are inclined towards amoral profit-seeking based on some rather unrealistic financial models. At least, I hope it's faux - surely no one who's been keeping the vaguest of eyes on the financial markets and the economic orthodoxy can honestly be remotely surprised?

As per the title of this blog (borrowed from Galbraith, of course), it looks like reality has caught up with its would-be escapees.

The Invention of Yorkshireness

Congratulations to William Marshall, curmudgeonly columnist on the Halifax Evening Courier, on securing a grant to research a topic close to my heart - 'The Invention of Yorkshireness: Yorkshire cultural identities 1850-1914'.

The Yorkshire Post quotes Marshall on that noble creed 'See all, hear all, say nowt; eat all, drink all, pay nowt' -
"It's interesting to discover the ways in which Yorkshire people have come to define themselves like this.
"One area of source material I've been looking at is picture postcards from the early 1900s. There's a series of "Yorkshire Sayings" which depict pot-bellied farmers dispensing such advice as a mother telling her daughter to only marry for money or a father telling his son never to do anything for 'nowt'.
"The thing is, these stereotypes actually seem to have been taken up by Yorkshire people themselves.
"They seemed to relish this idea of being quite stubborn and selfish – many of these postcards were bought by Yorkshire-folk and sent to other people within the county, so this negative self-image was not only acceptable to them but perpetuated by them."

More in the Courier itself, although that paper does show some distressing regional stereotyping in its headline: Our William is given an 'Ey oop' award.

On a related subject, I'm quite pleased with this panoramic pic I did of Halifax as seen from Beacon Hill -

Click through for full-size, to admire the town's geographic and architectural glories - given the financial news of the past few days, it could be a last chance to see the HBOS head office before they put the shutters up...