Bare Sterns

Every so often our bankers are caught with their trousers down and their naked backsides on grisly public display. We are tempted to seize the opportunity to give them a good kicking, but hell – they know where we live (until they repossess our home). What a bummer.

In the past we’ve seen our banks brought low by dodgy loans to South American governments, institutionalised money laundering, rogue traders and most recently sub-prime mortgages.

The sleight of hand which has taken this latest chunk of risk and spread it like mycelium throughout the world’s financial system is impressive, but right now all banks assume that every other bank is in the same mess as they are, so – impasse. No-one’s lending to anyone and as far as liquidity is concerned they’ve gone from snake oil to embalming fluid in a matter of weeks.

In good times (ie between banking meltdowns) our financial services companies treat punters with contempt and you only have to watch commercial TV for an evening to see this. Advertising for financial products in the UK starts from the premise that the product range is sufficiently complicated to rule out the possibility of just telling us about them.

So, adopting and adapting David Ogilvy’s insight that “when you've got nothing to say, sing it”, they hit us with 30-second commercials featuring crooning bank tellers, cartoon newlyweds or half-baked comedy sketches.

They must see our chain of reasoning as something like “Hey, these people can really sing – let’s give them all our money to look after.”

My own bank, some years ago, closed my branch down during a multi-zillion pound TV campaign focusing entirely on how they weren‘t closing any branches down. Oh how we laughed.

I kept my account with them of course since chutzpah of this quality only shows up infrequently.

However, we don’t need banks to make us laugh or gnash our teeth – we’ve already got politicians for that. From our banks we prefer clarity, although we’re never going to get it.

And yet, despite it all, complex financial instruments and products are here to stay. Lots of smart and rapacious people depend on this and, although they screw up badly now and again, the industry would go nowhere if we didn’t let them test the envelope.

So, as we consider just how far up shit creek these people have hauled the rest of us we should resist the temptation to kick ass, but we’ll certainly remember that, when we use the term “merchant banker”, it has a secondary meaning.

As rhyming slang.

Kosovo - an early to-do list

So, hello Kosovo. It must be nice to be a new country with everything to play for. There’s obviously plenty to do – there’s a new currency to design, tax collectors and tourism ministers to recruit, an entry for the Eurovision Song Contest to pen, a national drink to, well, drink.

On top of all that you need a national anthem – not your usual dirge, but something more likely to scare the shit out of anyone hearing it. In fact something like the hakka, performed by the New Zealand Rugby Union team before each match. This seems to say “We are mighty. You are feeble and have the gonads of mice. We are going to kill you.”

It’s important to get all the cultural sensitivities right and I think that strikes the right note.

Of course it’s a relatively civilised business setting up your country these days. In colonial times we never used to worry about other people's cultural sensitivity. Or their religions, laws, land rights, customs, women, dignity, reserves of spices/gold/slaves/opiates/diamonds/uranium etc.

Our civil servants have sat round many a mahogany table with our allies, carving up continents more or less at random. They've got out protractors, rulers, dividers and all those other geometry instruments that no-one has seen since 1970.

They've drawn nice neat lines round colossal swathes of territory and said OK let's call it Rhodesia. No matter that the new borders slice straight through ancient tribal homelands, bisect your royal palace at the billiard room, give you a piece of lake measuring four feet by 1,500 miles, put the source of your main water supply in the hands of your deadliest enemies and place your bauxite reserves in the Spanish enclave next door.

It’s tough that we couldn't find anywhere for the Palestinians, Kurds, Tamils, Karen, Welsh, Basques, etc but look, we've DRAWN it now.

These fellows played their cartography to win. If you were so rude as to disagree with their arbitrary geometry, then we'd simply pile in a couple of hundred crack troops and have you swinging from your palace balcony in no time.

These days we can't get away with such whimsical behaviour as you have probably noticed. By and large people can do what they like inside their own borders. Our governments concentrate instead on telling us what we can do in our own homes - individually we're easier to subdue than United Nations delegations, hedge fund billionaires and the Taleban.

Bali Hype

David Shenk, in his perceptive book Data Smog, put it neatly: “One of the most vivid consequences of the information glut is a culture awash in histrionics.” PR people beware, particularly those heading back from Bali amid their vapour-trails of greenhouse gases.

The world’s climate change evangelists have communicated so badly that global warming is now moving from being a problem (about climatology) to a meta-problem (about the politics of climatology). They have succumbed to the In-Crowd Effect.

In-Crowds get on our nerves and take many ugly forms, all united in their preening self-importance and their demand that we admire them as a matter of principle. They include the people who won the 2012 Olympics bid for London, eco-warriors, animal rights campaigners, death cults, creationists, riders of the EU gravy train, New Labour policy wonks, MPs, terrorists and Princess Diana fans.

They have booked their place in heaven with a cause more important than anything else, and this sense of disproportion produces tunnel vision about a photon wide, along with a belief that standard rules of proof don’t apply. Distortion and hysteria are OK as long as they help to Wake Us All Up, and Al Gore’s histrionics have, disgracefully, won him a Nobel Prize for precisely this.

But for the rest of us – while we may accept the reality of climate change but admit we don’t understand its dynamics and potential – we know when we’re the Out-Crowd, and we react to this as only human beings can (ie badly).

As a species, we didn’t get where we are today without taking note of what people do rather than what they say, preach, scream or spend our taxes on. In the UK we observe that while our government tells us we’re all doomed to drown, starve and fry, they’re putting in an extra runway at Heathrow, building thousands of houses on flood plains and commissioning new coal-fired power stations.

We see that instead of switching off the lights in their offices when they go home, they have announced the world’s largest windfarms – onshore (south of Glasgow) and offshore (Kent coast). This reversion to centuries-old and cost-inefficient technology is being wildly hyped as showing their commitment, but to what? To grandstanding, sanctimony and cynicism.

These are not “big decisions”, they are big projects, and we know the difference. A big decision might involve targeting a deep cut in our energy consumption, but where’s the fun in that?

As long as members of the climate change lobby pursue their In-Crowd strategy they will fail to get anything useful done and, casting around for an alternative energy source, we will burn their endless reports.

Welcome to the sustainable bonfire of the vanities.

'Tis the season to go bust

It is now considered very un-British not to go bankrupt during the Christmas season. Everything is for sale and everything must be bought, no matter what it is.

To the nation at large however, all this giving of gifts, all this wrapping up, this secrecy, seems rather childish and we have to be whipped into doing it.

Every year retailers claim their business will be in ruins unless we rush to the stores and this year they’ve recommended a cut in bank interest rates to help us on our way to financial doom (they got it too). All media run endless pages of suggestions to save us from our impoverished imaginations.

Despite it all, some people go through their whole lives giving and receiving socks at Christmas, in a kind of minimalist ritual, a barely discernible nod in the direction of Goodwill to All Men. They’ll also take a small glass of sweet sherry and a half-pound box of chocolates but draw the line at a grope under the mistletoe. The word “humbug” creeps into their vocabulary.

However, at least our gift exchange systems are more subtle than the classic Polynesian examples which all social anthropology students have to learn about before going to the pub. While the hierarchical distribution of pieces of a butchered animal survives with the dismemberment of the Christmas turkey, we adopt a broad range of approaches and our gifts can be divided into four major categories:

Useful: Power tools, whisky, fly-tying equipment. We’re not terribly good at understanding what counts as useful to other people, which is where our vast “nearly new” industry (particularly in power tools) comes from. It’s also why we drink so much whisky.

Useless: Power tools, things shaped like fish, actual Gifts – things which have no other purpose than to be given to someone else (ie about 75 per cent of all manufactured objects). These gifts cycle through social networks over time, and it can be comforting to find the same one cropping up every few years. When you pass it on again you sometimes paint it first, brush out the dead flies or take the handles off.

Egocentric: Jars of home made jam for instance or a ghastly photograph of your dog made into a jigsaw puzzle.

Deliberately provocative: Socks, for instance, or aggressive lingerie. A great-uncle of mine once gave his wife a ton of horse manure for her Christmas present. She responded with matching bed-linen, something no man has ever consciously bought.

So, anyway, if everything goes according to plan the only people with any cash by 25 December will be retailers, their advertising agencies and PR firms. The rest of us will have to rely on finding a silver threepenny piece in our Christmas Pudding.

Lessons from prehistory

If you're the smug type you'll probably enjoy reading books by people who know less than you. Recently I've been entertained by the 1933 edition of the Wonder Encyclopaedia for Children, written by people who had 74 years less knowledge than us but vastly more international real estate (Great Britain Is The Greatest Teutonic Nation On Earth).

The chapter on the history of mankind, for example, is on shaky ground, having been written before it was discovered that Piltdown Man, the alleged Missing Link fossil found in Sussex in 1908, was a total fraud. There's even a helpful reconstruction of what Piltdown Man looked like. He looked like Gordon Brown, our sub-prime minister.

Nonetheless, there's stuff I didn’t know. For example: Early Man Hid From Wild Beasts Until His Cunning Developed.

This sheds completely new light on human evolution. You can imagine our noble ancestors, hunkered down (behind rocks, according to the pictures), wondering how cunning they’d need to be. From time to time someone would say: Well, are we smart enough yet? And for millennia we must have looked out at the Wild Beasts and thought: Holy shit, have you seen the claws on that thing?

They must have gone through an experimental phase of shoving the smartest folk out into the open where, of course their potential contribution to the gene pool would be nipped in the bud (and everywhere else). After a short period of this everyone would be faking stupidity 24/7 and they’d have realised they were fairly cunning already, so they’ll have started to calibrate: Right, what have got so far then?

Well, we've got kind of oblong stones for scraping things with, flat stones for cutting things with, big stones for bashing things with and sharp, triangular pointed stones on the ends of sticks for, er, what are these for again?

Despite it all we were on our way, and sooner or later: There's a bloke behind that rock over there with a Wheel.

Surely that's enough cunning, they'll have thought, and sprung out.

There's no real indication of what Early Woman was doing all this time. The pictures simply show her dressed as Amy Winehouse and cowering alongside Early Man, in a trend-setting non-division of non-labour.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, we eventually got so cunning that it was November 2007, and yet somehow nothing much had moved on. By and large here in the UK we're simply hiding from the Labour government until our cunning develops.