2 posts tagged “financial times”

Let's play a game.
Replace one letter of the word Banker with another and reveal their true identity.

That's right. You got it. Replace the B with a W and you have the measure of the people we are talking about.

I know I know, I sound like a broken record but guess what?
I HATE BANKS!

Sincerely, with passion and total commitment I loathe the bastard things.
Not the guy on the counter or the people in the branch but the institutions and their boards of directors and gullible, greedy shareholders.

How can it be right that decade after decade we allow these thieving, greedy sanctimonious bastards to get away with robbing us?

I just want to know why Dick Fuld and all the rest of the worlds' top bankers aren't in jail right now.

It beggars belief when you look around you and see how decimated industry, services and above all peoples lives are. Entire cities are in financial ruins and all because some twat in a 50th floor office was a crook or played silly buggers with an algorhythm. Bernie Madoff was not the only shyster in town these past 15 years. We have all been Ponzi'd!

In the old days rhythm was something confined to the dance floor. Then the catholic church got into the swing and we used rhythm to prevent babies popping out all over the cardinals bath mat. (That's really would be a cardinal sin!) But it seems that with the advent of computers it is now something we all do every time we log in. The rhythm method is the cyber-spheres pornographic alternative to a vicar in a tutu . Well, like all sexual desires that are repressed, the algo rhythm method has now led to a form of VD that has infected every single person who engages in any kind of economic activity.

SMS texts, Phone calls, letters, emails and christ knows what other clever devices are used with gay abandon by the banks to entice us to deposit our money with them. Interest rate incentives, and free gifts are all the rage if you have a few quid but then it all turns nasty.

"Can you  tell me when you will pay this charge?"
"How often do you check your account?"
"Am I talking to Mr .......?"

and on and on the conversations go. Winging their way from Bombay to the back street on Bendigo and Beirut.

"Would you like a credit card with 1200% interest and a $3 credit limit?
What is your pin number?"

WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?

These people call up from somewhere in Nepal and have all your info at their fingertips and yet you have no idea who they are or what they can do to you! For all you know it could be the guy in the chip shop asking you all these questions and when he puts the phone down his next question might be "Do you want fries with that?" It might equally be how fast can we spend this money. Either way you have no way of knowing who or where they are. Great idea that. Inspires confidence. Let's all do it shall we? Lets all call up a random number and ask loads of impertinent questions.  Come on! It's a career move.

These automated human tape recorders input data that bounce across the globe and wrecks credit ratings or makes decisions about peoples real lives based on another fucking algorhythm created by another maths genius with a Ferrari and an apartment in Zurich.

Lets take some examples. Say you are a woman in the middle of a messy divorce and the ex has failed to pay your alimony this week which has sent your credit card to the limit. Say your pay doesn't clear until Friday and today is Monday and although it has left your employers account it hasn't arrived in yours yet leaving you $50 in debt. Say you have enough money in your account but a charge made for cheques has been debited and you forgot. Say you plain forgot that the annual insurance bill is due this week.  Where do you think it gets noticed first?

Or try another tack how about your Granny dies and leaves you a wedge. Or you get divorced and suddenly have a lump sum. Or you win the lottery or you get a bonus where do you think it gets noticed first?

You got it.

The sick thing is that all these things happen to all of us all the time and yet these parasitic monoliths have so much clout that they can literally make or break you by the press of a button, regardless of the true facts.

Power that is just as deadly and lasting as a nuclear weapon that never gets fired is now in the hands of someone who does not know you or your situation. As if that isn't enough the boss of the bank is only interested in his "bonus" and the guy who actually has the job of calling you up is most likely worse off than you are and is jealous of your perceived wealth. What a toxic combination that is.

That is the combination we trust our lives to.

Am I the only one that thinks we are all insane?
Am I the only one who thinks that perhaps we all have tertiary financial syphilis and that it has screwed up our brains?

This morning the esteemed political operative James Carville published an op-ed in the Financial Times.

I couldn't have put it better myself.

Here it is in all its glory.

Financial times image

The most predictable and fascinating ritual of American electoral politics has begun. And, no, I am not talking about early voting or pundit predictions. It is not last-minute robo-calls or get-out-the-vote operations either.

I am talking about finger-pointing. Yes, the blame game. In case you have not noticed, it is in full tilt.

You may think the blame game is played in smoky back rooms and dark alleys. Be under no illusions. The blame game is not merely a sideshow of the drama of the world’s most influential democracy, which elects the world’s most influential leader. In the coming weeks, watching the Republican party implode will be the main event.

The opening salvo was fired in the op-ed pages of the US newspaper of record, The New York Times. On October 13, William Kristol drew his guns in what he believed to be the start of the Republican civil war by beginning his weekly column: “It’s time for John McCain to fire his campaign.” He continued: “Its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic.”

Such an esteemed conservative intellectual would, of course, place blame on the “McCain campaign”. What a convenient target. This is the same Mr Kristol who advised the party in two of its greatest disasters – the Iraq war and the selection of Governor Sarah Palin as the Republican vice-presidential nominee. His idea is to point the finger at political professionals.

My colleague, Paul Begala, and I counselled Republicans on October 20 that the blame game could not begin soon enough and could not leave out any faction of the fractured Republican infrastructure. With so much blame to go around, I am sure everyone will get their own shots in but the people who work on the fringes of our democracy should not bear the brunt of an entire American political party going awry.

Allow me to rise in defence of my fellow political operatives.

The truth is that there was little Mr McCain, or his campaign, could do with a party falling apart at the seams. When Mr McCain announced his second run for the presidency on April 25 2007 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the Republican brand was already tarnished, perhaps beyond repair. At that time, a poll for Democracy Corps, a non-profit polling organisation I co-founded, found that his party was viewed more negatively than positively by far, with 47 per cent of likely voters giving it poor marks and just 34 per cent viewing it positively. At that point 66 per cent of likely voters thought the country was on the wrong track. Of course, it only got worse as the campaign and George W. Bush’s horrendous presidency trudged on. Our latest poll finds that 79 per cent say the country is headed in the wrong direction.

Remember, it was not Mr McCain’s campaign that started the idiotic Iraq war or masterminded the poorly thought out strategies there and on the economic front at home.

It was not his campaign staffers that reignited ridiculously divisive and unnecessary culture wars in 2004 just to win an election, in the process alienating a generation of young Americans.

It was not a campaign staffer that simply flew over a major American city as it was being inundated with water after the failure of federal levees created one of the worst disasters in our nation’s history.

It was not a McCain staffer who made the brilliant choice to appoint Alberto “Fredo” Gonzales as attorney-general, a man who will surely go down as one of the most buffoonish and incompetent individuals to serve in the US government.

It was not just a few McCain staffers who sold their soul and their political party to corporate America and Wall Street while the national debt soared.

It was not McCain campaign staffers who sat idly by as America plunged into its greatest crisis since the Great Depression. (Although one might pause here to note that Mr McCain and his economic advisers played an active role in creating the crisis over the past few decades.)

Blame the idiotic neocons, absurd culture warriors or the talk-radio crowd. Certainly do not forget the silly free-marketers who are now lining up before congressional committees to apologise to the nation for failed economic policy. Believe me, they all deserve every bit of of the blame.

But it was the pillars and icons of the party who did this: from Karl Rove, its self-proclaimed resident genius, to Dick Cheney, an overreaching vice-president, to Mr Bush. Of course, lest any of this read as an absolution of Mr McCain, the senator from Arizona was in lock-step with his colleagues on most or all of their failed policies.

Ultimately, the truth is that Mr McCain’s campaign was dealt an awful hand, albeit one he had a role in creating. You can second guess how they played it (and you should) but campaigns take chances (like they did in doubling-down on Ms Palin) when they are behind. So with only a few days to go before the party is handed its second mammoth loss in as many cycles, following the 2006 mid-term elections, my counsel to Republican friends would be to keep pointing fingers but lay off the political professionals as much as possible. They were not the ones responsible for the disastrous Bush-Cheney-Rove policies that Americans so desperately want to reverse.

The writer is an international political consultant, founder of Democracy Corps, and a CNN political contributor. He was chief strategist for Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008