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.

Graphtastic

Woo hoo a graph! A shit looking one to be sure, but still it tells a story even if it’s not one with an especially happy ending.

The background here is that unemployment rose sharply throughout 2008 before stabilising at the beginning of 2009 where it has largely remained since. Positively, the employment rate has recently ticked up signalling the worst of the credit crunch is behind us, which is all fine and rather dandy until you look at the actual composition of the unemployed population in a shit graph like the one what I’ve done here. There what you see is that while the unemployment rate may have plateaued, within this long-term unemployment (defined as greater than 12 months), has continued to increase relative to the total. To put it another way from 2008 Q2 to 2010 Q2 the number of people unemployed for over 2 years increased by 63% while the number unemployed for 12 months plus increase by 104% which is an even more fucking horrendous number.

To quote an Office for National Statistics review of employment statistics long-term unemployment is more likely among older men, those with fewer qualifications and the disabled. A different way of putting this is that the growing number of poor sods signing on for the 53rd or more time this fortnight have endured and are enduring an increasingly nightmare uphill struggle when it comes to getting a job. Sure, things are getting better, but why exactly would an employer take on an unskilled, disabled, middle-aged bod who hasn’t got out of bed before 8am for 2 years when there’s some able-bodied graduate just come to the end of a temporary contract and desperate for beer tokens knocking at his door? The answer is he won’t and we’ll see a permanent (over the medium-term i.e. 5 years) increase in the number of long-term unemployed.

At a high falutin economic policy level, the resultant increase in “structural unemployment” will probably see the NAIRU revised upwards in due course and nuanced references to why unemployment in excess of say 6% can be compatible with supply-side constraints and in no way a reason not raise interest rates. It’ll also see some Daily Mail led splenetics about dole scroungers and benefit fraud being trotted out every time government benefit spending figures get published.

Alternatively, given the human misery involved, I’d like to see the next few Office for National Statistics labour market statistics bulletins printed out and publically rammed down the throats of the few dozen or so vile British financial cunts who contributed to and profited from the credit crunch; it’s not as if it wouldn’t be a piece of piss to start naming names, especially given ignorance is rarely an acceptable excuse.

Weasel

Full employment as a notion sounds lovely cos its not just employment, its FULL employment. Yeah, everyone has a job! Except while common sense and a big dod of reasonableness would leave you thinking that’s what it means, in practice it doesn’t actually for basically snidey reasons, in fact full employment is weasel words!

A certain degree of unemployment is unavoidable what with frictional unemployment i.e. people moving between jobs with ideally a contract in the post and a month or two to chill. However, alongside this is the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment or NAIRU beyond which so many people have jobs and start buying things and taking advantage of tight labour market conditions to bid up their wages prices start rising. Hence in practice a debated degree of unemployment is considered acceptable, necessary even by our lovely policymakers, which is kinda unfortunate given the links between unemployment and crime, poor health, poverty and so on and so on. But, hey ho its all good if it lets people claim full employment has been achieved even if there’s still however many poor sods on the rock’n’roll.

Except, unemployment is also an irredeemably social, moral and consequently political issue as opposed to being simply a technocratic one. To give an example, am sure a “dole scrounger” being interviewed down the broo as to why they’re unemployed won’t score any brownie points by claiming they’re doing their bit to ensure inflation stays on target.

And then there’s that lovely class-dividing line between us and them at which point me getting a stonking great pay rise is an inflationary threat and as such to be avoided whereas you getting an even bigger one is a necessary incentive to ensure those who create wealth are attracted and retained. Except if we are to believe Sir Fred Goodwin, named Global Businessman of the year in 2002, when he told the Treasury select committee that “it is just too simple if you want to blame it all on me. If you want to blame it all on me and close the book, that will get the job done very quickly, but it does not go anywhere close to the cause of all of this", then individuals, even when they are the great and the formerly good, don’t necessarily make much of a difference (for a different and more wide ranging example of the irrelevance of CEOs see here).

And this isn’t even touching on the long-term structural issues affecting labour markets like gender pay inequality, that piss all over any notion that the labour market as a whole is anything even approximating an efficient market. So for me anyhow the labour market, that place where we sell our time in return for status and cash is a tad more complex than even the fanciest econometric formula can imagine.

Hence reading some Labour leadership contender’s commitment to full employment I thought what a twat. More generally if unemployment is a price worth paying to avoid inflation, cut the deficit and misquote the former Tory chancellor Norman Lamont, I always wonder if those doing the bulk of the actual paying mebbe deserve something concrete and tangible in return if only because so many o fthe people who caused the current mess are sat on piles of cash and/or in the case of John Thain have new, multi-million pound a year jobs.

As a P.S. that's the various Japanese pornographer/cultist comments gone. They were just waaaaaaaay too creepy

Halfords is fucking shite

Excellent, now I’ve built up a dedicated audience of half a dozen Japanese cultists and pornographers I can abuse my newfound position of power and influence by slagging off Halfords cos they are fucking shite. In case I’m not being clear Halfords the shop that sells stuff for cars and bikes and stuff is fucking shite, as in fucking shite i.e. shite that is fucking shite. They are shite. See that picture? That's Halfords.

So there’s me living in E’boro stuck on a bus of a morning going to work thinking fucking hell the fucking farce that is the E’boro trams and all those taxes docked off my wages so some fucking tit of a councillor can shit it into holes in the ground to massage his or her ego is so causing congestion (and all the economic damage that does to a local economy) I’d almost be as fast walking, in fact I’d be faster cycling. So cycle to work scheme it was for me!

Except to get the tax free benefits of the scheme via my employer I needed to get my bike via Halfords. On point of principle I’d rather have got it from a local business as opposed to some big chain store. Now though I’ve learned it’d have been better to have got it from anyone but Halfords because Halfords is fucking shite. Now clearly, dissing Halfords like that requires serious justification; thankfully Halfords being so fucking shite has provided that in spades.

Take ordering my bike – as I subsequently discovered the fucking tool who passed Halfords's rigorous recruitment process didn’t click send after he took down all the details. The key word here though is “subsequently” because in my weekly phone calls to find out if my bike had been delivered I was told to try a few days later the first few times, then eventually that the supplier was giving them problems. The supplier possibly was and is is and the representatives of Halfords were/are right to bring that to my attention. Alternatively they were lying wee useless fuckwits. Anyhoo after however many weeks had passed I phoned “head office” and after a few more calls to the useless fuckwits outlet later I finally got some clarity; send got clicked and eventually I got my bike.

From this point on mebbe it's all my fault – I was that excited to finally get the fucking bike I’d now been paying for for months I didn’t pay enough attention to how it wasn’t set-up by the Halfords fuckwits. Mebbe them thinking nearly flat tyres are cool, telling me "that seat's a bit low" rather than assisting me with altering it or not oiling the chain let alone suggesting I might want to buy some oil and thus achieve some cross-fucking-sales were clues to Halfords being fucking shite? I don’t know. What I do know is taking something out a box and handing it to someone is something a fucking monkey can do if you gie it enough bananas let alone minimum wage and only counts as product knowledge if you are a fucking moron - Halfords do not "go the extra mile".

Anyhoo, as I subsequently discovered on quite a busy street the real issue was the fact the fucking gear change didn’t work and that the brakes weren’t too clever either, but that’s OK you ignore the Halfords outlet morons telling you they can’t take your bike in for a fortnight and just turn up (carefully and slowly) and say my brakes don’t work and neither do my gears and I’ve only had this a coupla weeks and the actual branch manager will see to it personally.

Except the other day my gears stopped working again because the people who perform bike maintenance at Halfords are fucking shite, much like Halfords itself, which is fucking shite and to be avoided like the fucking plague. I thought I’d phone the cycle to work number at Halfords and get some help and hey presto I got through quite quickly – unfortunately they told me to call the customer service number, which took a lot, lot, lot, lot, lot longer although thankfully while I was waiting I was reassuringly told that my call was being taken seriously by some robotic voice. Except, Mr Robot was wrong because Halfords have obviously made the strategic decision that it should take a lot less time to answer a possible sales enquiry than it should customer service, which is a fucking obvious guide as to what is taken seriously and what isn’t. Anyhoo, when I eventually got through they were useless cunts and my gears still don’t work and I’ve no idea when they ever will.

But, hey let’s turn that frown upside down by using my personal experience to spell out some realities about Halfords as a business and as an organisation:

1) Halfords is a company that does not train up their employees to the point where they can understand or operate routine company processes
2) Representatives of Halfords are comfortable with lying to the point of making defamatory comments about suppliers/other companies without any substance whatsoever
3) Halfords is a company that is happy to let its customers ride off on bikes that don’t work properly regardless of the very obvious risk that poses to said customer’s lives.
4) Halfords is happy to let people who are incapable of performing satisfactory routine bike maintenance perform routine bike maintenance (regardless of the very obvious risk to said customers’ lives).
5) Halfords systematically apportions significantly more resources to sales than customer service despite their inability to sell bikes that work, indicating Halfords does not take customer service seriously.

So yeah, Halfords is fucking shite – they lie, they don’t understand the products they sell and the customer service is fucking shite. Spend your money elsewhere and question them being the only cycle to work supplier at your work if it turns out they are. You could even check out this blerk for another example of Halfords being shite or this one or even look at this in the meantime.

An 8th August postscript - Didn't realise Halfords was actually called Halfrauds. But, aye, one of the things that makes Halfords utter fucking shite is that while they sell products with warranties its nearly impossible to get your bike in to them to get it repaired rendering the warranty useless in practice. My experience was most times I phoned the person to talk to about bikes was unavailable. The odd occassion I got him he explained I couldn't book a slot to get my bike repaired, rather I had to hand it in and mebbe I would get it fixed within 2 weeks if I was lucky, an arrangement so awkward as to encourage me to go elsewhere. So I did. I went here to a local business that couldn't have been more spot on - same day (afternoon actually) service, loads of useful advice and a ridiculously good price, all things that highlight how Halfords are rip off money grubbing useless shites.

Fab person has a downer on it

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is both misunderstood and a pile of fucking shite. Starting with the misunderstanding, this stems from its origins and ends being so poorly known. Rather than being an even remotely shiny new thing, CSR originates in paternalistic management practices dating back to the nineteenth century. Back then, rather than however many over-ambitious middle managers jetting off to Malawi to build a new toilet block for refugees, CSR was about employers providing company housing, company shops, company retirement homes, company swimming baths, company libraries, company bandstands, company doodlydads etc., etc., the key word throughout being company i.e. when you worked for a company (some companies at least), your entire life was spent in company premises of one sort or another. Hence doing anything that threatened your job with said company was also a threat to you and your family’s entire way of life cos if you weren’t working for the man you certainly weren’t living in the man’s house.

CSR then originated in deliberate efforts by employers to impose an all encompassing managerial discipline and authority. In the case of say Cadburys or Lever Brothers at Port Sunlight, it also entailed imposing actually quite lovely notions as to how lives should be lived, but still it was a thing being imposed as opposed to free will etc. Except then the post war settlement with all its redrawing of the lines between public and private provision and mucho more council housing and welfare state and subsequent full employment suddenly fucked things up – you could tell the gaffer to fuck himself safe in the knowledge you’d still have a home to go back to.

You could argue this was the end of paternalism and as such claim there was a disconnect with the CSR shite we have today, except paternalism had always involved both ”soft” and “hard” objectives and its that distinction that’s still with us today. The hard were and are the easy to spot, obvious things. Like in much the same way that a company built a swimming pool expected fitter, more hygienic workers (and was also tacitly telling the state to fuck off when it came round asking for higher taxes to pay for houses with toilets), so today when a company sponsors an art exhibition it expects 100 free tickets to a private viewing where it can woo new and existing companies - and you bet they’ll get them given CSR is now a full-time pretendy profession with full time CSR experts and managers and what not all desperately trying to justify their existence by pointing out the bottom line benefits of whatever it is they do.

If the “hard” is about the readily measurable; the “soft” by contrast is the never ending and elusive quest for legitimacy and authenticity. Here the only meaningful difference between Victorian Gradgrinds and today’s corporate champions is what’s being legitimised. Back in the day the emphasis was on control and managerial authority and all the structured inequality that entailed when it came to the distribution of economic outcomes. Nowadays it’s still about legitimising, but of whatever it is the business coughing up to sponsor an art exhibition does to make money.

Take BP fer instance – piss oil allova Americans? Not necessarily a bad thing given how much they shite on everyone else, but that aside, ignore the environmental fuck ups and concentrate on all the lovely art they sponsor and the extent to which that proves BP is a cultured muthafucka of an organisation that routinely contribute to the moral and cultural life of Britain. In fact if you’re so inclined you could even read Noreena Hertz’s latest article on fuck knows and, ignoring any car rental references, latch on to her as the half-witted pan piper ideologue arguing in favour of a status quo wherein Bono and BP should be left free to spend a teeny tiny fraction of their tax efficient fortunes on patronising darkies.

Alternatively you could get real. Every public organisation and institution that puts out banners and adverts associating a corporate sponsor with something cultural should be obliged to also acknowledge the fact the vast majority of its funding comes from taxpayers and as a result oblige it to hold a parallel lottery wherein every month a taxpayer gets the chance to (a) win an exclusive night when he or she (and friends and family) has a private viewing and (b) gets a picture of him or her plastered all over the place.

As for the sponsors, every time a team of marketing managers are sent to Malawi to build a new toilet block the company they work for should be obliged to issue a public statement explaining why simply asking the volunteers to give up a single day’s pay and then handing that over to pay for actual local builders to do the exact same thing only much more effectively and without the additional cost of flights and accommodation wasn’t the better option.

And ooh, ooh Christopher Hitchens has cancer. Does that mean the Left needs a new, favourite bourgeois, pointless waste of space ornament to lionise? And will the “hitch” produce a diary of his treatment of the sort Christopher Morris satirised years ago? Who fucking cares, it’s the Grauniad equivalent of Jordan and Peter Andre’s latest Heat article iz all.

Back to actual real stuff. Yer man here knows whats what when it comes to the corporate paternalism or at least he used to before the Welcome Trust fucked up what constituted historical research in Britain. And the weird fucked up pic attached to this post I found when I googled CSR is supposed to represent CSR how exactly? Stupid cunts.

Ass wad

"You can judge a society by the way it treats its ..... eldery, prisoners, animals, poor, toffee pops, etc., etc., (delete/insert your vested interest where appropriate)" is one of they pat, sanctimonious, rhetorical cliches used to claim the moral high ground when there's no actual facts, logic or what no to support the view being taken.

And yet as all those economists across Britain pore over the budget looking for some nugget to insert into the summaries they'll be pissing over the internet and thru intranets into already clogged up inboxes, for me right now its the appropriate position to adopt.

To be fair as budgets go I fair liked its transparency, especially the nice straightforward table near the back showing how income tax, VAT and national insurance pretty much pay for everything i.e. us, not corporation tax, something to bear in mind I think. Then tonight there were the usual city talking heads being asked to react, my personal favourite being the tool from Barings who popped up on newsnight. Yeah that's right Barings, the bank run by inbred schmoos too posh to realise they didn't know what they were doing until the whole thang whent phut. Anyhoo, yer Baring's bloke said some terribly, terribly interesting stuff, so interesting I was about to pass out until I thought I heard him say "ass wad". Was the interviewer that bad? Or was it "ass-wajj" instead? Am no sure, either way it sounded fuck all like "assuage".

But, aye, ass wad aside, what got me was the budget decision to make claiming disability living allowances harder than it already is. Lovely, lets pick on disabled people cos you bet they had it coming.

Wait a mo mebbes the bods who came up with that lovely wee zinger had confused DLA with incapacity benefit? Probably, but who cares, its no as if DLA claimants can put up much of a fight and if they do we'll unplug their electric wheelchairs and jobs a good 'un.

3 musketeers

Cool, I get to be a pertinent for a change.

Between them Vic Reeves, Professor John Kay and Johnny Rotten provide the best guide available to the future direction and state of the British economy, one that’s far more accurate than the shite being issued by the Office for Budget Responsibility.

Starting with Vic Reeves, his comment that 88.2% of statistics are made up on the spot doesn’t directly apply to economic forecasts, but the warning it gives about spurious precision does. Every forecast comes with the caveat ceteris paribus (all other things being equal) because every forecast is the product of a model that only takes a finite number of things into account when it predicts the future direction of an infinitely complex thing (the economy). This would be cool if right now infinite complexity didn’t involve all sorts of mad, unpredictable shit that may or may not have all sorts of mad degrees of significance attached to it, like a sovereign debt crisis of a major European economy and all the scope for contagion that entails in a completely impossible to model type style, except it does.

But, then if you go by Professor Kay’s sage suggestion (and you really, really should), about economics and economic forecasts and how while we may be able to accurately predict what team will win on Saturday (particularly if it's however is currently top of the league), predicting the score is a lot less certain, then that’s all good (the practical example here being if we could quantify the future with any meaningful degree of accuracy the pools would have gone bust years ago).

Except right now we’re being encouraged to attach importance to the 0.4% difference between the 3% rowth Treasury under Labour forecast compared to the 2.6% subsequently forecast by the OBR. Alternatively fuck that shite, fuck it long, hard, bad, rough and wrong because both views depict strong, above trend growth, which is a YAY! in my book.

Plus given recent events the more recent the forecast the more likely it is to be pessimistic and anyhoo in forecasting terms how big a difference is 0.4% anyhow? Like as of May 2010, if you wanted a forecast for UK economic growth in 2011 you could choose from hundreds of options including Goldman Sachs’ 3.4% and Capital Economics’ 1.5%, 2 views with a whopping great 1.9% spread between them. Or should we simply tell both of these august institutions to go and fuck themselves for being useless fuck nuggets? (Probably, but thats a different point).

The reality then is that forecasts are affected by recent events on an ongoing basis, they change on a regular basis as a result, are derived from different models that are more or less accurate over time in unpredictable ways and can only ever provide a general guide as to what is likely as opposed to what will happen; a diretion as it where as opposed to a step by step route map.

Except that don’t fit in with the political narrative being constructed as I type this which is because we’re in an economic crisis government spending needs to be hacked back hard. As ever the use of economic forecasts here to "objectively" legitmise political decision making is a reminder economics is actually political economics as opposed to a game of psuedo scientific mathematical wanking, which in turn reminds me of Johnny Rotten saying "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"

(revised and arse picture added May 15th)