It's Just So Unfair

Life can be so unnecessarily hard sometimes. I mean it comes to something when you can't get a few grand of dry cleaning paid for by someone else or a bit of gardening or flat cleaning.

I should imagine there are a few angry people around tonight, feeling let down and cheated. It's not about the humiliation of having to pay money back, it's the principle of it. Heck, the Green Book of expenses codes could not be more clear - claim what you damn well like as it is down to your own idea of what is right. £116,000 is a snip when you think about the value for money we get from politicians. What is so wonderful is that the very people who make the stupid rules by which we have to live, don't like it when they are subjected to it. Try asking the Government to pay your dry cleaning bill or getting tax relief on your handyman. I got a call from HMRC today for being late with just one payment - they threatened legal action if it happened again. I am not kidding - all I did was select the BACS payment to go to the old sort code and account number at HMRC instead of the new one. I am sure Hazel Blears et al have not had similar calls despite their 'oversights'.

Anyway, one thing that has been unanimously applauded up and down the country is that pornography should be tax free. I should think many a lonely sales rep will want to present a few expense claims to HMRC and ask for 'relief'' on what their employer will not reimburse them for. As Jaqui's husband proved, they are essential for doing a good job and stimulating the grey cells.

You have to be some kind of person to be an MP or a Max Mosely. Life occurs to you in a very different slant to normal people. What is abhorrent to most sane, clean living, law abiding, tax paying people is perfectly natural to these people. Then take the Lehmans crew. A mere six European former executives are suing their former employer for £70m of unpaid salaries and bonuses.

The coffee machine is working over time but the aroma is not powerful enough. Hello, the bank is broke thanks to you guys - it was the largest corporate failure in history, thousands unemployed and taxpayers have stepped in to pick up the pieces. And you want money? That takes some front. One of them had only just started work there.

You have to laugh.

Meanwhile in the 'other' world where there are few gardens to charge for keeping, no dry cleaners and precious few meals let alone free ones, there are a few billion people sitting looking on bemused. How can sane people think the way we do? How can we justify going to war to defend this way of life? While millions starve and cry for help, we allow greedy people to take court action to extort money from people - £millions. The last 12 years of false profits and poor governing will be the biggest wasted opportunity in history. All those incredible £trillions could have solved the problems in Africa and the Third World in short order.

You have to cry.

This warped way of life is going too far. One minute banks are broken by their senseless activities, the next they pick up the very things that broke them before and trade them again for vast profits. Toxic debt one minute, perfumed profit the next. Profit from transactions that do nothing for anybody but the people who trade them. In Africa, it would be the same as creating grain from dry sand. They would be that rich if they could do it. They could eat.

One thing that has come out of the last two years is that for all our posturing as a civilised society, we are just a bunch of greedy, moral-less self interested and egotistical jerks - every last one of us. Africa can have what they want so long as we have our 42" inch TV, takeaway curry and a dream of a Porsche. They dream of survival.

For the bemused millions struggling to live, they must look upon us all as gorillas in a zoo. All muscle, hair, wind, chest beating and bullying - we are always right, we always get our own way and we get all the best things. And if we don't, we just fight.

One thing is for sure, we have the monopoly on bananas.

Why Should I Care?

You may be a sceptic or a true non-believer but let's assume for the moment that climate change is happening and that due to human intervention things are not going too well for the future for Planet Earth. The question is: should we modify or change our behaviour accordingly?

I read a letter in New Scientist from a Tom Dixon of Bristol in the UK. It was concise and well written - his answer was basically, why should he sacrifice his lifestyle for the good of the future when he has only a small window of time in which to live? In short, why should he care? And for the record, he doesn't.

It's an interesting point as I am a believer that in the brief history in time that man has lived on this Earth, we have impacted the environment in an extraordinary and unprecedented way. I am sure in my own mind that since the dawn of industrialisation we have done things to our environment which have profound and long-lasting effects on the Earth and particularly its atmosphere. I also believe that it is likely that we are actively shortening the potential opportunity for life, as we know it, to endure on Earth.

An asteroid may hit tomorrow. Super volcanoes may erupt in California and lay a black cloud over this earth for a century. The poles may swap ends. Something natural will occur to wipe us out anyway or change the environment we live in so profoundly that we will not survive. Or the incredible 'balancing act' that is nature is going through one of her long cycles and will 'right herself' again and the effect that humans have within it will be but a pimple on a gorilla's backside.

Both assessments could be true. One argues that we should look at how we live as it is humans who are having some kind of effect on the Earth while the other argues - hey, that's nature so make the most of what you can while it all lasts.

To have a concerted effort to change the way in which humans live would be a monumental task and it also pre-supposes that everybody agrees with the changes, thinks there is a problem and feels any kind of conscience that implores them to join in. This assumed 'Brotherhood of Man' may well not exist and it will be very hard to get widescale support to drive any such large-scale 'Green' policies to be implemented effectively to make the changes we think will help.

One thing that cannot be argued with is that we are depleting the earth's resources very quickly. Fossil fuels, on today's estimates, will last less than a few decades. There are no really good alternatives on offer - wind energy harnessing is both unsightly and equally damaging to the environment as well as not yielding enough energy to suit our needs. Nuclear energy has been descaled and now contributes less than 20% of the electricity to the National Grid. Solar energy is seen as the domain of cranks who deface their homes for no real gain.

Yet so much of our time, effort and brain power goes into sustaining or bettering our lifestyle in the present at a time when wealth in the developed world is at it a new height - and after a minor technical blip, will be back on course to grow. Profit and growth comes from exploiting the needs of the people now - having long term 'Green' strategies will inevitably mean that profit opportunities decrease and economic growth is limited, even negative. Many economists believe that you can sustain economic growth and have 'Green' policies but I am as sceptical about that as most climate change denyers.

Of this 'Brotherhood of Man' that Tom Dixon talks of which he asserts does not exist, you do not have to look far to see stark evidence of what he means. As the gobal financial crisis unfolded, it was pretty much every man for himself despite talk of concerted global action. Countries pumped varying amounts of money back into a system they understood as much about as they do nature itself and hoped for the best while other countries focused their cash on specific things that they estimated would help sustain them through the crisis. The results have been obvious - those who invested less in the global money system and more on their internal economy, have survived this crisis better. Look after yourself and things will get back to normal in a while.

When 9/11 occurred, almost without thought of the enormous financial, environmental and human impact the West engaged in two major wars which it still fights, eight years later. People will argue the reasons for the war but one obvious comment about Iraq was control of the region which supplies the most oil globally at a time when China is about to overtake the United States as the largest consumer of fossil fuels. It was 'aggressive' protectionism as Iraq's ability to wage war on anyone other than its own people had all but ended. Conflicts arise because countries believe their interests are compromised - there is no collective consciousness when it comes to seeing your lifestyle or freedom being threatened.

And as the developed world clamoured to pile trillions of dollars into sustaining its way of life into a system that had nearly ruined it, the developing and undeveloped worlds sat there and looked on incredulously as a mere fraction of all that wealth might have helped feed its starving inhabitants.

When it comes to understanding human nature rather than nature itself, we are still basically animals for all our intelligence. Survival of the fittest is the underlying culture and for all our altruistic ideals and thoughts, in reality there are very few of those who extoll them who are prepared to really sacrifice their way of life to ensure that everybody benefits. Indeed, from a political viewpoint even those with a scocialist ideal believe there is no issue in having people incredibly wealthy while others suffer. They have no issue with the exploitation of the less fortunate when it becomes personal but their ideas and ideals win votes and give them power because 'spin' is just plain old marketing when you analyse it and has little to do with real values and ways of life.

Yesterday, between meetings, I took a trip on a boat around the harbour in Hamburg and saw the vast empty dry docks of one of the former largest shipbuilders in the world. One new boat was being built of any consequence - it was 170m in length, had its own submarine and cost to date around €500m to build. It was a private yacht, commissioned by one man, who already has one of the largest private yachts in the world plus his own football club in the Premier League. There is incredible wealth in the hands of an incredibly small percentage of the population of the world while billions are below the poverty line, are mired in disease and can't feed themselves. And we just went out and saved them by propping up a financial system that rewards exploitation and penalises those that stop growing to look after others.

In the US some 47m people cannot afford medical care at all. The President is having to tour his country to persuade people it would be a nice idea to somehow provide for them when the same people are happy to pump $billions into sustaining a foreign policy that has made the US look like the world's school bully rather than the prefect.

I could go on but frankly when we live in a world where the impact of non-delivery of the latest iPod will have a more dramatic effect than more food to starving Africa, then you know that Tom Dixon in Bristol is right. 'The Brotherhood of Man' is no more than a former Eurovision pop group - a totally dreadful concept at that.

I could ask Tom Dixon and his followers why do we change anything? He did not invent the IPod yet he has one. He would not be pleased if he used a toilet where the previous users soiled the seat and did not clean up after them. He would not be pleased if there were no laws in this country stopping people just walking up and taking your possessions whenever that person feels like it. He would not be best pleased if Sky Sports was not made available to homes in the UK because Rupert Murdoch suddenly thought only Australians were worthy of it. He would not be happy if when run over by a car and he lies bleeding in the gutter that an ambulance is not available to help him.

All these things actually come from a collective drive to make the place in which we live a better place - without them our lives would not be the same and we would be worse off. Taming the Wild West was necessary for everyone to get a fair crack of the whip but Jesse James might have disagreed.

So what of the future? Do people like Tom Dixon not have children? Maybe not - if so, there is no point in providing education for them as well as nuturing them and giving them rules and culture if we do not believe that we have a role to play in the future. What is the point of doing all that and even providing them a legacy in a Will if we really do not care? The fact is that we actually do care. As animals, our biggest instinct beyond survival is to procreate new life. In fact, just about everything in nature prepares current life to create new life. Nature understands that our time in this world is very short and so it has set itself up as a long-term survival mechanism and each unit of life has a function to create new life while it lives.

Tom Dixon is not right - humans have enough intelligence to know that we can change our ways and it will have an effect on the chances of survival of our offspring. We can change the conditions in which we live today to make a future for our next generations - our own descendants.

In fact, as any good parent, it is our responsibility to do so as we owe our children the same chance to live as we got, if not more.

Would it kill us if we did not get the latest iPod every year or more of our fantastic brain power which goes into to designing ever greater and more complex risks in the financial market were channelled into finding the cure for cancer? Would it kill us or him if Roman Abramovich did not have so much money that he can commission the biggest private yacht in this world and the money were sent to Africa to help feed people? Would it kill us to have less lights on at night, less electrical devices in general, slower but more efficient cars, to not have electric advertising hordings in Times Square or Piccadilly Circus or Virtual Reality?

It probably wouldn't kill us. But it may kill our children if we don't do something about it.

You Lose, We Win

Well it didn't take long, did it? As you mull over your breakfast and worry about your finances and future, be comforted by the fact that life is getting back to normal.

A report by the New York State Attorney General has published the list of bonuses paid to bank executives last year. That's right, I said last year - the year when the taxpayers around the world paid the rather large bill for the bunch of voracious gamblers in the sophisticated world of Hi-Tech Finance which we seem to think we need to help our world be the way it is. So much so that we are willing to continue paying off the debt until 2032.

Put down your cereal spoon for fear of choking on the next mouthful as it gets better.

First up - Citigroup, who were until a year ago the most 'profitable' bank in the world but was the US version of RBS in the scale of their stupidity and greed requiring hundreds of $billions to bail them out by the US Treasury in terms of loans and guarantees. Well, their darling top earners pocketed a meagre $609m last year - and that was shared out amongst just 124 people. Three of the gamblers earned over $10m, 13 of them grabbed $8m or more while 44 people made off with $5m or more.

Merrill Lynch was at it too - the company that performed so badly that it had to be bought by Bank of America and even then had been less than honest about its liabilities and even as it finalised the deal, still paid out bonuses to its gambling executives. They clocked up a near $28bn loss last year but still managed to pay a total of around $860m in bonuses and that was only to the top 149 earners, of which the top 4 were paid a combined $121m, the next 4 around $62m.

There is plenty more - every state aided bank paid out huge bonuses again last year just as if nothing had really happened. The estimated global cost in terms of bail outs is far in excess of $5 trillion and the banking world goes on as if nothing has happened.

In the UK, savers have been compensated to the tune of £21bn after the collapse of the banking system and then there is the enormous bill we have been landed with by the world of finance far beyond that in rescuing the banks who failed so massively.

It's a real world that lacks any kind of similarity to real life.

A career in banking was once seen as the realm of the fuddy-duddy, striped-suited Oxbridge chaps who stalked the City effectively lunching to get inside tracks. Today, modern banking is just a sophisticated and complex system of gambling. The supply of endless money into the system means that comparatively unintelligent people can drive screens that just does the banking version of whirling weighted fruit machines - they cannot seem to lose and the rewards are fabulous. What we have done, in all the far-fetched sums we have collectively stumped all over the world, is to keep the whole thing going in exactly the same way.

There is not a hint of contrition. There has been no real cull of the people who caused this. There has been little or no action by Governments and scant real understanding of the extent of our dependence on the system to sustain our way of life other than the fact they 'had no choice' in bailing the system out to make sure it did not collapse and the world becomes some kind of wilderness of fighting tribesmen haggling for food with beads and goats.

The fact remains that the finance world had created a make-believe game that generated profits from thin air just as part of the solution is to create more money from thin air in 'Quantitative Easing'. The threatened implosion of that system did not trigger a clamour to change it but to merely save it and we came so very close, they would have us know, to a world foreseen by 'visionaries' like David Icke. It now seems that lunatics like Icke were actually the clever ones.

The problem revolves around us. We are now so 'well off' that we must have 42"+ tellies, more pods that you can listen to, phones that send video, the latest gadget, new furniture, holidays, kitchens - the list is endless - and we are all very prepared to spend far beyond our means in order to get it and forfeit anything to do with provision for our retirement. Our jobs are now in far greater jeopardy than they were two years ago, more of us have lost our jobs since 1997 and our average take home income has actually dropped in real terms over the same period.

The fact was that we afforded this 'Utopia' by drawing down on our asset values - we created our own banks to conjure up money out of nothing.

Many will tell you that there is a concept of 'zero sum finance' which means that all the money in the world flows in credits and debits and always adds up to zero. So in that farcical view of the world, some may get richer at the cost of others but the amount of money has not changed and so the world is no worse off. But it is worse off. Just as the Bank of England literally conjured up £175bn out of nothing in order to increase the money supply, each of us created our own cash out of the supposed value in our assets. And then we gave it all away by spending it. We did not buy any really tradable assets as what we bought were effectively disposables or services - we did not invest in fine art, stamps or precious metals. We effectively increased the amount of money in the world and gave it away.

The bill for all that came right back to us because it was not real. As the value of our assets dropped the whole system shredded itself and we had to dip into our pockets for the actual cashflow to pay for our own mortgages again - this time in incremental tax over the long term.

What the whole collapse has taught us is that you can get nothing for nothing. You can create as much money as you like but there is a price to pay for it. And boy has the real person found out.

Up the there in 'Bank World' that hasn't happened. Reality was a close call for them but thankfully a bunch of mugs known as taxpayers and real people worldwide saved their pathetic necks. And now they are playing the whole game again. In the zenith, or nadir, of the crisis, I saw excerpts of the African Nations Congress or similar. Speaker after speaker expressed how incredulous they were at the enormity of something they simply could not understand. They also were at pains to point out that they had not caused this Credit Crunch and so the developed world should not forget them - but we did. There are always losers in the world of 'zero sum finance' and it is those who are unable to play the game. As in any lottery, you have to be able to afford ticket to play - the Third World just watched wide-eyed as the sophisticates of the developed world simply gave away money they did not have to a small number of incredibly wealthy people and then paid for it again. Meanwhile people were dying in front of our eyes and the planet is getting a less healthy place to live.

We must be mad.