Shock News - Brown Is Appalled

Now they are in for it. Gordon Brown has gone public on the fact he is 'appalled' having found out that some financial firms are continuing - or even extending - their bonus culture.

The world must be a constant surprise to poor Mr. Brown. I mean, he thinks and says one thing and people do the opposite. He observes how things should be and then, blow him down with a feather, things behave very differently. It must make him very excited about getting up each morning as he would keen to find out what else has happened he didn't expect.

In the case of the banks, he clearly thought that because all those executives and traders who had been making millions had run up against a wall and lost the lot, that they would feel a great deal of contrition and not want to go through it all again and earn even more money than before. How it must have shocked him that, after he saved the world, and used the hard earned cash of his loyal and worshipping public to bail out the failed financial people that they did not kiss his backside for saving their rotten necks and then all become the financial equivalent of monks - living off the land, wanting no rewards save the joy of living, weaving baskets, treading grapes and distilling fortied green liquors.

Now it has come to his attention that indeed bank executives and other financial people are not behaving the way he had anticipated. In fact, the moment their companies were saved by the global $11 trillion of bail outs, of which Mr. Brown contributed £1.5 trillion on our behalf, it seems that they immediately whooped it up and started all over again. It turned out that the credit crunch had not dried up the flow of cheap money after all - these financial genii had found a new source, the public. Even better, they did not have to seek their permission to get the cheap money, there were no rules or nasty contracts attached, indeed there were no real requirements to pay any of it back - all they had to do was to lose a load of money and the public would continue to pay. If anything, the financial world had a new instrument that allowed them to take even more risks and try to earn even more money which they could pay themselves as they had discovered the one thing that was missing from their bold scheme/scam to make money - an unlimited underwriting of all debts they incurred should they fail, now or in the future.

Mr. Brown must be shocked indeed. After all he gave all that money in good faith. He did not ask for seats on the Boards at banks he had 'invested' in, instead he wanted them to carry on with much the same staff as before as he was convinced they would not want to risk all that again. He did not go to the regulator and sack him for total incompetence and sleeping on the job as that would be churlish - instead he asked the same incompetent fool to write up the rules again with slightly different language and give them a new grand name - Macroprudential Regulation - which would help make it abundantly clear to the public how banks could not overstep the mark again. The fact the public had no idea what the title meant but could plainly see that none of the regulations had changed did not seem to occur to him. It must have sounded different when that hopeless fop, Lord Turner and his willing but intellectually challenged sidekick, Hector Sants, had presented it to him like the characters from 'Pinky and The Brain'.

You see Mr. Brown has a head for dates. He knew that one year ago from today, Lehman Bros bank failed and was allowed to collapse. Inside, he knew that was a massive mistake by the Americans as he had stepped in and saved all the UK banks. Not one of them had been lost and every saver's bit of cash and mortgage had been saved. He even went after those nasty Icelanders who had 'stolen' the savings of many people including our Local Authorities who also had played gambling games with people's money. It came as a nasty shock to Mr. Brown that in a world of derugulation and globalisation, which he decreed should be saved at all costs, that if British subjects had put their money into foreign banks who went bust, then they would not get their money back.

15 September 2008 must have been a dark day for Mr. Brown, and as he went to bed that night with his mug of cocoa he must have thought, 'Now there's something new I learnt today - what went up must come down, particularly if it was traded on hot air.' Sadly, he failed to connect the very clear dots. The financial system he was hell bent on saving was only being set up to carry on, there was no understanding that the system was flawed at its very heart and merely giving the cancer victim an aspirin may only stave off pain for a short while but it does nothing to solve the problem.

But now he is back and fighting. The new eco-friendly light bulb has gone on in his head and he has decided that banks now must be regulated more vigorously. He is going to fly to Pittsburgh in his superman outfit and tell those G20 leaders exactly what for and demand that the world once again follows his fearless lead. In aggressive language he has said:

'Now I will want an agreement - because we are talking about banks in other countries as well as banks in Europe - at the G20.' Clearly Mr. Brown has read the Ladybird version of the banking system and discovered that other countries have banks too - this globalisation thing may have some credence to it, you know.

In a rare moment where he admitted that he was less than perfect, he said. 'It's true that the mood of opinion in Britain was that we needed less regulation and not more. Now we've found we need more.' It was a clear 'No sh*t Sherlock' moment and he obviously believed he is the only world leader that had discovered that banks were out of control in the past - thanks to his own personal 'light touch' approach because he did not want the poor lambs to become uncompetitive and leave the City of London as a third rate financial centre where people came for loans of last resort only.

'We should have all been supervising more,' said Brown sternly as he neatly deflected the blame to fictional others whose role also was supervising even though it was his fault that the FSA stuck their feet up on their desks and played online poker while the banks melted down. Now he wants us all to feel we can trust banks.

At this point, it seems that Brown has lost touch with reality. You see, the public never trusted banks as they watched young numbskulls make millions by creating and trading products that served no earthly purpose and had lost all connection with the assets they purported to represent. In our feeble way, we had already guessed that the banks were trading blocks of nothing and pretending they were worth something. We also know that the same is happening again. It must come as another terrible shock to Mr. Brown that banks are buying former Lehmans open derivative positions for anything from 10 to 50 cents in the dollar in wild speculation that when the liquidators have unravelled the mess, they might find some of them are worth something.

Now, maybe I'm being naive here. We have just bailed out the whole system, we have collectively paid trillions to do so, covering the immense losses that allows liquidators to write down such derivatives to virtually zero because we allowed such contracts not to be honoured - a debt obligation was forgotten about, a default swap was allowed to disappear. Now, in the aftermath of the largest corporate failure in his history, we are going to allow the vultures in the banks to pick over the failed pieces and find small nuggets of gold in order to make money again trading the very same products that ruined us.

We must be stark raving crackers, the lot of us.

It isn't regulation that is needed - Yvette Cooper's 'Janet & John' book on the financial system does not quite suffice in situations like this. The banking system needs a fundamental reform and the time to do it was when they needed the money to survive as they would have had no choice but to comply. Instead, the whole gravy train is back on the tracks again, the banks are making money, the leaders of the countries are satisfied disaster has been averted and the system is slowly reviving. The banks have all their power restored and the very people who ruined us are being paid for their thoughts and leadership on the solution. It is not a bit of wonder that they do not want change and now they are once again 'Masters of the Universe' and the types that Blair, Mandelson and Brown bent their heads and so very gently kissed the backsides of before, are once again calling the shots.

Mark my words, there will be few constraints applied to the system - reform will not come and companies will be allowed to make money out of Lehmans' losses. 15 September 2008 was a very dark day for the world generally. 15 September 2009 is even darker because we have just reset the House of Cards to be puffed over by the gentle waft of a butterfly's wings - again.

Dates In My Diary

I am always interested when offered an invitation to a free webinar - they are great because you can dip out easily if it is not interesting but best of all you never have to leave your desk, so if the subject matter is good I try to attend. But when I received an invitation today I had to check the date and make sure it was not an April Fool's prank.

The invitation came via ExecuNet and it sounded good as it is part of the Power Break series and was entitled 'Weathering The Storm: Executive Talent Management In An Economic Downturn'. The sort of subject matter I'm interested in, I was about the accept the invitation when I noticed who the speaker was - a Dr. Anna Tavis who happens to be Global Head of Talent Management and Organizational Development at AIG Investments.

It was at that point that I reached for the calendar and checked the date.

AIG is not exactly the most shining example of best practices in terms of talent management or organizational development for that matter. On around its third or fourth round of Fed bail outs, it has consumed well over $200bn of cash pumped into it and is in state hands. Clearly the 'talent' they have is for building a house of cards in terms of investment and organizationally the company looks virtually defunct.

Still, I expect I will be getting invites to an RBS seminar on 'How to maximise your pension when your company is bust' and an invite from Jaqui Smith on 'How to maximise your expense allowances' in conjunction with Brown, McNulty, Conway and Darling. I am also waiting for tips on 'Knowing when to set up a blind trust when you are not meant to get paid enough to have one' by Lord Mandelson who follows on from his insightful series on 'How to get sacked twice, consort with rich Russians, get a peerage and a handsome pay off', 'How to get a passport pronto', and 'Mortgage loans made simple.'

I am also expecting a seminar invite from Tony Blair simply entitled, 'Timing', while 'The Janet and John guide to quantitative easing' by Yvette Cooper should be good too. The best should be the jointly presented seminar by Gordon Brown and Barack Obama called 'Big Number Theory - how to destroy an awful lot of money and someone else pay for it.'

Cool Facts of The Week For Pub Conversations

Did you know that monkeys show organisational skills? Perhaps AIG should consider using a few but it was found that monkeys at Stockholm Zoo pelted stones at visitors. Studies showed that before the Zoo opened each day, the monkeys would look around for stones, make piles of them behind a bush and then when the visitors came by, they would pelt the stones at them.

In another revelation, it seems that chimpanzees exchange meat for sex, thus proving that prostitution is indeed the oldest profession after all. I wonder many pieces of rump Max Mosely paid for his sessions over the years?

A recent study at John Hopkins University has shown a link between oral sex and some throat cancers. It seems to be all to do with the HPV virus which can cause cancer and it has been suggested that those who have oral sex with more than 6 partners have 9 times greater chance of getting throat cancer - which is a greater risk than from smoking or drinking alcohol. I'm sure there is some witty line to be added here but I shall refrain.

It is good to know that Reality TV is getting to the nub of topical issues. Fox TV in the US is putting together a series called 'Someone's Gotta Go' where employees of small companies decide which one of their colleagues gets laid off.

And finally, a woman in Berlin is to divorce her husband because he cleans too much. There, it's a message to all men not to try too hard - it could ruin your marriage.

Power Napping

John Redwood was accused of 'nodding' off during Shadow Chancellor, George Osbourne's recent speech on the economy in the Commons. Yvette Cooper, leading the Government in the absence of Alistair Darling who was getting another pep talk from his Boss, made the scurrilous accusation to draw attention away from the fact she was useless at her job and fast asleep at the wheel of the speeding car that was the UK economy.

Rather like Labour Lord Ahmed, who killed a man while texting and driving his car in the outside lane of a motorway, Cooper and her crew of idiots have not just wrecked the economy but botched the attempts at solutions, only to get off scot free.

Cooper has been at the heart of the debacle of bail outs and negligence.

Contrition

It seems that Labour have this issue with being accountable. They put in lots of daft targets - one for the Foreign Office was apparently 'To make the world a safer place'. You may think that was not measurable but after the 9/11 tragedy in the US, 7/7 in the UK, Bali, Madrid, Russia etc and now wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, tensions in Iran and North Korea, I would say that there has been massive failure. Don't even start on the NHS or Education.

Gordon Brown came the closest he has ever done to accepting blame for the financial mess we are in recently when he said he should have been stronger in pressing other countries after the Asian Crisis in 1997. Right, that explains what you did not do in 1997, so talk us through the 12 years since - what else did you not do that would have avoided this financial havoc we are in?

Unregulated markets, greed culture, over dependence on bank profits, poor taxation policy on corporates, stealth taxation, lack of planning for the future in terms of squirreling profits in good times and pension provision for retirement (except of course for public servants who are laughing), openly rewarding private equity and financiers with tax breaks, not dealing with the non-domicile problems, allowing Non Executive Directors to make money with zero responsibility and governance, allowing the housing market to spiral out of control and the financial products associated with it to become ever more unsound, making people think they could create money from their assets to subsidise their living when wages were dropping, not reading the warning signs in the economy as long as 6 years ago when the IMF made it clear Britain was heading for trouble, borrowing too much and creating a 'credit culture', allowing an unprecedented growth in unsecured loans, letting the benefit system get out of control.......

You could go on and on but the basic premise is that this Government came in on a wave of good economic conditions. Whether you liked the Conservatives or not, many of the toughest decisions on the economy had already been made and the books were in far better order than the horrible mess Labour created last time around - for all her dictatorial, hard-headedness, Margaret Thatcher had given Britain a second chance. Change was definitely needed and Labour took over and just kept the economy in simple shape by watching certain dials and setting limits. It all seemed so easy.

The Shape of Things That Did Come

But a feature of this Government was how they avoided detail - they thought governing was easy and as long as the numbers looked big, it was all fine. The defining moment came quite early for me and set the scene for 'laissez faire' Government. The late Robin Cook, as Foreign Secretary, was awoken one night to find that Britain was involved in a fracas in Sierra Leone. He was baffled - he had no idea that there was trouble there and least of all that British troops were deployed. His Civil Servant lackys pointed out that if he had read his Dispatch Boxes, he would have been fully aware of the situation. Cook had famously swept into his office saying that he did not read the Dispatch Boxes and governed on a 'need to know' basis only. Presumably, he got his updates from newspapers and hearsay in the corridors of power.

Mandelson, Blair, Vaz, Lord Levy, Lord Sainsbury, Robinson and many others have flirted with the heady mix of power and sleaze/cronyism. Blair relied on a body of external advisers to effectively run the country so much so that at one point Alistair Campbell effectively ran the Government. Meanwhile Blair could get his head into the trough and sort out things for non-domiciles like Mittal and then invest in properties for his son via his Trust that wasn't so blind, using the services of a convicted conman in the process. The peerages for loan scandals slipped off his greasy back after certain email servers seemed 'inaccessible' to investigating police who in the end were vilified for wasting public time when in fact people should have been brought to book. Mandelson we know is an unreformed character - with constant 'diplomatic shuttles' to Brazil which must be the most promising of links to Britain judging by the number of times he has been there, murky meetings on yachts with Russian Oligarchs and now even a blind trust for a career politician whose wages surely should not justify it, yet he has nice properties and a lavish lifestyle. He only recently got his handy 3 year unwarranted pay off from the EU for services rendered and backs scratched so it is curious as to how he enough money to afford one as setting them ain't cheap.

Again, you could go on.

Sleeping At The Wheel

My point is, John Redwood nodding off in the Commons during yet another speech haranguing the Government's abysmal record is nothing compared to the sleeping at the wheel by people like Yvette Cooper.

Because of this Government's failure to govern properly, every taxpaying citizen is in hock to the tune of £40,000 over and above what our normal tax liabilities are on an annual basis. It doesn't sound very much when you say it like that, but like any debt, we will have to pay it off over time and we end up paying a multiple of the principal - and that's if we have the wherewithal the afford it.

Contrition and accountability are lost words in this Government's vocabulary but I would forgive them that if they could just do their jobs properly and stop trying to deflect blame onto some mythical global blob of energy that has supposedly created the financial meltdown. People are not stupid - all the warning signs were there. We now get bleats on avoiding protectionism so that we can once more feed on that global energy and revamp our nation.

Yvette Cooper is the 'Janet & John' of politicians with her simple words so that idiots can understand that numbers are big and we are too stupid to comprehend them so leave it to her to sort out.

No thanks, Yvette. You lot slept for 12 years and have the gall to complain someone dozed for a few seconds. How very Blairist of you.

Mervyn's Day At The Casino

In The Bank of England's incredible 315 year history no Governor has ever tried it, not even in very bad times before. Today Mervyn King will become the first man in British banking history to use the Fiscal Policy known as Quantitative Easing - for those of us who have not swallowed the Economics textbook it simply means to print more money.

Quantitative Easing (QE) - The Idiot's Guide

Imagine a pyramid made up of three layers of champagne glasses. QE is much like pouring in liquid into the glass at the top so that it overfills and cascades into the glasses below it which in turn fill and then overflow into the glasses at the lower level which also eventually fill and overflow. If you think of the top glass as the banks, the middle layer as business and the bottom layer of glasses as consumers, then what you see is pretty much the process of QE.

It's the idea that if you print a load more money, pour it into the banks, they will want to lend more to businesses who in turn offer us, the consumers, more credit.

Now the real dummies amongst us may point out that a great many transactions today do not use money and that therefore the process of printing more money will have far less relevance today than say in the period known as The Great Depression in the 1930s when the theory was honed.

All I can say is that the intelligent people who came up with this idea have pulled their heads out of the theory book, written all those years ago, and noticed that fact and have, of course, taken it into account. I think.

These intelligent people are the ones who have presided over the collapse of 5 major UK banks and pumped a great deal of money into the banking system already without any great effect but, keep quiet cynics, because now it's Mervyn King's turn - and he has kept a discrete distance from the fiasco to date, adding a few acidic words about policy every now and then. To a large extent, he has kept his credibility alive by doing so.

But today marks the start of his big gamble - one unprecedented in modern times. Let's all hope 'Big Merv' is right.

How Does It Work In Practice?

At midday today - as such is the pageantry of big banking business - an imaginary gong will go and the Bank will start to use its £75bn of new money it has printed to offer to buy £2bn of Government debt in the form of bonds from institutions.

It's some convenience to just go and print a load of new money and that's based on the concept of a 'Fractional Reserve'. This is vaguely about the notion that at any time The Bank of England has, say, £100bn in its coffers but it may print up to, say, £600bn of bank notes to go into circulation - remembering each bank note comes with a promise to pay the bearer the amount on the note its value should the bearer present it at The Bank. Fractional Reserve tells us that in practice no one ever does and certainly not at the same time - so we can print vastly more notes to go into circulation than their total promissory value held in the Bank's vaults. Quite how the Bank would pay these days as it no longer has any gold is another discussion entirely - but don't worry, our PM has thought of everything.

So the first of these bond auctions will start today and The Bank of England will be buying these £2bn batches of Government debt or Gilts. Two hours later, there will be a second stage when the institutions and banks will be allowed to participate in these reverse auctions - and similar activities will carry on twice weekly until all the new cash printed is consumed.

Gilt prices have risen sharply in the last few days as the financial system salivates at the prospect of more money being created out of thin air and being spent - it's just like a sucker walking into the East End with a wadge of new notes wanting to buy a car from Arthur Daley, there is not a chance in hell these Gilts will be a 'good deal'.

The top champagne glass is being filled starting today. The one snag in my analogy which is reflected in real life is that nobody knows how much the champagne glasses hold and so how long and how much money will it take to fill them all.

Deflation

This amazing gamble comes after The Bank has dropped interest rates to 0.5%, the lowest rate in history. This kind of Fiscal Stimulus goes into a new area known to some (i.e. me) as Fiscal Defibrillation - a series of very sharp and big jolts to the heart of the financial system to stimulate it into life. QE is the second major jolt, if you discount the meagre £1.3 trillion of bank bail outs, loans and guarantees on offer to the UK banking system. The disease that The Bank is trying to avoid is 'Deflation', the banking equivalent of 'MRSA' which is what the injured financial system may catch after its major surgery and tries to recover.

Thankfully, the financial system is not being treated by the NHS but by clever people like Mervyn King, Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown, Yvette Cooper and a host of really brainy, intellectual and incredibly greedy bankers. So our economy is in fine hands, as it has been for the last 10 years.

Deflation is a bit of a killer disease itself - it's the concept that just as the financial system is recovering then prices to start to fall rapidly - just as in the fire sales we have been seeing in shops. Consumers, of course, those irrelevant carriers of wealth that rich people would like to have, like lower prices - but we are not the important ones here. If bankers cannot make huge profits, where is the fun of loaning us money?

The perverse logic of deflation is that textbooks say that we, the evil consumer, will delay spending the cash given to us via our champagne glasses, in anticipation of yet lower prices - the concept that I will not go to the East End and buy that car off the nice man in the sheepskin coat and trilby this week as he will have a lower price next week. This of course has the effect of increasing the effect of the downturn.

When A Science Is Not Exact

The financial process of treatment and recovery is sadly not an exact science as we have seen so far from the vast bank bail outs across the globe, estimated at around $5 trillion and rising. Mervyn King grimly warns that he does not have any idea how long he has to keep printing money and how much will be needed to get us to spend again. All he knows, or should I say, thinks, is that eventually it will work.

That's why no one has ever tried it before. I don't know about you, but that really fills me with confidence.

'It Wasn't My Fault'

While there are some who wonder just what a 'City Minister' does, I for one am feeling very sorry for Lord Myners who yesterday gave a 'robust defence' of what appeared to be gross incompetence in the 'Fred Goodwin Pension Fiasco' which faces the Government.

"I was assured the pension arrangement for Sir Fred Goodwin reflected 30 years of service," said Lord Myners yesterday as he mounted a very sound defence of his actions in the lead up to the fiasco in the Lords. The fact it sounded as a forlorn defence against the gathering cloud of Brown and Darling revisionism regarding the truth of the affair in order to appoint a scapegoat made it all the more poignant.

Just Doing His Job

Of course, if you are an ex-City type yourself and the Government is being advised by a horde of Investment Bankers at extreme cost to the taxpayer, then no one would quibble about a 'fair pension' after 30 years service to one of their own. And £693,000 per year doesn't sound much in the great scheme of the fantastic numbers that are being thrown about in the bank bail outs, after all it was commensurate with his final salary.

But as Harriet Harman has seized upon, such an embarrassing number is vote winning if something can be done about it in retrospect. It becomes even better if a specific individual, not directly related to the Government hierarchy, like Lord Myners, can be blamed for it. Then they have a scapegoat as well - perfect - and Harriet knows it. By mentioning it herself over the weekend that Sir Fred should 'not count on' keeping his pension, the Government and specifically Harman, seems hell bent on spending any sum of money to block him having it and so gaining the public's confidence that they are acting in our interest, not just being totally incompetent as it it appears. Harman also advances her public stock for a future leadership challenge.

How Did Fred Get Away With It?

The villainous Fred Goodwin, as he is now portrayed by the Government (and it will come as a source of some glee to Harriet Harman that Goodwin was a close ally and friend of Gordon Brown and his retinue of famous Scots now seen to be on the make), is the man who seems to have hoodwinked a raft of lawyers, Board members, Ministers and banking advisers and got away with a fabulous pension it is now deemed he does not deserve.

Myners claims that in fact he did not meet with Tom McKillip, the RBS Chairman, and Bob Scott, a Non Executive Director, who were charged with negotiating Goodwin's exit package (and hardly likely to be nasty to their old boy), until after they had already agreed Goodwin's exit package and they told him only that Goodwin had been given a pension reflecting his 30 years service. No warning bells here then, as Goodwin had agreed to waive his entitlement to 15 months salary - which on the face of it was cheap as Peter Mandelson had got a 3 year pay off from the EC when he was appointed Business Secretary which the taxpayer pays for.

At the meeting, Myners was accompanied by a Government lawyer who trotted out a 'standard script' to set out the Government's position. Myners also says he told McKillip and Scott that "In exchange for support, there would be no reward for failure. We would expect Boards to minimise the cost of severance."

The problem was that Goodwin, although being forced out, was leaving as an early retirement not as a sacking. So McKillip and Scott were acting on that path - the Government did not have the balls to say Goodwin should be summarily sacked and receive no compensation or pension. The let-off was all of their own making. Goodwin, by waiving his pay off, was actually being perfectly fair in insisting on his pension rights after 30 years of service, the maximum under the company scheme.

All the facts were staring everyone in the face - they knew his salary, they knew his length of service, they knew what he was entitled to it.

So why has it come as such a shock as to how big the pension was?

Taking A Hit For The Team

The ground is being prepared for Myners to be sacrificed brutally in the wake of the affair. Alistair Darling is already sloping his shoulders and has sinisterly warned that the Ministers must have the 'humility' to admit mistakes. If that were the case we wouldn't have the time left in the Universe to hear them and the associated excuses, but the pointed remark was for Myners alone.

He was expected to fall on his sword or be roughly pushed on it very soon.

Myners, though, was having one of it as his Lords statement showed. He claims that he knew Goodwin would get a 'large sum' but not how large that was. It wasn't an issue at the time - he had negotiated Goodwin out as he was told, avoided the embarrassment of a pay-off, surely Goodwin could have a fair pension to live on?

Locking The Gate After The Horse Has Bolted

Gordon Brown has confirmed his sudden rabid hatred for the man he was so friendly with not a few months ago by confirming he has instructed lawyers to find out how much of Sir Fred's £16m pension pot can be kept away from him. It is too little, too late, naturally and an expensive way to solve a problem that with just a modicum of foresight and attention to detail, he could have prevented beforehand.

There are no real excuses here. Everyone was involved in the bail outs, everyone was involved in the specific task that surrounded RBS, everyone knew the stakes they were playing with. Everyone knew the size of the salaries of these individuals from Sandler to Goodwin to Hornby - they knew the kind of money they could be entitled to beforehand - this is not rocket science and it is not an unknown quantity as it is at the very heart of the entire problem identified in the City. The rewards are just too high.

So bleating afterwards about Goodwin's pension is just a smokescreen and by saying that Ministers were not aware of it is just compounding the issues we face on bail outs. If you do understand the basic figures that make up the huge numbers in the City, then you cannot possibly know how much the big numbers you throw at the problem are going to affect it.

I return to a common point. This Government, from start to finish, had no idea about the economy and how it was functioning and they have far less idea about how to remedy its collapse. This whole saga about one man's pay off is absolutely indicative of how little they know or care in their blind panic to try and rectify a situation they made for themselves.

Now we have the unseemly clamour for the scapegoat. Personally, I think Brown, Darling and Cooper should go along with Myners - they couldn't organise a party in a brewery, least of all a bank bail out.

Here Come The Girls

It’s a sure sign the country is in trouble when beer sales fall – in fact at a rate faster than the recession itself at -5.1%.

Perhaps a more worrying sign is that loonies other than David Cameron and Nick ‘Who?’ Clegg are lining up to mount bids for leading the country. Harriet Harman has bid to undermine her glorious leader and raise her own importance by organising a Women’s Summit prior to the G20 meeting.

Should we be scared?

Probably. For the cynical chauvinists this is no ladies book club meeting or hen party, this is a serious attempt by someone who really does think she will be Party Leader at least and second Lady Prime Minister at best (or worst) to undermine Gordon’s Browns attempt to augment his position as World Saver.

I can’t say I like her. I like her husband even less. Jack Dromey was the man, who as Treasurer to the Labour Party, claimed he had no idea about the nature of the Party funding. Apart from the fact it was his job to know how the party was funded and manage the finances, it was certainly his job to find out as he was in charge of the coffers. But no, he was whiter than white when it was found that only Tony Blair, and his long-time friend Lord Levy, who knew what was going on. They had obviously taken the passwords to the computers, the ledger books and access to the bank accounts away – hadn’t they? Nor Gordon Brown, who knew a thing or two about economics or so he had us believe, who was Chancellor, had no idea where or why money was being taken in or possibly repaid at some point in the future. No such thing as adding up or keeping the books tidy in the Labour Party despite the fact the Treasurer would have to be aware that there was a serious hole in the finances which needed shoring up.

It’s about as believable as Bernard Madoff having a 'Mom & Pop' accountant or Sir Allen Stanford having accountants with tiny offices and two desks in Enfield. Indeed they did – how convenient?

The Italian Connection

Rather like Tessa Jowell, whose ‘former’ husband has taken the dive on behalf of his alleged briber, Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi, this week, Harriet claims to know about as much as Manuel the Waiter when it comes to her husband’s doings – how very convenient. Jowell reacted very badly to finding out her husband might ruin her career despite helpfully signing forms when their mortgage was remarkably paid off on a house in the Cotswolds from a lovely ‘gift’ by their Italian benefactor's 'people'. Rather like his old friend and holiday largesse receiver Tony Blair, Berlusconi enjoys a life of freedom despite allegations of ‘bribes’; in Tony’s case they were mere peerages for loans. For Berlusconi, it was just a way of life.

Then again, I am sure Harriet has a clear conscience – as does Jack, Tessa, Tony, Gordon, Lord Levy, Silvio et al.

Dodgy Deals Galore

On the subject of dodgy deals, we are told that Jacqui Smith will be hauled up in front of yet another committee with a foregone conclusion over her claiming £116,000 in expenses on her alleged second home – the one she spends most time in no less. According to complaints by neighbours of her ‘primary’ residence which happens to be a room in a house, she spends no more than 2 days a week there despite it being in London where she is supposed to work. No surprises here, I think, as I would imagine this is the thin edge of the wedge of the vast scam that is MP, Civil Servants, National Assembly and Councillor expenses generally and I certainly think she is not putting much effort into her job.

Rising Value

But a lady who is rising in stock value quickly is none other than Secretary to the Treasury, Yvette Cooper. In the skulduggery that is the slow and clandestine preparations to replace Brown as Leader, Cooper has emerged as a viable candidate to at least block Harman’s manic bid. Cooper is the one who has been trooped out to give condescending , ‘Janet & John’ interpretations of high finance so that the public can understand that billions down the toilet is not as bad as we think and the only way to fight the dreaded doom of financial oblivion so neatly masterminded by people like her. I find her obsequious and sanctimonious tones less than credible and if it represents the standard of opposition to Harman then we may as well have ‘Watch with Mother’ rather than Parliamentary Debates and PM Question Times in the future.

And Your Coffee Is Rubbish Too!

After Starbucks's CEO Howard Schultz had said on a TV Show in New York that the UK was spiralling down (faster than his company's profits), Lord Mandelson, ever the true patriot, reportedly used a four letter word in questioning Schultz's knowledge of the UK economy.

Evidently, Schultz had read my blog linking the bursting of the South Sea Bubble and the collapse of the Coffee House Culture in Britain and how his company's decline is similarly linked to the current recession - or at least that was my view.

I think there would be several people who might use several four-letter words to question Lord Mandelson's understanding of any economy let alone the British one.

But that's Mandy for you, all froth and no cappuccino.

From Facebook to Face-ache

On a non-political note, I see Facebook has withdrawn its new Terms and Conditions which would have allowed them to have kept people’s personal information for themselves even if you decided to delete your account. Amid a clamour of complaints euphemistically termed as ‘Questions’, Mark Zuckerberg (the founder of Facebook) has sought to calm his followers by reverting to the old terms until they ‘can figure out’ a way to do it without any legal recourse.

Many lawyers and concerned people who know something about data privacy think this will be the last of the matter but it is really only Round 2 in the journey that is known amongst the Venture Capital glitterati as ‘Monetizing’. Facebook has been pretty much a huge sump for cash since its inception and despite its extraordinary valuation has clocked up no revenue to talk of to date. This is because it has spent its money accumulating vast amounts of data – the latest is the craze for people to admit to 5 or so things that people didn’t know about them which sounds like a recipe for disaster if ever I heard one.

The fact remains that Facebook is on a race to create a credible and sustainable revenue stream for the future and it has just one asset from which to extract this – that’s us and our valuable data. So, if you have Facebook as your home page, think about this for the future – from there you may enter many other applications or websites and even spend money. Imagine being given a Facebook ‘credit card’ or being tracked as you do so with Facebook getting a referrer fee or percentage of spend in exchange for making your data available to others.

Not possible? Just you wait and see.

They Must Have Seen You Coming, Mate

Mr. Brown is VERY angry. Yvette Cooper is in a right legal tizz. Meanwhile bankers at RBS are paying themselves £1bn worth of bonuses.

What did we expect?

Sick Joke

It's not just that this is greed on a scale that is so appalling as to wonder what goes through the minds of people who think that they are entitled to bonuses when their activities put their bank into public ownership and reduced its value to only a few multiples of the collective bonus they now propose to pay themselves, but it is the incredible lack of thought and planning by the Government to have not even thought of covering this off.

It's a sick joke beyond the imagination of most decent people.

'Asleep On The Job'

From Brown, Darling and Cooper's position, it is as David Cameron put it - a case 'Sleeping on the job'. It really is no use Gordon Brown being 'angry' about it now that it's in the public domain - the Government, while using the taxpayer's money with such generosity, had a moral and legal obligation to have covered this off as a precondition of any bail out.

As far as the credibility of these ministers go, it is cut to shreds. Most people would have thought of this but it is entirely in keeping with the slipshod, knee jerk series of reactions to their stupid policies going wrong which got us here - and they did not pay enough attention to warning signs before the debacle so perhaps we should not have expected anything different in the execution of the so-called 'rescue' mission.

Badly Advised

I come back to a central point of mine. Brown and Darling have surrounded themselves with Investment Bankers at incredible cost to the taxpayer to rescue us from the very catastrophe they caused. It comes as no surprise that their advice seems to overlook penalising their colleagues in the banking world. Indeed, you can bet your life their smarmy, expensive advice was that in order for the machine to restart, adequate incentives needed to be kept in place to tempt the executives into playing ball.

Just as at Northern Rock where Ron Sandler, earning nicely himself, is paying bonuses to staff just for repaying what they owe the taxpayer, the banking mentality is one of mega-money - and it's where numbers like millions do not cut it any longer as they were so 1980s.

Like the whole credit crunch and recession, this was entirely a predictable result of the bail outs.

It really is time we all voted with our feet. Just think if the British public withheld their tax cheques until the Government got this mess sorted out to ensure to a penny goes in bonus to anyone in a bank part owned by the taxpayer.

Now that would be some incentive to get things right, would it not?