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The risks are all accruing in the same place - the tax payer. In the form of bank shares, guarantees, unemployment benefits, deferred tax receipts.........................etc.etc. No wonder sterling is flagging.

So what's the choice ? Try to honour all the contracts made by the hubristic banks ? and hang on to the system? or throw in the towel by way of some form of ' chapter 11' legislation and do an Iceland ?

Only knowledge of the potential size of the 'Black Hole of Toxicity ' can inform this choice. And this is a closely guarded secret.







Try to honour all the contracts

This looks like it could be building to be a perfect storm. The more countries that are near to insolvent the greater the risk for those remaining, on both a national and international level. Like a the house of cards that it is removing only one card in a key position causes a knock on effect that brings most of the rest tumbling down too.

At the end of the day there will be loosers, the problem is that it is politically acceptable for millions of people to loose a few £1000 but not for a few big institutions to loose £m.

So it looks like taxpayer beware, although I have a feeling they will get you one way or another!

Oh, you mean the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ has noticed that there is actually other things happening?

I think it is easy to overestimate the importance of this event, and the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ has done a very good job of over emphasising it entirely.

It is of historical interest that Obama is Black - but when it comes to his involvement with us, it would make no difference whether it was he, or Hilary Clinton, or maybe even John McCain who is in office. As has been remarked many times, the policies were beginning to look rather similar.

I think the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ has forgotten in the ambition to spend as much of my taxes on silly programming, that:

1. He is NOT leader of the Western World
2. We did NOT vote for him
3. He is NOT a British Citizen
4. Most people come the Weekend will still be more likely to read stories about Vicars and Actresses

The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ is often seen by other countries as being the voice and indeed the representative of the people of this country. The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ knows this from their own World Service system.

All the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ is doing today is portraying us as the 51st state.

We are not. Never have been. Never will be.

Now, exactly how many millions has this coverage cost across the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ?

Its my money you know, and I am obliged by law to give it to you.

Is the Standard & Poor's of which you speak related to the ratings agency which, along with its bretheren, turned a blind eye to the terminal weaknesses of the financial system and thus bears a substantial responsibility for our catastrophic situation?

CALIBRE OF LEADERS.

While the masses continue vote like lobotomised lemmings we (and other 'civilised' countries) will go on getting governance that is 'not about our wellbeing'.

While it suits the rats who seek (and are admitted to) office, to school us all into lobotomised lemmingry (inability to analyse people, and situations, accurately) nothing will improve.

Re your last para, Paul, I think we're already well past the point of 'really going to wear thin'. People are not just fed up and angry but have lost hope, too. Sadly, unlike the US, it seems we have no one (monarch or political leader of any party) who can inspire this country's people in the way that President Obama has his.

its them market to market rules that force people to give a value to assets that you can't sell today that cause trouble.

Fear and dealing with fear is the real key. No one is taught about how to deal with fear, there is little written on it and few talk about it. However a trader, for example, who has to make money every day regardless how mad the markets are, deals with it everyday.

so its not a financial wizard so much that is needed but someone who understand fear. Someone who has the techniques to emotionally process those emotions that prevent people acting correctly regardless of fear.

fear is about unspoken beliefs. Having maybe wrong imaginary ideas about something that creates mental blocks in people. e.g We don't ask someone for something because we fear rejection even though that is unproven.

Fear rules our lives and it can rule organisations and states. It ruled the FSA when they admitted they were too frightened to regulate. Look how fear runs through people and organisations like some invisible ectoplasm whose presence is only known through effects in actions that can be seen.

We know fear is infectious.

So each of us has to find the British lion hiding in us. What is fear like? its like this

So you are worried what a credit agency, which is a vested interest, has to say about the UK when it was the slack monitoring of banks, hedge funds and others by credit rating agencies, giving triple A ratings to all and sundry, that was a major cause of this crisis to begin with?

Personally, I could not give a monkeys what anyone in these agencies say and if they threaten the financial well-being of the UK in any way then we should send in the boys in the sand coloured berets to have a word with them. This is after all, is it not, financial war?

Anyhow, I am frankly staggered that anyone from the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ has managed to recover from their Obama orgasm and is in a fit state to type anything. Listening to some of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ types today I was convinced that, given the opportunity, there would have been a mass puckering of lips if the President elect had come within kissing distance!

It is good to note that someone else is dwelling on the very real economic troubles here in the UK. History is indeed being made today (Obama) but to me, it just brings home the fact that we are spiralling down a plug hole and our only apparent means of escape is by way of an unelected leader. Too much debate is being given over to the blame game and I am sick and tired of the term "global crisis"The reality is GB assured us not to long ago that the UK was best placed for this crisis. I didn't believe him then and I certainly don't now.At what point is someone going to stand up and stop this government from putting a sticking plaster on this. It is all very well them playing doctors and nurses but they are charging us an astronomical amount for this private care. And that's another thing. I am sick of the privacy, the lack of preemptive discussion. No debates in the house. No public consultations. What needs to happen? Well firstly we, the public, need facts and figures and if that means holding the bankers down and making them squeal - so be it! How on earth can solutions be found when the extent of the problem hasn't been ascertained. Secondly, if the govt really want to prove they are doing "everything it takes" then submit GB, AD et al to interviews with Jeremy Paxman. If, by the time he has finished with them, they have convinced the public they have "what it takes" then great. If not, we need new blood. Someone needs to be pro-active here. I am sure I am not the only person tearing their hair out at the amount of discussion and lack of action whilst jobs, homes and savings are being lost, our currency is disappearing, interest rates non effective. The reckless have been rewarded and the shrewd saver trodden upon. The message is wrong and the only thing being achieved here is massive debts for our children and grandchildren. The USA have hope in Obama. Here in the UK, we are merely treated as mushrooms - kept in the dark and fed sewage. How can we be expected to have fair and balanced views when we are being asked to fund the unknown?

bluebell42 (#2) "This looks like it could be building to be a perfect storm."

When this was raised here (and elsewhere before) in early 2007 and throughout
the year most people wouldn't have it (apologies NewFazer, you've endured it for even longer than has been pressing it).

Yet most still won't acknowledge the primary drivers, and despite many requests for Newsnight to cover it, they didn't, and.... they still won't.

The analysis/prognosis goes back years (to Cattell, Herrnstein and Murray, and Lynn) so it's not as if it SHOULD have surprised anyone who hasn't been in denial....(but there's a lot of it about, conditioned by political correctness) - when exactly it would happen was moot I guess.

HAVE NEWSNIGHT READERS/BLOGGERS GONE A LITTLE ......?

bookhimdano (#7) "Fear and dealing with fear is the real key. No one is taught about how to deal with fear, there is little written on it and few talk about it."

Steady on. Conditioned and unconditioned fear has been central to behavioural science for decades, and there have been no end of papers written on it, not to mention that there being a very powerful and reliably technology which is used every day both in the pharmaceutical industry and research labs more generally as behaviour assays all over the world!

What you may mean is that YOU don't know very much about this. Why do so many people these days take their own self-reference as a universal reference rather than look into matters objectively? Is there a narcissistic pandemic?

Finally, is it my imagination or were there a lot more black people on Newsnight than usual, they only comprise about 14% of the population (but about 50% of the prison population), the fastest growing, largest minority group is the Hispanics. Furthermore, I take it that everyone fully appreciates that Obama's mother was

BAD SCIENCE AND MAD MONEY (#9)

I posted on Susan Watts thread to the effect that any 'scientist' calculating that Obama has 4 years to fix the climate, does not realise he has missed the 'unknown unknowns' out of his equations.
By the same token, I have been convinced all along that when vaguely-real money gets 'derived' for the umpteenth time, unknown unknowns creep in (a bit like prions, in a cow fed sheep) and you get Mad Money Disease, that no one can diagnose or characterise.
Gordon's calm confidence is that of the delusional, about to fly unaided, from a high cliff. Further, I observe he can no more do fake anger than fake a smile. This is a very peculiar man. Once again, our political system has given us a peculiar leader. If it were not so galling and futile, I might cry: "Time for Change".
For far less than the cost of one Obama, we could buy ourselves an independent candidate in every constituency in this country. Party Politics is the enemy within, far more insidious and threatening to our future (and freedom) than Terror. If only we could tell the electorate, next time, "You have nothing to fear but fear itself", when some spinning 'Big Beast', hired for their nefarious skills, tells us that unless we vote 'party' all the air will be stripped from the planet and devils will gnaw on our children. SPOIL PARTY GAMES

Obama's plan will see the final destruction of the US economy. His story is going to be the biggest tragedy since Othello.

Obama is merely proposing use of the same fire-fighting equipment as Brown but on an even more massive scale - neither of these guys can read what it says on the can: 'PETROL'.

11..YOU don't know very much about this. ..

that is not the evidence is it?

if it's such a highly examined subject everyone knows and talks about why does it dominate most people's lives and most institutions?

why do 90% of people lose in the markets if fear has no power? why did the FSA say it was too frightened to regulate if fear is discussed and people are trained in it?

because the reality is it is not talked about or widely known? which is why it has power.

people who talk about fear lightly are people who do not face it on a day to day basis and so are like backseat drivers.


fear dominates society because it is generally unknown and not talked about not because it is talked about.

anyone who can come up with an easy universal antidote to fear would become a billionaire.

what is dominating society at the moment is fear. maybe you have the methods for dealing with it? perhaps you have the antidote. do share it with us. i have the humility to learn from a self proclaimed master of fear.

bookhimdano (#14) What I said was "What you may mean is that YOU don't know very much about this." I was clearly referring to your saying "No one is taught about how to deal with fear, there is little written on it and few talk about it."

I was specifically referring to the "there is little written on it", as up until the 70s, 'fear' was central to behavioural science and much clinical work (e.g the treatment of phobias, anxiety, avoidance behaviours etc). Tests of anxiety (e.g the TMAS) were, in the 1950s/60s, essentially measures of drive or fear. Motivation and reinforcement was, back then, treated as drive induction and reduction. Since the 1960s probably more has been researched on the brain mechanisms of fear and reward than any other subject. See Index Medicus.

As with almost everything else that I say here, one doesn't have to take my word for anything, one can, and should, look it up for oneself using what I post as a cue.

Fear is an unconditioned, innate, genetically progranmed class of behaviours, and a lot of its CNS and somatic anatomy, physiology and neurochemistry is understood. It can be conditioned, it is managed.

I have said many times that there is plenty of evidence that we live in a de-regulated society where Government has devolved control. The FSA (like MHRA, NICE) were not adequately mandated/resourced to effectively regulate. What is so hard to grasp about that? In risk there is profit, those who have high thresholds for fear (low on conscience/empathy), i.e. 'snakes in suits' (see and closely related videos) do well under such circumstances, some advance them for this very reason. Some of us suspect Financial Services (especially) are awash with them as a consequence. In the USSR they would have been sent to the Gulag, seriously.

Congratulations, Paul, on your new book. I look forward to reading it.

And, you're bang on, Paul, people are rightly tired of crisis and gazillion pound payouts.

I really think that this should be looked out by thoroughgoing Parliamentary debate (inclusive of the House of Lords) and, possibly, electoral approval should be sought before such fantastic sums are committed. The minute-by-minute rollercoaster of October is a long way away now and there is no reason for these plans to be taken into the hands of an elect few.

I do worry when people say that the situation is so desperate that ordinary people must be bled. "Too Posh to Pay" is just supposed to be a television program and I thought the days when gentlemen's gambling debts were legally unenforceable were long gone.

Crippled banks, huh? Let's study the trade press, shall we?

Could I point out a few articles appearing in the trade press recently
which might shed some light on the context which is exacerbating the pernicious aspects of the beartrap that was brought back from the country weekend at Chequers? And which was unfortunately ratified away from the fussy intellectual disciplines of the office and Parliament?

------------------------------------------------------
BANKNAME banking platform pays for itself 29 Oct 2008
"One BANKNAME" project allows quicker market entry, cuts costs, and provides single customer view
BANKNAME's $1bn global project to move its disparate banking systems onto one global platform has now paid for itself halfway through the scheme
--------------------------------------------------

I will not quote the body of the article, but I will excerpt some choice phrases. "Going global". "Entering new markets for tens of millions of dollars rather than hundreds of millions of dollars". The trade press seems interesting.

The urge to enter new markets in this current clime is interesting. Anything juicier in the trade press? More ratings-friendly than well-managed bank re-engineers business processes? How about this?

Ladies and gentlemen, I commend to your attention a class of liabilities and derivative-based fun issuing from the vaults of high street retail banks in the UK. Today. A "bank's global derivatives infrastructure" is being re-purposed, not merely to run FSA-mandated risk scenarios (nothing so quotidien confines our titans of finance) but to offer derivative products to external clients at a faster pace than ever before.

"The determining reason to introduce a high-performance environment was the need to add scale to the [derivatives] platform and rapidly bring new products to market."

Before Christmas, this is what a company can report to the specialist trade press:

(1) a "50% increase in trading volumes".

(2) New risk "products" being "rapidly" brought to the market. CEO thrilled that they could manage to "increase revenue to the business".

Achtung, baby. A 50% increase in trading volumes. What is this company? Step forward one of the three recipients of the Govt. recapitalisation fund, BANKNAME B.

"One of our most complex products uses a tree-like structure to generate valuations and is very memory intensive, so if you are limited on that front, you will see a slowdown in your competitive performance."

Wow. Complex derivative products being issued on a global platform coming online in, say it with me, "first quarter 2009".

When "by the first quarter of next year... the use of [the trading platform] will be extended to other areas of the corporate markets division".

In a piece of Jungian synchronicity, early 2009 will be just in time for the completion of this BANKNAME's HMG-led rights issue. With management initiative like that, what village idiot wouldn't underwrite their liabilities?

Right, who is the customer for this product? The Basingstoke Carpet Shop? The Formula One engineering company? The cattle-gate welder? The roof insulation company? Or Globocorp companies managing risk? Gosh, without Government help? Without "loss caps".

This system will enable a "reduction in time spent on risk valuations". Super. Nothing like wasting time on risk analysis. Just jump in there. Supercomputer-enabled high-street banking.

But "global platform"? "Risk products"? How to ascertain that we are not looking at an open channel for the internationalisation of the HMG bailout fund?

Some questions do arise.

How global is "global" derivatives trading?

Is this funding a voter-friendly banking facility? Or turning taxpayer cash into SWIFT-friendly confetti?

With such a potential for social unrest all those draconian Big Brother Labour policies seem to make more sense now, don't they?

*goes to shops to buy long life milk*

15 "there is little written on it",

perhaps i didn't make myself clear.


what i meant was there is very little written on it that is useful.

for either people are keeping the 'secret to themselves' or are unable to demonstrate any effective method.

bookhimdano (#18) You were perfectly clear. That is why I picked you up on it. I was making a point. Try learning from it.

They keep their professional skills no more a secret than do doctors, dentists, engineers, and even market-traders.

Education is not a process of being told 'secrets'.

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

...Try learning from it...

so far lots of insults but no knowledge of any use. it that the usual method of teaching? or is that unique to you?

talking about papers written by people who spent years poking rats with sticks have little relevance to my point.

one group of people do not have the monopoly of the study of fear?

if you played Churchills 'fight them on the beach speech' to rats or chickens would that make them lose fear?

indeed among the most useful stuff on fear is to be found among those who deal with the mind e.g budhists , makers of horror films and comedians [we laugh at what we fear].

The jobs creation is all pretend. We can NOT create UK jobs. Any jobs 'created' are for anyone in the EU.

On this morning's Today program it was optimistically put forward by a reporter that 'they might all go home'. Evan Davis replied, quietly, that the labour supply has not in fact reduced ie despite misinformation from the govt's pet ( and funded) think tank IPPR, Eastern European workers are not 'going home'.

But he failed to say where that info had come from, and glossed quickly over it. If jobs are created (eg the Olympics), Eastern European workers will come, or return, to fill them, anyway. There is nothing to prevent that under the current EU rules.

So we need the debate about the EU labour liberalisation rules at this point, without ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ reporters taking it upon themselves to censor any such discussion in case they dont look like 'nice' people.

Do we need to try to change the internal EU labour liberalisation rules, or get out of the EU? This is the discussion we need to have, straight, out front, not mentioned under breath as it was this morning.

And fast, because beyond the internal movement of labour within the EU, a meeting at the European Parliament this week showed that the EU will push ahead, at the first opportunity, with Mandelson's offer to open up to cheap labour from 150 countries. It was all dealt with as secretly and craftily as ever. But it is for real.

Are we going to let this happen and say goodbye to labour standards and liveable wages that people here have fought for, for ever?

Those working in the publicly funded media have a responsibility NOW to get this aired, with full information into the public sphere, whatever the official efforts to keep it schtum.

bookhimdano (#21) "so far lots of insults but no knowledge of any use. it that the usual method of teaching?"

Not insults, just helpful advice which you are not taking. Your belief that they are insults is mistaken. I suspect it is just because you feel uncomfortable.

I am not obligated to educate, just to correct errors when I see them, and you have posted factual errors. What you do and do not find useful is just a function of what you do with what you are aware of. I have provided enough links over the years for anyone who is genuinely interested to follow up should they so wish. That is precisely how higher education used to operate in my day, and I am just continuing the tradition. Nothing personal. Those who worked, got good degrees, those who did not and expected to be fed, did not. Perhaps that has changed - I fear it has.

Most medical research is done on animals for good reasons. Most of what I was referring to in above posts referred to humans. If you persist in posting errors, I will persist in correcting you. I'd expect anyone else to do me the same service.

#12 '...when vaguely-real money gets 'derived' for the umpteenth time, unknown unknowns creep in (a bit like prions, in a cow fed sheep) and you get Mad Money Disease, that no one can diagnose or characterise.'

I like your thinking, Barrie. No wonder foreigners don't want our money any more. Perhaps we should try culling and burning all money that is over, say, 3 years old;)

So Britain will soon have an AA's hole instead of an AAA's hole that the sun no longer shines out of ,how trajic that it will no longer be equal amongst AAA's holes on the internatianal stage.

We shall have to make A while the sun no longer shines or borrow some from the BNK of Inklnd

Are we seriously being told that an AA's has less value than an AAA's and will it affect our nations bottom line interest payment ?

This is a great post by Paul Mason, perhaps he should be a ghost writer for Robert pestons Blog?

Jericoa

This blog is better than Pestons - Mad Money Disease! hehehe.

Nobody is allowed to know the value of all the toxic 'off balance sheet' liabilities held by western banks. This is the financial thermo-nuclear device at the heart of the current crisis.

RBS was sunk by them. Lloyds has its fair share, and Barclays, well, they are really REALLY desperate and have been ducking and diving for over a year trying to avoid disclosure.

US, UK & Euro Banks are no longer relied upon for good reasons - institutions (and people) that have nasty SECRETS cannot be trusted!

Until there is a fully functioning system of accountability and transparency as to the true state of banks' accounts the crisis will contune and probably intensify.