Some kind of floating hotel praxis

Aieeee!   That sound of torment is my anguished cry as am forced to return to blogging chores. I had been hoping for leniency, but alas for me, and for you, gentle reader, I am driven by the agency of pointy sticks back to the uncomfy desk, for to witter on in the empty echoing vastness of the blogosphere.  Ahem.  All of which is a frankly silly way of saying that I have been on holiday and I've got better things to do on my holiday than blog blog blogitty blog.  Looking out the window for example.  Or reading a damn fine book.  

Both looking and reading were occasioned by traveling from Bergen up and round the coast of Norway, to Kirkenes on the Russian Border. 

I travelled by Hurtigruten, (or Hurttigrutimurtiturtigrun, obviously) which was great, apart from the fact that me and my mate were the youngest people on the boat by about 30 years.  It must be single party babes week on the Hurtigruten this week, not last.  Damn.  Anyway here is a picture of wot I saw.

  

Drifting serenely from fjord to fjord while watching the awesome scenery roll past is an excellent way to spend time.  It also leaves plenty of time for reading, so it was lucky that I brought a good book.  A great book in fact.  

Now, I know that Mr S Langridge, not of London Town, believes that Neal Stephenson jumped the shark the moment he finished In The Beginning Was The Command Line (though he may concede Snow Crash if he's in a good mood or drunk) but I disagree.  I liked Cryptonomicon.  I loved the Baroque Cycle, all three and half thousand bastard, brilliant, long hand scribed pages of it.  I had the same feeling I got reading Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, like someone somewhere knew me and said, 'let's write a book for this bloke.'  I guess I'm interested in many of the same things as Stephenson; science, philosophy, history and fucking great spaceships / sword fights, depending on when in history you find yourself.  Anyway, his new tome (and it is a Tome) is called Ananthem, (a deliberate cross between Anthem and Anathema, though I found the clever clever linguistic mash-ups the least convincing thing about the book) and its ace.  It is by no means flawless, but it creates an utterly convincing and internally consistent world, a task that has proved beyond JK Rowling for example.  

Anyway, on the world on which Anantham is set, society has evolved into two camps. First is the saecular world, which isn't a million miles away from the society we live in now. The second part is made up of the Avout.  Now, the Avout are like monks and nuns in some ways, they live in monastery type institutions and dress in robes, but rather than being religious in nature they are made up of scientists and philosophers.  They live sequestered away in their 'concents', only venturing out into the saecular world once every ten, hundred or thousand years, and they take the long view.  In one dazzling passage, the narrator, a young Avout called Erasmas, describes the location of his concent.  He tells how it can be found down river from a natural crossing point and that sometimes there is only an inn or a gas station by the crossing, though occasionally that grows into a town or a city and skyscrapers overlook the concent, but such things pass and fall, and forests surround it, only for the process to begin again.  These are people who view nuclear winters as the kinds of things that roll round once in a while.  I found this juxtaposition of two views of time absolutely spellbinding. It has wonderful consequences in the story too.  When an avout leaves the concent, he is uncertain if he (or she) will be picked up in a horse and carriage or in a helicopter.  Both technologies (or praxis, as they call it) come and go and go and come.  

Couple of other things, then I'll shut up about it for now.  First, characters from our intellectual history crop up in this world, but under different names, and working them out is good fun if you're as sad as me. Secondly, a couple of new words really, really work.  'Plane', for example, meaning to destroy someone in an argument ("I got talking to Grant about philosophy and he totally planed me"), and even better, bulshytt:

Bulshytt: (1) In Fluccish of the late Praxic Age and early Reconstitution, a derogatory term for false speech in general, esp. knowing and deliberate falsehood or obfuscation. (2) In Orth, a more technical and clinical term denoting speech (typically but not necessarily commercial or political) that employs euphemism, convenient vagueness, numbing repetition, and other such rhetorical subterfuges to create the impression that something has been said. (3) According to the Knights of Saunt Halikaarn, a radical order of the 2nd Millennium A.R., all speech and writings of the ancient Sphenics; the Mystagogues of the Old Mathic Age; Praxic Age commercial and political institutions; and, since the Reconstitution, anyone they deemed to have been infected by Procian thinking. …

Procian thinking is his way or describing nominalist philosophy, or more extremely and cruelly, any kind of post-modern mumbo jumbo.  

It is a word I intend to make a trusty friend.   

Final point here.  The concents are beautiful places, where people study and teach and research with no other purpose than tending to the flame of knowledge.  They grow their own food and make beer and wine.  They date and marry and live full lives.  Now, I know this might mark me out as a bit of a weirdo, but I can kind of see the appeal...

Three Word Poem

America.  Fuck yeah.

Better Angels

So we come to it at last, the great battle of our age.  I believe that just about everything that could be written about the US elections has been written (somewhere there are monkeys with typewriters about to lose their jobs) but I'd just like to chuck in a final few observations.

First up, why should I, as an Englishman in Scotland, give two hoots about whoever the damn Yankees elect to strut around in front of old glory for the next four years? The first answer to this is about power, and the second more interesting answer is about legacy and philosophy and dreams.  The first answer is obvious, so its the second one I want to dwell on here for a moment.

It was F Scott Fitzgerald that called the United States the 'last and greatest of human dreams.' America is the expression of some of the finest impulses and traditions that have shaped my own country and my own beliefs.  It is ultimately an enlightenment project, an attempt to create a country and system of Government based on reason, self determination and, to quote one of the greats, government of the people, by the people and for the people.  While its self conscious striving towards this ideal has been tarnished by some horrific acts, those acts are no different than those of every other industrialised country, but we hold America to a different standard.  I'm not looking to downplay its crimes here, just to point out that the US suffers in comparison with its flighty rhetoric, but at least it has the rhetoric and it lives up to it more often than I can quite credit  It is the best, bravest and most important attempt to make the idea of democracy and freedom stick, which is why its actions and elections are so important.  If the yanks can't make this work, it probably can't be done.  The American Caesar, the man to break the republic and establish a tyranny of fire and glory is always closer than we care to think.

The ideas that animated the founding fathers and still course though America today are ideas that spring from my country, or counties in fact.  It was the infringement of ancient English liberties that so enraged the colonists.  It was said in the build up to the English Civil War that 'magna carta is such a fellow that he will have no sovereign'.  That was as true in the fields of Virginia was it was in the downs of Sussex.  In fact, it could be said that the American Revolution was a replay of the English Civil War (minus some of the religious headbanging) and the same side won.  The US is the finest expression of the better angels of the English political nature.  The Scots shaped it too.  The extraordinary flowering of the Scottish enlightenment forged ideas that became the tools of the craft of Constitution building in the hands of Jefferson and Adams.  Hume and Adam Smith's thoughts on the nature of man and the best form of government to manage him directly inspired the founding fathers.  In other words, the project of America is the project of all of us who see ourselves in the enlightenment tradition, especially if we are at all proud of what the sons and daughters our own lands contributed towards it.

My next observation is a bit less pompous.  This election has been so much fun.  I'm going to miss it.  I've really enjoyed the musings of Michael Tomasky and Oliver Burkeman at the Grouniad, and Fivethirtyeight's been brilliant. If there's a rookie of the years for this election its surely Nate Silver (though a certain Mr B Obama might run him close.)  The Economist's multi coloured bloggers at Democracy in America have great too (and funnier than I ever expected.)

Finally, and for the first time in a long time, I feel like we are on the threshold of something glorious in the election of Obama.  America needs to dream itself up again and he can do it. Something extraordinary is happening.  He'll let us down, the world is a hard and unforgiving place, the challenges he faces are colossal, and he's just a bloke, but for a glorious moment here I feel like I can believe in a political system, believe like I feel I should be able to.  

Live up to yourself, America.  There are some of us out here that share something deep in our souls with what you can be.  Be true.

Swivel eyed nutjob revisited

Hmmm.  Just been having a little trawl round the website of the 'Christmas is the work of Druids at Stonehenge' loony as advertised in my previous post, and in amongst the ravings about the Illuminati and inane babble about freemasonry is a nice little section of holocaust denial.  

Not so funny any more.  In fact, Lorraine Day, M.D., fuck you.  

Soul Man, and Swivel Eyed Nutjob.

Here's something from wikipedia that caught my eye (my emphasis):

All Saints' Day (All Hallows Day) became fixed on November 1 in 835, and All Souls' Day on November 2, circa 998. On All Souls' Eve, families stayed up late, and little "soul cakes" were eaten by everyone. At the stroke of midnight there was solemn silence among households, which had candles burning in every room to guide the souls back to visit their earthly homes, and a glass of wine on the table to refresh them. The tradition continued in areas of northern England as late as the 1930s, with children going from door-to-door "souling" (i.e., singing songs) for cakes or money. The English Reformation in the 16th century de-emphasised holidays like All Hallows Day or All Souls Day and their associated eve.

I grew up in the North of England, and I used to do that.  Didn't call it souling right enough, but the kids where I grew up used to go from house to house on Halloween and sing songs for sweets or cakes.  Seems a somehow nicer tradition than the Yank import of trick or treating.  Mind you, the way I sing I expect that the neighbours would have preferred a firework through the letter box.  

Its somehow reassuring that I was part of such an ancient tradition, saddening that I seem to have been the last generation to do it (pretty sure it's stopped where I grew up) and slightly eerie that what seemed like fun for sweets, where the worst part was getting hot inside a plastic ghoul mask, was the remnant of a blurring of the walls between living and dead.  

Meanwhile, while looking for an article about the superposition of Christian meaning onto ancient festivals of one kind or another, I came across this marvellous article.  Its a treat.  It starts of relatively soberly, pointing out that Christmas has no more to do with Jesus H Christ than it does with the family Ness, but then it proposes banning Christmas.  A bit harsh, and I think it focuses too much on fertile crescent religions, rather than Northern European ones, but fair enough if you are a real Puritan.   

It goes on.  Easter is the work of Ishtar and ancient Babylonian false messiahs (it doesn't seem to have occurred to the author that the replication of the young-god-dead-on-a-tree-and-resurrected meme might have some some significance), Halloween (oh yes) is for SATANISTS and WITCHES and is the same festival where DRUIDS used to perform human sacrifices on the LIVING ROCK of STONE 'ENGE!  The writer then descends in comedy gold, sorry, total swivel eyed lunacy, by claiming the Bilderberg group (BONG!) sacrifice humans (BONG!) in a wicker animal (Edward Woodward BONG!) at Bohemian Grove. (TRIPLE BONG ROLLOVER!)

God, I love the internet.

Things we lost in the fire

While flogging my guts out for the Man today (and further apologies to Sil, whom I was unable to quiz on what 'relaxed and casual' for Top Gear might look like due to the Man's incessant beating of the drum in the rowing deck of the galley in which I must toil) I fell to wondering.  and I wondered this:

In the forthcoming / already here recession, what's going to vanish that I won't miss? Hell, what will I be glad to see the back of?

Here's the beginnings of a list.  Add to it if you can bothered, and the recession doesn't stop you mucking about when you too should be toiling in the pit.

• Shops selling what I can only call girly pish.  You know, cards with bows on them for no reason and that kind of thing.  Okay in small does, but its got way out of hand. 
• 'Style wine'.  I was in a proper pub the other day and the wine list mentioned a Gewurtztraminer, a nice drop right enough, but it was a described as a style wine.  Just.  Fuck.  Off.
• Organic tapas.  Actually, tapas outside Spain point blank.
• Bottled lager in pubs that sell pints
• Pseudo science, especially in adverts for beauty products.  'Vitalised with pro-oxy-tetra-lava-kittens.'  Well, thank fuck for that.
• 'Gen Y' being feted in the media for being high maintenance and demanding.  No kids, it is all our lot to suffer.  
• The laissez faire neo-liberal consensus.  And that's from an Economist subscriber.
• The Labour party being the Tory party
• Paris Hilton and her ilk.  Okay, I actually expect that as times grow dark we may well seek to distract ourselves with bread and circuses even more, but for  a moment I want to imagine a society of Woody Guthrie songs and the dignity of labour
• The Republican Party in its current odorous and vile incarnation.  John, John, you used to be a principled bastard.  A rock ribbed conservative bastard, but now?  My God man, how can you sleep at night?

Anyway, you get the idea.  Add away in the comments if anyone reads this!

One other note - if, and its still an if, the powers be cursed, Barack Obama wins the election I intend to have a Thanksgiving party on the nearest weekend to, er, Thanksgiving, so if anyone knows a recipe for Pumpkin Pie, or indeed knows what Pumpkin Pie is, let me know.  Anyone who knows me and wants to come sing out, and I might even do it rather than just talk about it.

Royal Bank of Socialism

According to the This is Money website, the new CEO of RBS, one Stephen Hester, who seems to be as smart as a tree full of owls, laid out a six point plan for RBS when he was asked by the Treasury during a snap interview during the bailout negotiations. His plan is a sensible one, but its based on the tacit assumption that idea of Government running a bank is Bad Idea, and that banks should get back to their own commercial ways asap.  

Now, I'm not so sure that the idea of HM Government running a large chunk of the UK banking system is such a bad idea.  Think of it as a return to the old mixed economy, but with a different idea of what the commanding heights of the economy are.  Rather than the state owning utilities and railways under this model, (though there's an idea now I mention it - not sure that pissing off that awful old Trot Bob Crow is a good reason to keep the current totally fucked railway arrangement) the state owns big chunks of banks.  Why?  Well, here is St Andrew of Wishful Thinking's own plan, if the Treasury would just like to give me a call...

1. The Bank has a role to moderate the economic cycle.  Owning a huge chunk of the capacity to lend would be a great way to counter act the natural cycle of capitalism, that is the tendency of the current system to lend too much during bubbles and not enough during downturns, making both worse.  HM Royal Bank of Sod-Off-Alan-Greenspan could help balance that

2.  The new Bank would play a long term support role for UK Manufacturing.  I don't mean a cossetting role here, that insulates companies so when the cull comes it's worse (a la British Leyland) but a bank who's job it is to nurture, grow and support the actual, real, wealth generating economy.  The idea is to support good business that might be having a few bad quarters.  It won't be easy to find the line between sensible support and market distorting, unsustainable lending, but banks are full of smart people.  They'll find it.  Incidentally, this idea is supported by that notorious hippy journal, the Financial Times.

3.  Support for strategic investments for the UK.  I'm thinking of things like renewable energy, fuel cells, carbon capture, coastal defence, nanotechnology.  I'm sure you could add to the list.  Crucially, these are areas which we expect to make money - which is why we want a Bank to back them, not HMG directly - but they might not make money for years.  In other words, the market won't solve these problems unless its given a hell of a shove.  Enter the Royal Bank of Shoving.

4.  Get shut of banking assets outside the UK that don't support the core mission.  So, in terms of the 'City' bits, keep financing, payments and risk management, but bollocks to an Indian or US Branch network.  These assets don't matter to the UK taxpayer, so sell them to an organisation that will grow them.

5.  Some banking products are downright usurious and vile.  I'm thinking of store cards at 25% APR.  Undercut them.  Make it easy - like three clicks easy - to move your debts to the Royal Bank of Support People.  This is no soft option, if you as a customer take the piss then its curtains for you, but this could form part of a programme of proper financial and, hell, even counselling support to get people back on the straight and narrow

6.  Finally, act as a bank for rural, isolated or deprived areas that the commercial banks can't justify putting a branch in.  This includes shitty bits of the UK, where a branch designed to help rebuild the area might help.

The key point with all of this, is that the New Bank would still be a commercial organisation, run by the same hard nosed commercial bastards it is now, but rather than just focusing on making money, it would have a grander mission.  In The Corporation, Joel Bakan argues that if a person acted like a business in focusing on the acquisition of money and never mind the consequences, we'd call them a psychopath and lock them up.  (Read the book, by the way, its brilliant).  What I'm advocating here is a corporation with a sense of its wider responsibilities as a citizen.  It still has to make money, but that's not all it should do.  Capitalism with a human face if you like.

And to all those who say that its not the business of Governments to run banks and that the market always knows best:  look around.  We tried that, and it really, really didn't work.  

So foul and fair a day I have not seen

A mere week has passed since last I came this way, and quite a lot has happened.  My fearful feelings of panic last Monday bore horrid fruit; the Dow fell further in a week than it ever did in 1929, inter Bank markets went from bad to simply gone away, Lehman's toxic waste spilled out across the landscape at eight cents in the dollar and serious newspapers carried headlines like 'at the edge of the Abyss.'  

I'm not entirely sure that Gordon Brown and his faithful Sancho Alistair have ridden up on white horses and saved us, but they have taken bold, decisive action, and for this moment at least our chances look better than they have in a week.  

Part of the Government's plan of course is the effective nationalisation of most of the big banks, and it is part of that that I want to dwell on.  Specifically, I'd like to talk about the Tragedie of Frederick Goodwin.  

Now Sir Fred 'the Shred' Goodwin is not a figure that attracts much sympathy today.  He is the erstwhile Chief Executive of RBS, and is the first and the most high profile banking exec to take the pearl handled revolver into a quiet room and be a good chap.  Nonetheless, there is something of the genuinely tragic in the story, tragic in the Shakespearean sense.  Here is a man who achieved great, astonishing things and was brought low by the very impulses that drove him to succeed.  A flawed, brilliant man, undone by an unescapable twist in his personality.  Sounds like tragedy to me. 

Goodwin is a Paisley grammar school boy, which puts him in immediate contrast to a Scottish banking environment dominated by the clubbable, networked scions of Edinburgh's public schools.  He is in other words an outsider, who rose to his position through a mixture of ambition, luck and a fierce first class intellect.  This is a man who was a partner at Touche Ross at 28 - an achievement that takes others a career to achieve, if they achieve it at all.  At 32 he ran a department of a thousand souls unpicking the bones of the BCCI fraud, an achievement that made his name.  Make no mistake, he may be a cantankerous bastard, who never suffers fools, but he is a genuinely brilliant man.

Up and up he went, chief exec of RBS in his late thirties.  Half a dozen years later it was the second biggest bank in the world, and by some measures the thirteenth biggest company on the face of the earth.  Goodwin did this in a number of ways.  He demanded results and got them.  His mastery of the detail (all those years as a forensic accountant) kept the rest of the bank at a pitch of excellence:  'What would Fred think of this?"  "Hmmm.  Wouldn't buy it.'  'Agree.  Do it again.'  And he bought NatWest.  

Nat West was three times RBS's size.  It was also subject to a take over bid by RBS's great rival the Bank of Scotland.  In a mixture of courage, astonishing self belief and sheer cold eyed aggression Fred snatched NatWest from BoS (which consoled itself in the arms of Halifax, which also ended badly).  Meanwhile, the integration of NatWest and RBS was run so well Harvard Business School wrote a case study about called 'Masters of Integration.'

RBS just grew and grew.  It broke its own profit records every year.  Further acquisitions followed, in the US, in China, in the UK.  In the spring of last year Fred Goodwin had built a machine that seemed capable of anything.  No matter what was thrown at it, analysts reports, city sneering, deals on three continents, it just grew stronger and badder and bigger.  It was with this machine under his hand that he turned to what was to be his finest, valedictory moment.  

The story was beguilingly similarly to the Natwest takeover.  Barclays, which was seen as somehow a softer, weaker bank than RBS, was negotiating what seemed to be a cosy merger with the huge, multinational Dutch conglomerate ABN Amro.  ABN Amro was a different beast to NatWest through.  No stuffy, sloppy, fat English aristo here.  No, ABN operated in 54 countries.  It had a hundred thousand people.  It was worth over 40 billion pounds.  No one had ever attempted a hostile take over of such a beast before.  The only thing vaguely comparable was the AOL / TimeWarner deal, and that was based on inflated dotcom bubble valuations and it was friendly.  AOL wasn't a monster of complexity a world across and three hundred years deep.  ABN was.

Fred went for ABN like he'd gone for NatWest.  This time he involved other banks in his posse, Fortis of the low countries and Santandar of Spain.  They outbid Barclays (again its the self belief, vision, sheer agression) and stuck to it.  They stuck to it when ABN sold its US arm, La Salle, which was half the reason RBS wanted it, to Bank of America.  They stuck to it through the summer when the credit crunch darkened the horizon and common sense said to lower the bid.  No though.  He wouldn't back down.  Not in the teeth of the most ferocious criticism; never back down.

RBS and its sidekicks horribly overbid for ABN to win the deal.  They paid £45 billion in cash money, which was 17 times the book value of the bank.  In other words, thats 17 times value of ABNs assets if the bank was to be liquidated.  In the good times this would have ben amazingly overpriced, but perhaps just, just, justifiable given the benefits of the ABN deal to RBS and Goodwin's track record of integration, but in the bad times it was madness.  And when the deal was signed the bad times were very clearly round the corner.  No one expected them to be this bad though.

RBS won ABN and with it set the seeds of its own destruction and that of Goodwin as well.  Times grew tighter.  RBS had to run the biggest rights issue in European history, asking shareholders for £12 billion to repair the ravaged balance sheet.  Goodwin got it, but after paying cash for ABN and repeatedly denying that RBS planned a rights issue, the writing was on the wall.  A tiny shift had taken place, in which his brilliant mind and subtle strategic sense had been somehow overwhelmed by the will to win, by the desire to beat Barclays flat, by his own crushing ego.  Confidence had become arrogance, aggression hostility, self belief had tipped into overwhelming ego.  

From then on in it was chronicle of a death foretold.  The financial crisis has laid bare the faults of the ABN deal in dreadful detail, and its architect has been overthrown.   Destiny had become hubris, and after hubris, Nemesis.

"He's worth no more

They say he parted well, and paid his score

And so God be with him!  Here comes newer comfort."

And now, something funny

That's enough gloom. This brilliant SNL sketch nails the VP debate. Ah, shucks, thank God for Tina Fey.

Panic on the streets of London

Its Monday, it must be a meltdown.  I was going to open tonight by suggesting that matters would be immeasurably improved if every stock and bond trader on earth had to wait 24 hours and have a really nice calming cup of tea between receiving a piece of information and making a trade.  The idea here being that a little cooling off period might help forestall the storm-fronts of fear (or, in the olden days, irrational exuberance) that pass through the markets.  Then I stopped and thought about it, and realised that the bastards have had all weekend to take the dog for a walk and drink calming cups of tea, and what to they do?  Come into work on Monday morning and TOTALLY FREAK OUT.  

Unless you've been doing something interesting today, rather than sitting at work and watching the FTSE attempt to tunnel straight to hell like the rest of us, you'll realise that stock markets have gone down.  A lot.  There are couple of things about this that make me properly nervous.  

The first is that they've had all weekend to be happy that the Paulson plan to save the world has passed Congress, and furthermore all of Congress has buggered off to campaign for their cushy jobs and can't do any more mischief.  Instead, our old mate the market is now worrying that the bailout isn't big enough (to put the bailout in scale, if they divided it up between the entire population of Great London it would give everyone $93,000 - so it ain't small), and that the US treasury can't administer it.  Seeing as the US Government under the Disgrace can't administer their way out of a paper bag, they may have a point there.  Still, there must be some competent people left.  Please?

There's also been more bad news.  Fortis, a huge Dutch / Belgian bank that no one had heard of has been part nationalised and broken up.  Another huge German financial institution that no one has heard of is also boned.  Iceland appears to be headed back to the dark ages, which is bad news for Iceland because that's not a country where I'd choose to sit out a dark age (I'd pick Italy, I reckon) and also bad news for the rest of us, because last time they ran out of land and stuff they kicked off in a major way.  Wouldn't want to be on Lindisfarne right now, that's all I'm saying.  Meanwhile the German government is guaranteeing all deposits, except it isn't, but its now too late and everyone else is guaranteeing things in a mad beggar-thy-neighbour race to the bottom.

But even after that catalogue of doom, there is another reason I'm a bit nervous.  Its this: lots of bad things are happening, but I'm not sure that they explain the fact that the FTSE has had its biggest ever one day fall, and the Dow is also gyrating like a drunk stripper, but with less class.  In fact I don't think anything really explains the hysterical falls in the markets, and that's what worries me.  Panic is setting in.  Not fear, or horror, or dread at loosing your shirt on a swop deal with Cuban penny shares, but actual, stone cold, panic.

Now panic is irrational, which means that no rational act by Government or God almighty or Warren Buffet can defuse it.  It replaces reason, annihilates thought.  Its is extreme and overpowering.  The Greeks thought it was caused by the God Pan himself, and they also thought that those whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad.

(Incidentally, the thought of that Greek sense of panic - a sudden irrational, overpowering fear overcoming someone in a lonely spot, is a deeply chilling thought.)

Anyway, my point is this - if the markets are panicking, then this is the moment it moves utterly out of control.  If it continues to drop, we'll get closer to the capitulation moment, which is sort of the event horizon for financial Armageddon.  Its the moment when traders think, 'ah fuck it' and sell everything no matter what the price.  Chaos ensues.

Veep veep! says Noddy

Mr R. Timothy Jonez, of Little Daneland in the Marsh, Oxfordshire, asks:

"Are you going to cover the veep debate?  Will it be triumph for the common women who can see Russia from her house, or will Joe Biden rip of Neil Kinnock again?"

The short answer, is not really, because I'm going to the pub, but in the few moments I have before I go and talk to people face to face (shudder) here's my tuppence worth.

- Biden is on a very sticky wicket indeed.  If Palin even manages to speak in vaguely coherent sentences, it will be judged a great triumph by a fawning media and she'll be hailed as the next Lincoln.  Pray I'm wrong

- Secondly, her whole appeal is based on the media being full of elites who hate her not blinking and her guns / forcing teenagers into loveless marriages / death from above shtick.  So, if she does badly - that's the media's fault.  Real folks know that its east coast elites up to their usual tricks. (Incidentally, I wish America really did have a liberal media.  The world might be less fucked.  I also hate the way conservatives have the whole thing in their pocket and then still complain.  Bastards)

- Hardly anyone will base their vote on VP anyway.  When was the last time you voted in the UK based on the likely choice for Home Secretary?  And the Home Secretary has , y'know, powers and things.  He or she isn't a heartbeat away from being the most powerful creature on the Earth though, in fairness.

- If they do vote on veep choice, they'll only go to Palin.  There's not a soul alive who would vote for Biden but not Barack.

- Biden really, really knows his shit. But he's an old gasbag, so if he gasbags, Palin can play the 'ickle wickle girlie card and win.  

- An incompetent, mad, inarticulate women on the GOP ticket is not doing the the great Cause of Women in Rock, sorry, Government a great deal of good.  We're not in  a place where we can see this just as being about two people, so all its seen through the lens of her gender, which is very annoying, both because we're talking about her gender, not her insane policies, and secondly, that this is still an issue.  Fuck's sake, world, sort it out.

- This might be rope a dope. She might have only been pretending to be some one who didn't speak English and might become H L Mencken on stage, and skin ol' Gasbag Joe alive.  Unlikely, but hey.

- She has a special move of turning everything into folksy stories.  This plays well in small towns, but Vladimir "Stone Cold" Putin doesn't care about folksy stories.  She shoots moose? Putin shoots bears.  Incidentally, if she can see Russia, Russia can see into her.  I have a vision of Putin's great lidless eye, wreathed in flame, atop the Kremlin, his gaze fixed upon Wasilla, Alaska.  "I see you.  I see you."

- PLEASE PLEASE WIN, JOE.  Don't be an arse.

By the time anyone reads this its likely to be over.  She can't win?  Can she?  

Winter is coming

Its cold in Edinburgh today, that kind of clear autumn cold that rings through the air like a bell. At this time of year, I'm reminded of something Dad always says as autumn closes in;  'the first breath of winter's chill is on the night'.  I'd hoped to track down the origin of this rather wonderful line, but google has let me down and I remain in the dark.  I'll have to ask the old boy himself.

I did however find this brilliant, but rather miserable poem by recent GPSOE favourite, A. E. Housman (hey, we were in Shropshire for the industrial revolution thing, which led to a discussion about how little those of us who were present know of 'a Shropshire lad').

Twice  week the winter through

Here I stood to keep the goal;

Football then was fighting sorrow

For the young man's soul

Now in Maytime to the wicket

Out I march with bat and pad;

See the son of grief at cricket

Trying to be glad

Try I will: no harm in trying:

Wonder 'tis how little mirth

Keeps the bones of man from lying

On the bed of earth

Just because its melancholy, doesn't mean it isn't true.  The Buddha recognised three things that characterise this world (the dharma seals).  They are: impermanence, no-self, and sorrow.  

So it goes.

Why Now; and MechaHillary

In the midst of last night's screed about the credit crunch, whores, coke, Yale, Minehead and semi demonic beings neither living nor dead, I fell to a-thinkin, which is never a good idea.  And my though was this: why now?  Why didn't the whole ridiculous, marvellous dance continue on and on?  Was it some kind of financial gravity that pulled us all to earth?  Did some derivative apple fall on Ben Bernanke's head?  Or to put it another way - if the whole thing was a confidence trick based on magic beans, why did it grind to a halt when it did?  I mean, we can nail the start of this thing to a particular day - the ninth of August 2007.

The truth of the matter is that I don't know, but I'm on the internet and so therefore will posit a theory which may or may not contain a grain of the eternal.  Anyway, this is how science works as Stuart and Karl Popper both assure me.

My theory is that it was driven by two main factors.  They are that a load of the cheapo deals that friend Cletus had taken out to buy his shack come to an end, and the second is the rise of commodity prices.

Mortgages deals first.  One of the more underhand tricks used by mortgages brokers in the US to get Cletus and his ilk (y'know, decent working people, young families, older folks who'd dreamed of owning their home, mugs like that) to buy, was to offer low low low introductory rates. Not low like you get in the UK, where the intro is 4% and the real rate 6%, but deals where when the intro wears off the repayments go up by between 60 and 150%.

Woah.  

Now I don't know about you, but if my mortgages payment went up by 150% I'd be eating out of a tin can.  These evil mortgages are called ARM, and we all of us are in ARMs way.  Sorry.  Anyway, the full sorry saga is in the previous link, which goes to that notorious hand wringing liberal journal, business week.  The other thing I'd point out is the date of the article - September 2006.  Bear mind as well, that even for people who had normal mortgages interest rates went up from 1% (which is better than free money because its below the rate of inflation!) to 5.35% between 04 and 06.

As business week reports, people whose mortgages are going up start to default, poisioning the well that feeds the magic beans.  Winter is coming.

Thing two is that around about this point, the price of stuff (or commodities, as they call it in financial circles) which had been going up for a bit, started to bite.  Inflation started to creep up.  Oil went up.  People whose budgets were based on a historical view of oil at $20 a barrel were looking down the barrel (sorry again) of $70 or $80.  There's less money to go round baby, let's stick the keys through the bank's letterbox and light out for the border.  Or go and stay at Mom's.

Part of this price rise was driven by ferocious demand from the Chinese.  Here is a picture of Chinese ships queuing up outside the coal port of Newcastle in Australia.  That's a lot of demand.  And part is the old ghost at the table, peak oil.

Anyway, that's my theory - mortgages got harder to repay and people bailed on 'em. This is down to increases in prices and stupid, stupid deals.  Fuck me, I'm brilliant.

But why the tenth?  That's the day it went public, when BNP Parabis, a big old French bank said they couldn't value their CDO's 'n' shit, because no one was buying or selling them anymore.  The magic had worn off the beans.  Before then, it had been boiling away for a bit.  A subprime lender had filed for bankruptcy.  The Fed said they thought the whole thing might cost the then large sum of $100bn.  Borrowing was hard to come by.  The music hadn't stopped, but it was going seriously out of tune, and yet while it was still playing people were still dancing.

MechaHillary

This excellent piece in Salon reflects on the feelings of a serious feminist about the Sarah Palin broohaha.  Now, I am not serious, but I am a little bit of a feminist, insofar as I think people should be judged on their merits, so I've got a refinement to the plan to offer.  Rather than Hillary Clinton stopping Palin, we need MechaHillary.  You know it makes sense.

Aaaaaalborg

The Danish Pepys might be distressed to learn that while the Wolves still ride high, Danish side Aalborg have been beaten tonight by Manchester United in a shock result.  Berbatov scored twice, his first goals for the club, which gives me a excuse to copy this picture of him.  What a snakey cool mutherfucker.  

Finally, thanks for reading and for your comments.  Figure I've got Sil to thank for the traffic.  Hope you enjoy it more than work.  

Godzilla and Beaker investigate the credit crunch*

There are two ways to look at the current meltdown in global markets.  Both are very tempting, and both contain a kernel of truth.    

Way one is the great temptation to dance through the smoking ruins of Wall Street rather like Godzilla or the monster from Cloverfield.  With great glee stamp flat the massed hoards of overpaid, emotionally absent, ideologically perverted, morally bereft scum!  People who have flown the entire economy into the mountain through their naked, obscene greed and then come winging to the government to help them out.  STOMP!  Didn't show any solidarity with the miners, when their industry was broken, did you, you fucks? SPLAT! How did you expect it to go on and on and on and on?  Don't you realise that this is made up magic beans money?  It stopped being a useful way for actually useful to manage risk about thirty years ago.  CRUSH!  And then look back at the twisted metal and laugh.  Bwahahahahaha!  No one gives a fuck about your Brietling now, fuckwit.  

Way number two is to transform, magically, horribly, from Godzilla into Beaker  from the Muppets, and run around because we're all doomed. 

All of which is an attempt to say there are two questions here.  One are we doomed?  And two, do we / Bankers / the Government / purveyors of magic beans deserve it if we are?

First up, in the long term, we are all doomed.  I don't mean in an every-man-must-die way here either, but in a very specific Peak Oil way.  Whether we hit the peak this year, next year or in five years is almost immaterial because its coming and likely to be soon - too soon for us to invent the first ever energy technology with no downsides to save us.  But this is a tale for another day.  The question, is the Credit Crunch (aka Cletus' revenge) going to break the economies of the west like a dry twig and leave us queuing for soup and using our iPhones to plug that gap between the cardboard walls of our hovel that the wind whistles through so cruelly?  Well, as I see it, mibbees.

The problem is that every vaguely sophisticated economy since the dawn of time needs some kind of a banking function to oil the wheels.  Banks are a super cool way of making sure that money flows around and gets to those that need it to make more while making sure that the owners of the original sum make a big fat rake too.  It allows people to borrow money and invest in stuff, houses for example, which makes them feel like they are active members of the society.  It means that business with short term cash problems don't go bust.  In other words, banks at their best, take money that would otherwise be sitting as gold bars under the ground, and make it work for all of our benefit. Some benefit more than others, but no one said life was fair.

If this basic function goes away, even for a few weeks, we are hosed and no mistake. The danger is the credit crunch might make it do just that.  Banks at he moment are so short of liquid cash (not other assets, like mortgages or gold or paintings of the Queen) to use to slosh around that they won't even lend to each other.  This is really AWOOGA AWOOGA AWOOGA dive dive schnell achtung Englander! bad.  To put that in context, by AAADDSAE bad I mean otherwise healthy businesses going bust because of cash flow problems.  I mean people, lots of people, losing their savings.  I mean no credit to buy anything for an extended period, which means nothing gets bought, so more business go down.  All of which equals Jarrow marches, more Steinbeck novels and a really bad time for everybody.  And that's before we get to the political consequences.  

This basic banking function actually going away though is by no means certain, Paulson plan or no Paulson plan.  There are solid banks out there and the Government ain't done yet.  Central banks are working like crazy to un-gum the wheels and get this money sloshing around productively again.  They might do it.  

So, in short, as we stand here is a real possibility of catastrophe - the strongest in my time of Paying Attention - but it is by no means assured.  I'm not a betting man, so no odds folks.

Whatever happens though, we are in All Sots Of Trouble right now.  Who's fault is it?  There are number of candidates; we-the-punters, Wall Street, maths PhDs who should go and work in physics, greedy bottom feeding lowlifes at all turns, the Chinese.  So, laydeez and gentlemen, this is our cast of vile miscreants.  This is an adult show, so I would advise pregnant ladies or people with heart trouble to read no further.

Perp one: you and me, gentle reader.

The average wallet or purse in the UK has eight credit cards in it.  Lots of them are maxed.  We have borrowed and borrowed and now we are fuckoed.  House borrowing, car borrowing, borrowing at 35% APR to go on fucking holiday to Ibiza for two weeks and shag a telesales worker from Minehead.  We were insane in the membrane.  This great orgy of borrowing has two horrible consequences.  Well three if you count the STDs from Minehead and all the orgies.  They are: 1, now we have to pay it back, we're all skint, lots of us are going to default and then we'll never borrow again and he money is gone all gone, do you hear me, and 2, once we ran up the debt it went of to Wall Street and the City to be made into magic bean CDO money. Which brings us to perp two...

The Global Finance System, aka watch and learn Beelzebub.

I'd like to say that once upon the time merchant banks weren't full of absolute cunts who were motivated only by greed and intent on making a huge pile of loot for themselves, and the rest of the world could fall into Satan's fiery maw as far as they could care, but this would be a lie.  Finance has never been the natural home of philosopher kings.  It is instead the home of the rapacious vultures, dead eyed killers and Brooks Bros clad Nazgul - financiers, neither living nor dead.  Two things have happened recently which have made the whole things worse.  One, the old rather pissed boys who wore pinstripes and did business over five hour lunches with old, equally pissed, chums from Eton or Yale have slowly left.  These guys were no good (see The Great Depression for example) but they were pissed which meant they weren't that quick.  Now they have been replaced with guys who are sober (at least during the day - at night they like to take coke and abuse strippers or the homeless), sharp as blades and twice as morality free.  The second bad thing is that we have given them really powerful computers and bunch of maths PHDs who should be doing physics to run them.  

This has lead to an explosion in financial instruments (translation: nearly but not quite scams).  Because everyone who invented, bought and sold these things was trying to scam everyone else involved, it sort of worked and huge, huge piles of loot were made for the Nazgul, the maths PHDs and the pissed old boys who still held stock.  Some of this cash even made it to coke dealers and strippers, but not, alas, the homeless. This is called trickle down economics, incidentally.  

A lot of the financial instruments were made by getting a bank's PhD to make a magic cauldron on his computer and put in a bit of debt that they might get back, some of the credit card debt that that introduced you to the telesales rep from Minehead, mortgages debt from Alabama etc and so forth, mix it into a shiny new thing called a CDO and flog it to the bank down the road, who put it in their magic cauldron and so we go again.

I could weep.

So now the magic beans have turned back into just-beans, all this has fallen down in a heap and we're all up shit creek.  So, are bankers to blame?  Yes.  But its not just them.  For example, why were able to borrow all this money?  I mean, we - the public - clearly can't be trusted.  Someone must stop us borrowing money we can't afford to pay back.  Why didn't that work?  Two reasons - one bankers leant it to us because they either actually thought they'd get it back (ha!) or more likely, they could flog the debt for magic beans and get it off their balance sheets.  Reason two is that the people who control interest rates - and remember the higher the rate the less borrowing happens - fucked up.  Their names are the Federal Reserve and Bank of England.

Fed and Threadneedle.

In fairness to these two august institutions, it wasn't all their fault that they fucked up.  Their job, under the current economic model, is to control inflation.  (The current economic model is Milton Friedman' s fault, btw). And inflation was low and stayed low.  This is the fault of the Chinese (and I for one hail our new masters, the Chinese) because they made loads of crap we wanted to buy and made it really cheap.  Made it so cheap in fact that even as we bought more and more, which you'd expect to drive up the price, the price stayed low low low.  So did interest rates.  So we borrowed, companies borrowed, private equity borrowed, Cletus the slack jawed yokel borrowed.  Banks than made all this debt into magic CDOs and sold them to one another and all went round and round until you, me, Cletus and private equity started to default, he music stopped and we stand here, two minutes to midnight.  

Lordy, Lordy, Lordy.

More tomorrow if I can be arsed and lights haven't gone out.  Tomorrow's installment to include: why did we all default?  And why can't I spell or punctuate? 

* I came up with this title last, which is  shame because it would have made a better blog all round.  Sigh.

Good morrow to thee

After much prompting, here is my blog.  It is named after that fine and not-secret-anymore society, the Gentleman's Philosophical Society of Elvet, because no one else will read it.  It is a partial record because this is only my burblings, so the following should not be taken as representing the views of the GPSOE, its members, affiliates or employees.  

I might even update this one.  Let's see, eh?