And in a similar vein...

America cheers as satirist delivers knockout blow to TV finance gurus.

Interestingly, mad Max (see below) upbraids Jon Stewart for not raising this sooner. Is Peston right to say that the British press has been much better at reporting on the markets and appreciating the seriousness of the crisis?

Global banking fraud

Tom sent me this article by Patrick Wolf in the FT the other day, which is a pretty sobering assessment of the implications of the current financial meltdown. The era of financial liberalisation has resoundingly failed, and it's not clear what will replace it. Poverty and suffering is likely to increase on a grand scale, and there's a serious risk of geo-political instability, more wars, the rise of extremist politics etc. And this from a guy who wrote a book a couple of years ago on how anglo-saxon style liberal democracy was the inevitable model for the world. 

This morning I heard this guy - Max Keiser - being interviewed on Radio 5. He also does a show on the BBC World tv news channel, and on Resonance FM (which is worth checking out more generally, by the way).  Now, there's more than a touch of the blogging crank about him, but he was refreshingly angry about the whole economic situation and incredulous about how governments are dealing with it, and how we're all complacently going along with it. I checked out one of his slightly shrill podcasts, and beneath the bluster he makes a lot of good points (as far as I can tell). For instance:

• Banks are effectively holding governments to ransom - give us more trillions or we'll blow up the economy. And we're going along with it. But while governments are desperately attempting to stabilise the situation for the good of their countries as a whole, the banks (and other large companies) are still motivated by corporate self-interest - they want the cash to continue to enrich themselves.
• Similarly, a couple of pharma companies in the US got a massive chunk of Obama's bail out in order to do a merger, and promptly sacked 17,000 people (would need to check the facts on this one) - not really the rationale for giving it to them in the first place.
• The whole 'toxic bank' model doesn't just get the bad assets off the balance sheet at vast expense for the taxpayer - it enables the banks to re-package the bad assets and sell them on (again) as commodities, and take fees for doing so. (This was part of what led to the problem in the first place: banks' liabilities - i.e. dodgy mortgage loans - were getting repackaged and sold on, so they ceased to be regarded as liabilities and instead became assets - and thus were not subjected to the same degree of risk analysis, as there were profits, commissions and bonuses at stake.)
• He reckons that media reporting on financial markets should be approached in the manner of a scandal sheet - trying to uncover fraud and bad practice, which has always been extremely widespread, but is only now getting a lot of attention. His view is that in the last 25 years, the dubious practices of dodgy 'bucket shop' stockbrokers have become standard practice throughout the financial industries. There is sharp practice at all levels, but everyone with a stake has been complicit, but kept schtum for as long as they were making cash. For instance, execs at Citibank and Goldman Sachs or somewhere were selling their customers financial products, but taking short positions on the same products themselves because they believed they would underperform. Similarly, they were also shorting on their own company's shares - in order to make cash for the company. Financial institutions invested in Madoff even though they must have known what was going on, because they still made massive returns. And so on.
• Quantitative easing essentially involves the government borrowing money to buy back its own loans. Hm... Historically, this kind of behaviour generally results in uncontrollable inflation. 

 I don't know how on the money his analysis is (to use an appropriate phrase), but he's certainly right that we should all be furious about what's going on and very politically engaged with it all. There's a lot at stake - and I don't mean wealth necessarily, but the state of society. But it all seems to complicated, and the sums of money involved so unreal, and nobody knows what the solution is, so we're just watching it all happen and hoping it will all turn out ok. 

By the way, he says buy gold. 

The Fitzroy - as good as ever

Colin and I had a beer last Wednesday in the Fitz. You'll all be pleased to hear that it is exactly the same as always. John, Seumas - any chance of a Fitz get-together this year?

They Rule

Anyone had a go at this? Interesting concept, though struggling to get any particularly striking results.

Meetup

Great site, what a good idea.

Fight global warming even if it's untrue

I quite like this line of argument, that was published in a letter to the Sunday Telegraph from Cafod. Of course, the sceptics were out in force the next week, but it makes sense to me. 

Fight global warming even if it's untrue

SIR – The longer I work on climate change, the less important I think it is whether or not the warmists or the sceptics are right. This may seem a rash statement, but hear me out. Just imagine a future where the majority of the world's climate scientists are proved wrong and global warming does not occur at the rates predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

If we hadn't listened to them, we might enjoy the satisfaction of saying "told you so", but we'd still be living in a pretty miserable world. That world might not be much warmer but, my goodness, it would be beset by a host of other serious environmental issues: diminishing water resources, rampant deforestation, massive soil erosion, uncontrollable urbanisation and the frightening loss of biodiversity.

Peoples lives would be threatened and whole ecosystems destroyed because we hadn't bothered to address the causes of this environmental degradation under a global economic system that, in its current state, can only grow if nature dies.

Now imagine a world where we had listened to the climate scientists and started to change our resource-consuming behaviour and address the inequities of the global economic system. Although the warming still didn't materialise, we would have addressed a host of environmental issues and be living a largely pollution-free existence.

We may even be saying thank you to the climate scientists who, although they got it wrong, provided us the opportunity to create a cleaner, brighter and fairer world.

Dr Mike Edwards, CAFOD

And I think they should go ahead with the Severn barrage!

Spotify

Do you guys know about Spotify? Link to free sign up sans invitation here.

Diana and Actaeon 2

Diana and Actaeon to stay in Scotland

Hurrah! Some mealy mouthed labour MP (or MSP or whatever) on the Scottish news just now complaining about the use of taxpayers' money - bah to him.

Btw, i've granted all you chaps admin privs so you can hack around with FT

Oversight, should have done this a while ago. Everyone is now able to tinker with gadgets etc should they so wish.

Is anyone else here using Google Reader?

Because you can add a shared item widget into blogger which shows a feed from your google reader shared items (looks to right).

Bookshelves. Finally.

Have worked out where to get some decent bookshelves for the living room. Vitsoe. Thank god. Can die happy. Or at least with a decent shelving system that will integrate with the shelves I put up myself.

When central bankers rescued, then ruined, the world

John Lanchester seems to have been picking up some work for the New Yorker lately. This review of a book about central bankers is up to his usual standard - although he's Americanised his style a wee bit, or the editor has. Turns out his dad worked at HSBC in Hong Kong when he was a kid, which might explain his fascination with the global financial system over the last couple of years - over and above the more obvious reasons.

Mu Mu!

One for you John? Bill Drummond on the death (he hopes) of recorded music from Radio 3's 'Free Thinking Festival'. I heard this on the weekly Radio 3 Arts and Ideas podcast, which often has interesting stuff on it, despite the annoying presence of Philip Dodd. 

I increasingly find I don't care one way or the other what happens to recorded music - despite devoting about 15 years of my life to being absolutely obsessed with it. What a waste of time - I could have been doing something useful instead.

What is Stephen Harper reading?

Cats aside, this is the best website I've seen for a while - brilliant stuff from the writer Yann Martel

Apropos the below

The latest environmental disaster - Google

Sorry guys, to do the first global warming horror story of 2009, but this was a bit alarming. It seems that Google searches use up an incredible amount of energy. Like pretty much everything we do in the modern world.

This is probably as retrograde as anything in terms of cool

But I'm quite liking lolcats. It's related to the failblog thing and is (ummm) lots of pictures of cats with funny
captions. They've evolved their own lolcat-speak...





I've also spent yesterday evening playing with Windows 7 on a tablet PC. It's not bad (see below)...

Productivity plummets

The office has discovered Fail Blog.

Atheist Advertising

I like the look of this campaign. I agree with the sentiment of course, but also the quite cheery tone of it. The UK's high-profile public atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens) can be a bit of a turn-off with their truculence and aggressive materialism. I think this is a bit more gentle and positive.