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Here's some thoughts on my mind.

If the 'fly-by night banks disappear down the plughole does it really matter?
Should all future investments be tied to a tangible asset? For short selling to make money someone has to lose, so should all those games be stopped? I understand the need for hedging to help farmers and perhaps factories to set a price for the future, but otherwise it adds nothing to the GDP.
Maybe those wealthy manipulators of the market should use their assets to bail themselves out.


When we have this recession will it be a good thing? House price drops will help form steady communities and those first imners may [if they still have a job] be able to get their foot on the ladder.

A global recession will save how much CO2? Assuming emissions do affect the climate, maybe 2 years of very low output will give the trees enough time to remove the gas and cool the earth again... I seem to remember a few weeks after 9/11 changed temperatures over America.

The conservatives, under the infamous Thatcher, heralded in the era of market forces. Where are her Captains of industry now? Probably scarpering orf to a sunny clime with a suitcase full of our hard earned money. Tory Blair was no better in his unctuous pursuit of American economic and political policies. When are the UK populous going to wake up and demand proportional representation. I feel that this is the only way to curb the politicians 'short term' thirst for getting votes at any cost, in order to give one party total power (which we know corrupts absolutely). It seems that the country did rather better under coalition government in the 1940's
Perhaps following the Chinese economic model would help us? you know, the one that owns America. Credit where credits due.
Sean Appleby-Simpkin (57 tear old, slightly smug Socialist). Told you so.

Don't forget that the 'Hill' is still thinking about smooth transitions, never mind the financial crisis; see Saturday’s Wall Street Journal:
Many of the defense industry's most important programs will start the new fiscal year [starts Oct 1st in USA] next week with higher budgets, thanks to a quickly hashed-out bundle of bills expected to be sent to President George W. Bush for approval just before lawmakers return home to campaign. As part of a continuing resolution, lawmakers set aside $487.7 billion for the Defense Department, ensuring a smooth transition for the Pentagon's big defense contracts ahead of the next administration.

All part of the superordinate system called government!

Belgian bank Fortis paid over the odds for ABN-AMRO last year - as did RBS. I guess
that is part of their current problem ........

Hope you will also press Adair Turner to explain the nature of the FSA discussion
with Victor Blank wrt the HBOS takeover.

Who prompted FSA to speak to them? Was it Downing Street as followup to the cosy wee chat on the plane back from Israel
when Blank lobbies Brown for relaxation of the normal rules on competition?

An hour and a half is a long time in US politics .... Congress has voted it out!
The markets have apparently plunged.

"Then on to Washington. The House of Representatives is due to pass the $700 billion rescue package to bail out Wall Street tonight"

Here are my thoughts: Spinning around in my mind, some how they are connected to each other but I cannot fit them together. Bin Laden, Arab oil, gas, energy, high prices, very high prices, very high cost of living, can't pay mortgages, pressure on banks, no cash, repossessed houses does not help, can't sell repossessed houses, banks and building societies do not have the cash for mortgages anyway. Living with our backs to the wall, Is he winning?

Bottom line on Bradford and Bingley is who gets to keep all these buy to let properties.

I say these should be municipalised rather than nationalised.

Tenant protection is paramount surely - and those units that are empty should be let ....

Screw the middle-class speculator and solve Britain's housing crisis!

Maybe what we need now is a revival of the squatter movement to occupy "buy to let"
property on behalf of the people .............

Where is Swampy when he is needed .......?

Demutualisation was the big error all these
former building societies made ........... they
were warned at the time it would all end in
tears.

I got my Abn-Amro statement through the post this morning just before the Fortis story broke ....... curiously the security
paper they are now using for statements
seems to incorporate Arabic watermarks!

Should I be worried?

#2 phantomphiddler
"When are the UK populous going to wake up and demand proportional representation"?

Sadly, it's unlikely to be anytime soon so long as both BluLab and NuLab Tories conspire to dumb down the education system to ensure that not enough people notice.

It is, however, just possible that after the next general election the BluLab Tories may have to offer some form of federal solution if they really are unionists, in which case a democratic federal senate might follow, whilst a rump Westmidden shorn of non-English members reeked on in unreform.

It's also possible that if the NuLab Tories dump "Duff" Gordon PDQ they could implement their '97 commitment on electoral reform and salvage something from the car-wreck they're facing.

What next for the US as the $700billion loan has been refused? How will this affect the world markets, particularly the UK?

It is also reminiscent of the Reagan era too.
This quote is from Paul Krugman's excellent
account 'The Age of Diminished Expectations: US Economic Policy in the 1990's' which came out in 1990 with a
section on Financial Follies including the Savings and Loan Scandal:

"the biggest single economic policy disaster of the 1980's sprang from a misguided attempt at deregulation. Deregulation
of the savings and loans industry turned what might have been a $15 billion problem at the beginning of the decade into a burden on taxpayers at least 10 and perhaps 20 times as great by the decade's end. Of course, the reasons for this debacle went deeper than simple misguided deregulatory zeal. But the rhetoric of economic freedon helped mask what
might otherwise have been seen as
an obviously irresponsible policy."

as it became apparent a few days ago this is no longer about economics but reputations of those who believe in no regulations.

to protect their reputations they will make a wasteland. To accept the bill would mean accepting they were wrong which to them must seem 'offensive' and 'unamerican'.

now citigroup which is bailing out banks might be downgraded which would make them a lame duck. who will buy them?

for those who missed the comparison between the 2008 and 1929 dow monthly chart its back on track to copy it.

13. deregulation

is a religion in the usa. They see it as the essence of the 'american way' which is why its held despite the irrationality of its belief.

if they really believed in it they would have deregulation on the road network. A no rules road network or no rules railway network or no rules air traffic would result in massive pile ups. So its not surprising a no rules market ends up in a trainwreck.

so its about perhaps the deepest and most central belief of americans about themselves. they are not ready to give it up yet. they need more 'pain'.

the uk had the same crisis of identity when they lost the empire. some diehards still think we have an empire.

SWIMMING WITH MASOCHISTS, PSYCHOPATHS AND NARCISSISTS

Interesting result. One Republican Congressman as a "huge cow patty with a marshmallow stuck in the middle of it."

More should be made wary of the abuses committed by the frequentig Wall Street (see #5), or prone to buy the Kabbalah which is passed off as which just reinforces them. In earlier decades they would have been classed as enemies of the people, not 'alpha males' and those who revere them, euphemistically, 'camp followers'.

For anyone interested in what has been happening about the US bailout and the banking shennanigans that has been going on in the US I would highly recommend the following -

Karl Denningers blog at



he also runs an investment messageboard full of very astute and colourful people over at-



and is responsible for -



and there is also Mishs blog at



and Nouriel Roubini



To very briefly sum up the situation, if the bailout bill passed it would not make a difference as it was for $700BN whereas the problem it aims to solve is somewhere in the region of $3TN-$7Tn in size, taking on the bad debts of banks would require that the US take on even more debt, which would eventually either be defaulted on, like Russia / Argentina or the US would have to print money causing hyperinflation like Zimbabwe / Weimar Republic, either way the US government dies vs the death of the current US banking system. In short, it's the difference between the Great Depression with no bill and the fall of the Roman Empire, plus nuclear weapons, with the passage of the bill. Unfortunately our government wishes to destroy itself by taking on the private debt of the banks, it is a sad day when American politicians are wiser than ours.

AMERICANS SHOULD SPOIL PARTY GAMES TOO!

The voting speaks for itself. Parties, like religions, believe in their 'god' and cannot compromise in the name of pragmatism.

Now that clever money has come a cropper, we need wisdom to dominate. Political parties find wisdom disruptive; they prefer narrow adherence to the party line.

SPOIL PARTY GAMES

It was slightly surreal, was it not, to see Peter Mandelson popping up in Brussels
to comment on the need for tougher EU
banking regulations? Where was that he
got his mortgage? The Britannia Building
Society which is still a mutual - according
to page 226 of Andrew Rawnsley's book
'Servants of The People: The Inside Story
of New Labour':

"For the next twenty-four hours, beginning with Monday's Newsnight, on which he declared 'There is no conflict of interes so the question of resignation does not arise',
Mandelson toured the TV and radio studios,
determined to tough it out. [Next sentence
is not suitable for a family audience!] But
the more Mandelson talked, the more questions were raised. Should he have declared the loan [from Paymaster-General Geoffrey Robinson] in the Register of Members interests? In the summer,
Elizabeth Filkin, the commissioner of parliamentary standards, ruled that he should have done. Had he revealed the loan to the Britannia Building Society when he applied to them for a mortgage? After a period of equivocation, Mandelson confessed that he had not."

And the rest as they say is history ........

Jeremy did will to extract a concession from Adair Turner who has only been Financial Services Authority Chair for a week that
for the last six years they have been lax
in exercising their bank supervisory role.

But who set this up? Again it is interesting
to go back to Andrew Rawnsley to find the
smoking gun ....... it wasn't Eddie George,
who went ballistic when Brown's plan was
revealed! Pages 41 and 42 reveal that he
nearly resigned as Governor of The Bank
of England in protest.

Perhaps Paul Mason should track Steady
Eddie down for comment on the situation?

Jeremy did well to extract a concession from Adair Turner who has only been Financial Services Authority Chair for a week that
for the last six years they have been lax
in exercising their bank supervisory role.

But who set this up? Again it is interesting
to go back to Andrew Rawnsley to find the
smoking gun ....... it wasn't Eddie George,
who went ballistic when Brown's plan was
revealed! Pages 41 and 42 reveal that he
nearly resigned as Governor of The Bank
of England in protest.

Perhaps Paul Mason should track Steady
Eddie down for comment on the situation?

Plan B will be in by Thursday, then plan C,D,E,etc.

As for our problems, NeilRobertson (9)has it right, the rot set in on demutualisation and I have the letters I wrote to all my Societies at the time saying it will end in tears.

The Banks in the '60's touted for our money by forcing employers to pay wages into bank accounts. Our money wasn't enough hence the speculators and snake-oil salesmen then went for broke --and got it.

I Watched some Cowboy film the other day where some settlers were singing the hymn "We are heading for the Last Round-up" How topical.

THE THIRD WAY

.

It's a pity CiF deleted all the posts by AnatoliyGolitsyn. See the very end for Giddens' response to apparently non existent posts.

That is, what you won't find is the original posts by 'Anatoliy'. Just a comment on them.

At least one regular here saw this (non-transparent) memory-hole editing.

It was an eye opener.

I know that people in top jobs aren´t always nice people, that is probably why congress are so reluctant to bail them out, but considering America and the UK are about to go completely down the tubes if they don´t come to some kind of a decision right now that seems to me to be rather more important.

Mandelson was great today, talking of a unilateral pan-world solution to include imerging economies as well, what is wrong with tempering our freedom with a little worldwide regulation to everyones benefit.

Having said that I do believe that the market is the best teacher I´ve had as a freelancer, I was a lazy teenager but being self employed in a foreign country was one of the most challenging and enjoyable experiences of my life. I actually am a great fan of the free market as long as it continues to function. I´m certainly not an old fashioned socialist then but some so called socialist measures are a good way of mitigating some of its harsh realities. Why should the whole world be made to pay for Americas right to run a totally free economy it just seems insane to me, so many peoples futures and even lives depend on them passing that bill, however fair or moral it appears to be. As an Englishman I´m asking you please put common sense before your egos congressmen and pass that bill!

hgwaldock (#24) People are not all the same (see genes, see Gaussian distribution).

Immigration, sending smart women into education and work, and a barrage of fear (directed over recent years at those who can read it), is making matters worse for all but those who 'get on' at the expense of others' suffering.

Why do you want to encourage that?

Can you think beyond that? Most of this counts on the answer being no (as it hurts).

I do like Crick but he is so left wing.

Osborne could save the tax-payers even more money if he was prepared to scrap all those non-jobs that were created under labour; the type of jobs you see offered in the guardian every week. That will save us all a bundle of dosh and maybe we can create some real jobs or at least pay off some of the debt Brown has burdened us with. I'd vote Tory on that one policy alone. Mind you though, the Tories could have no manifesto what-so-ever and still win the next election on account Labour are a spent force...though Labour has fervent cheer-leaders at the Beeb. Why is that i wonder? is it Knowing which side your bread is buttered, eh? self interest maybe?..

Thoroughly excellent in-depth interviews by Jeremy with Lord Turner and Peter Mandelson. The FSA were "monkeyed" by the markets - pity the relevant legislation wasn't in place!

Phantomphiddler #2

I support your views entirely. I am also intrigued by you nom de plume. I could read it as Phantom Fiddler and have you down as a musician. Or I could skip the second 'h' and I ind myself whisked back in time and space to Rupert Street in the 60s. Who are you really?

JJ # 23

I too witnessed the so called Comment is FREE on the Grauniad blog. Something of a misnomer that. Those with self declared interests screaming for the blood of others who dared challenge them - and getting it. The knives were out for anyone not toeing the democratic liberal pc line. Even mild mannered me got banned from there.

I offer no comment on the financial catastrophe we now face as nobody would listen anyway. Since 1990 I've been telling everybody to be afraid of China, but they didn't listen then either.

FOG OF ALL FOGS

NewFazer (#28) Some of it still .

BEHIND THE CURTAIN

thecookieducker (#26) "Mind you though, the Tories could have no manifesto what-so-ever and still win the next election on account Labour are a spent force"

New Labour was always a spent force, but as the Conservatives are basically the , what if Labour purged the party of their Neoconservatives (Trotskyites/anarcho-capitalists/Austrian/Chicago School, call-them-what-one-will who are now kings) and returned it to Old Labour's essentially Webbian/Stalinist policies?

Most people have been fed so much Trotskyite/Orwellian (anarcho-capitalist) propaganda about the alleged evils of to indoctrinate the merits of global free-market liberal-democracy (or, looked at another way, debt-serfdom) that it would be a very tall order, but the reality is that Liberal-Democratic principles are literally slowly killing us off demographically if one looks at all Liberal-Democratic countries' TFRs.

JJ #29

Fog on the Time

For every academic, there is an equal and opposite academic.

Jadedjean @ 30:

i'll just get me coat...

Credit where credits due!

Twinkle Twinkle hedge fund Gelt
Rodent odours I have smelt
Spotty youths with flashy cars
Destroy our dreams with single ‘yah's’

Short selling’s selling us all short.
Perhaps some in depth moral thought
Would stop the rot and save the day
For normal folks their bills to pay

The politicians vacillate
The bankers hold their breath and wait
Whilst we poor punters in their hands
Hear the death knell of our plans.

So many of us trusted them
The wizards of free marketdom
We bought our shares and sold our souls
We all helped dig this massive hole.

Love and hugs.
Sean.

Credit where credits due!

Twinkle Twinkle hedge fund Gelt
Rodent odours I have smelt
Spotty youths with flashy cars
Destroy our dreams with single ?yah's?

Short selling?s selling us all short.
Perhaps some in depth moral thought
Would stop the rot and save the day
For normal folks their bills to pay

The politicians vacillate
The bankers hold their breath and wait
Whilst we poor punters in their hands
Hear the death knell of our plans.

So many of us trusted them
The wizards of free marketdom
We bought our shares and sold our souls
We all helped dig this massive hole.

Love and hugs.
Sean.