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.