Green Diamond

Howard Davies is the kind of smart Adair Turner gets presented as by people who rub themselves against the latter in the hope some of his apparent credibility rubs off. Both were/are also FSA chairmen, but only Howard’s recent writing is worth much reading. This includes an essay last month on why the moves to reform the financial system are running into the sand, which matters given the rationale for reform was to prevent a reoccurrence of the kind of thing that has already put millions of people on the dole.

This and the increasingly aggressive push by the banking industry to be left the fuck alone provide the context for today’s announcements about two bankers getting new jobs. The one that got all the headlines, commentary, analysis, pish spoken, etc., involved Barclay’s bank, which will be headed up next year by a very, very rich bloke as opposed to the current very rich bloke. The one that was actually significant though was the announcement that the chairman of HSBC will become a government trade minister in January next year. Not that the attention paid to the former in any way obscured the latter or that there was any coincidence involved in the timing of the announcements. No chance.

Regardless of that its nice to know that as the government is considering reregulating banking and even has a nice commission considering breaking banks up the chairman of a bank that recently threatened to leave Britain if this was to occur will be in government. It leaves you feeling all warm and moist knowing they’re in the tent pissing out, not pissing in. Or perhaps it’s simply taking the piss.

Speaking of which, arse. No idea how to add a graph showing how the % of long-term unemployed has risen from c.1 in 4 to c.1 in 3.

Also piss is all this BBC malarky about the spending cuts/review given what was going to happen was already apparent before the election during which it was allowed to fall between the cracks in favour of the usual personality wankfest. Presumably the temptation to do vox pop/speak your brains specials has just got too damn much. The other point of course is that the spending cuts will be over a number of years and not really kick in until 2011 - i.e. the BBC will get bored with it a day or two after the spending review is announced on October 20th (having already nagged ministers every morning on Radio 4 in the run up to the announcement) and the human misery they actually cause will no longer be headlines when the misery actually starts getting caused (by then my guess is they'll be wanking on about the coalition breaking up in between over-reacting to some disease that might just wipe out Western civilization).

P.S. read an intersting article today (8th), which mentioned Barclays told Downing street in advance about the very, very, very, very rich man's impending appointment, exactly the kind of info that would enable those so motivated to make sure the other appointment was announced at the same time and buried as a result.