I only ask this question because the Telegraph's partly-housetrained attack dog has penned an article today under the headline "Is Gordon Brown insane?". She assures us the question is "not just vulgar abuse". Well, heaven forbid you should do anything vulgar, Janet. But if it's not abuse, then my question isn't either. (For what it's worth, the answers to the two questions are "no" and "yes", but not necessarily in that order).
Janet's outburst is fairly typical of the way that right wingers, both politicians and pundits, are reacting to the current economic malaise. Here in the UK, I have a hard time making sense of the Tories' economic policies. I find it hard to believe that they would really like to rerun all the policy mistakes of the 1930s. Mostly, though, I assume they're really just pushing a standard political counterfactual: "this would never have happened if we'd been in power". I have my doubts about that, but it's a legitimate argument.
If the Tories are mildly incoherent, over in the US the Republicans have gone clean through the foaming-at-the-mouth stage and are ready to be fitted with a straitjacket. Unlike the Tories, of course, they can't remotely claim that none of this is their fault. Given that even Alan ("don't blame me") Greenspan warned of looming problems as early as March 2007, Dubya and his pals had almost half of their second term to try to set things right.
In fairness, Bush himself, and some of his senior people, have explicitly stated that they owe Obama their silence while he tries to sort out the mess. However, most Republicans are unwilling to abide by any such self-denying ordinance, even before the end of the customary "first hundred days" honeymoon. It's impossible to tell what these morons would do if they were back in power, because they're not saying. Let AIG fail? Put GM and Chrysler into Ch 11? Cut welfare spending? Raise tariffs? Who knows.
The pundits of the right are leading the charge. Mark Steyn, for example, has gone completely over the edge, in the process even losing his customary wit. This week he declared that the Obama economy will be a "disaster for the entire world" -- this in response to the forced resignation of GM CEO Rick Wagoner. Well, I for one am prepared to admit that I don't know whether Barack Obama can run GM. But I'm absolutely certain that Rick Wagoner couldn't.
Wednesday, 1 April 2009
Friday, 27 March 2009
The media predict a riot (and send cameras)
The media on both sides of the Atlantic are warning that populist rhetoric from the Obama and Brown administrations could stoke public anger and trigger social unrest.
Get serious! People don't need to be coached to be angry about soaring unemployment and bankers' bonuses. The politicians are reflecting the nasty public mood, not creating it. Does anyone really think that the great American or British publics would be less angry about the economic crisis if politicians were acting all nonchalant? Rather the opposite, I'd have thought.
Mind you, there may be someone out there fomenting all this anger that the media are so worried about: the media themselves. There are particular concerns over the possibility of rioting in London next week, when the G20 meeting will be taking place in the city. If the media really want to help forestall any trouble, I have a suggestion for them: they should announce right now that they won't be sending any cameras or reporters to cover the demonstrations. It's the corollary of the old question, "if a tree falls in a deserted forest, does it make a sound?": if nobody films a Womble, does he bother to protest?
Get serious! People don't need to be coached to be angry about soaring unemployment and bankers' bonuses. The politicians are reflecting the nasty public mood, not creating it. Does anyone really think that the great American or British publics would be less angry about the economic crisis if politicians were acting all nonchalant? Rather the opposite, I'd have thought.
Mind you, there may be someone out there fomenting all this anger that the media are so worried about: the media themselves. There are particular concerns over the possibility of rioting in London next week, when the G20 meeting will be taking place in the city. If the media really want to help forestall any trouble, I have a suggestion for them: they should announce right now that they won't be sending any cameras or reporters to cover the demonstrations. It's the corollary of the old question, "if a tree falls in a deserted forest, does it make a sound?": if nobody films a Womble, does he bother to protest?
Thursday, 26 March 2009
War on Peace
Back in early 2007 I posted a brief comment here on David Peace's remarkable novel, "The Damned United", about the late football manager Brian Clough. I've read it again since, and I still like it.
The Clough family, however, doesn't like it one bit. With a film based on the book (loosely based, from the bits that I've seen on TV) about to appear, the family has co-operated in the production of a documentary telling their side of the story. Peace's Clough was a chain-smoking, hard-drinking, Ramsey-swearing genius who wasn't above accepting a few quid in a plain brown envelope once in a while. The man the family remembers seems to have been a mordant wit who only just failed the audition to join the Twelve Apostles.
Clough was a moderately successful manager with Hartlepool and Brighton and an amazingly successful one with Derby County and Nottingham Forest. His only failure was his brief tenure at Leeds, in between his triumphs at Derby and Forest. It's not surprising that a novelist like Peace would choose to examine this low point in Clough's career, rather than the more upbeat parts. Peace's achievement is to demonstrate how the personality traits that stood Clough in good stead elsewhere failed him so spectacularly at Leeds. Leaving aside the smoking, swearing and boozing, which most of us would consider to be minor sins, Peace's Clough is a dedicated and decent family man who can't quite believe what he's got himself into. It's a work of fiction, and some of the more bizarre episodes are completely made up (Clough's burning of his predecessor Don Revie's desk, for example), but for anyone who watched Clough's career from the outside, it's quite credible.
So I think the family is protesting unduly -- and in some ways, may inadvertently have proved Peace's point. The documentary recounted how Clough was waiting at FA headquarters for an interview for the job of England manager, a post he craved. An old gent came past and began to struggle up the stairs, prompting Clough to yell after him that a man in his condition should take the lift, in case his heart gave out on the stairs. That gent was, of course, one of the panel who were about to interview Clough. The family also claims that the entire interview process was a fix -- the FA already knew who it was going to appoint -- but as there are no written records of the interviews, that claim is no less fictitious than anything in Peace's book.
Peace is a challenging writer and a bit of an oddball. His speciality is fiction based on real people and real events. Before "The Damned United" he wrote a searing indictment of the Yorkshire police (recently televised as the Red Riding trilogy) and a novel on the unpromising theme of the miners' strike. He now lives in Tokyo and is writing a trilogy on that city in the aftermath of World War 2. The first volume, Tokyo Year Zero, is already out in paperback. It makes The Damned United look like Little Miss Muffet, but fortunately for Peace, all of the protagonists are now dead.
The Clough family, however, doesn't like it one bit. With a film based on the book (loosely based, from the bits that I've seen on TV) about to appear, the family has co-operated in the production of a documentary telling their side of the story. Peace's Clough was a chain-smoking, hard-drinking, Ramsey-swearing genius who wasn't above accepting a few quid in a plain brown envelope once in a while. The man the family remembers seems to have been a mordant wit who only just failed the audition to join the Twelve Apostles.
Clough was a moderately successful manager with Hartlepool and Brighton and an amazingly successful one with Derby County and Nottingham Forest. His only failure was his brief tenure at Leeds, in between his triumphs at Derby and Forest. It's not surprising that a novelist like Peace would choose to examine this low point in Clough's career, rather than the more upbeat parts. Peace's achievement is to demonstrate how the personality traits that stood Clough in good stead elsewhere failed him so spectacularly at Leeds. Leaving aside the smoking, swearing and boozing, which most of us would consider to be minor sins, Peace's Clough is a dedicated and decent family man who can't quite believe what he's got himself into. It's a work of fiction, and some of the more bizarre episodes are completely made up (Clough's burning of his predecessor Don Revie's desk, for example), but for anyone who watched Clough's career from the outside, it's quite credible.
So I think the family is protesting unduly -- and in some ways, may inadvertently have proved Peace's point. The documentary recounted how Clough was waiting at FA headquarters for an interview for the job of England manager, a post he craved. An old gent came past and began to struggle up the stairs, prompting Clough to yell after him that a man in his condition should take the lift, in case his heart gave out on the stairs. That gent was, of course, one of the panel who were about to interview Clough. The family also claims that the entire interview process was a fix -- the FA already knew who it was going to appoint -- but as there are no written records of the interviews, that claim is no less fictitious than anything in Peace's book.
Peace is a challenging writer and a bit of an oddball. His speciality is fiction based on real people and real events. Before "The Damned United" he wrote a searing indictment of the Yorkshire police (recently televised as the Red Riding trilogy) and a novel on the unpromising theme of the miners' strike. He now lives in Tokyo and is writing a trilogy on that city in the aftermath of World War 2. The first volume, Tokyo Year Zero, is already out in paperback. It makes The Damned United look like Little Miss Muffet, but fortunately for Peace, all of the protagonists are now dead.
Monday, 23 March 2009
The positive equity trap
You hear a lot these days about people who've fallen into "negative equity" in their homes. The value of their home has fallen below the outstanding amount of the mortgage. A lot of these people are finding it hard to refinance when their mortgage falls due, even if the loan is entirely current.
"Which" magazine, never slow to jump on an anti-bank bandwagon, is now trying to drum up support for a group who claim to have the opposite problem. Back in the nid-1990s, a couple of banks offered a "shared appreciation mortgage" or SAM. You got the loan free, or at a very low fixed rate, but in return the lender took a proportion of the increase in the value of your house -- as much as 75% in some cases -- when time came for you to sell.
The April issue of Which contains what it presumably imagines to be a sob story from one "victim" of this outrageous free money scam. A gent who is now in his 80s borrowed £44,000 via a SAM in 1997. This was about a quarter of the value of his home at the time. He now wants to sell, but because the house is worth £450,000, he would have to repay £250,000 to the bank. He'd be left with "only" £190,000 or so, and the home he now wants to buy would cost him £230,000.
It's hard to pick your way through the logic of this, at least the logic as the victim sees it. Let's suppose the value of the house had not risen at all from 1997 to today. Our "victim" would have to pay back no more than the amount he originally borrowed, which would presumably make him happy, but he still might not have enough cash to buy the new home to which he now aspires. If the house were to go up by a further £150,000 or so, he might have enough for the new place, but something tells me he wouldn't be happy about paying over £350,000 to the bank to retire the existing loan.
Apparently there are 8000 people with SAMs outstanding. I don't know if all their stories are directly comparable to the one quoted by Which, but I'd bet they have something in common. They're all prople who saw a chance to get their hands on some free money, and now they're mad as hell that they've lost a big chunk of the benefit of rising house prices. Somehow I can't feel as sorry for them as I can for the negative equity crowd.
"Which" magazine, never slow to jump on an anti-bank bandwagon, is now trying to drum up support for a group who claim to have the opposite problem. Back in the nid-1990s, a couple of banks offered a "shared appreciation mortgage" or SAM. You got the loan free, or at a very low fixed rate, but in return the lender took a proportion of the increase in the value of your house -- as much as 75% in some cases -- when time came for you to sell.
The April issue of Which contains what it presumably imagines to be a sob story from one "victim" of this outrageous free money scam. A gent who is now in his 80s borrowed £44,000 via a SAM in 1997. This was about a quarter of the value of his home at the time. He now wants to sell, but because the house is worth £450,000, he would have to repay £250,000 to the bank. He'd be left with "only" £190,000 or so, and the home he now wants to buy would cost him £230,000.
It's hard to pick your way through the logic of this, at least the logic as the victim sees it. Let's suppose the value of the house had not risen at all from 1997 to today. Our "victim" would have to pay back no more than the amount he originally borrowed, which would presumably make him happy, but he still might not have enough cash to buy the new home to which he now aspires. If the house were to go up by a further £150,000 or so, he might have enough for the new place, but something tells me he wouldn't be happy about paying over £350,000 to the bank to retire the existing loan.
Apparently there are 8000 people with SAMs outstanding. I don't know if all their stories are directly comparable to the one quoted by Which, but I'd bet they have something in common. They're all prople who saw a chance to get their hands on some free money, and now they're mad as hell that they've lost a big chunk of the benefit of rising house prices. Somehow I can't feel as sorry for them as I can for the negative equity crowd.
"Two Homes" McNulty
The sheer chutzpah with which senior politicians dip their grubby paws into the public trough never ceases to amaze. It was only a few weeks ago that we learned that Home Secretary Jacqui Smith was claiming as her principal residence a house in London in which her sister just happened to live. Since Ms Smith represents a constituency in the Midlands, she has a good case for needing a second home closer to Parliament, but the fact that a close relative was living there didn't pass the smell test, and there were doubts raised about whether the Minister actually spent much time at the house in question.
Employment Minister Tony McNulty has now admitted that he has also been claiming a second home allowance. His principal home is a flat in Hammersmith, in West London. His constituency is in Harrow, in north-west London, and he claims an allowance for a home there, in which he allows his parents to live. Even if McNulty ever used the Harrow home -- and it appears he doesn't -- there is no possible justification for the allowance. Harrow and Hammersmith are not just within easy commuting distance of Westminster -- they're both on the Tube, for heaven's sake. McNulty is declining requests to repay the £60,000 he received in allowances on the Harrow home. Although he has now stopped claiming the money, he may still be hauled up before the parliamentary sleaze watchdog, a body whose scariness is perhaps best judged from the frequency with which politicians of all stripes are prepared to flout the rules.
McNulty, of course, claims that he hasn't flouted any rules. He does, however, admit that the situation may look strange "to outsiders". Just to remind you, Tony (and Jacqui and the rest of you): a synonym for "outsiders" in this particular context is "voters".
A footnote to this. After I wrote it I came across a list of second-home allowances claimed by London-area MPs. Several MPs with easy access to the Tube have claimed well over £100,000 over the past few years. Jacqui Smith and Tony McNulty are among the most high-profile abusers of the system, but the rot is widespread. The inquiry into all of this may not get going until October, which will probably mean that it doesn't get completed before next year's general election. How convenient. The will to do anything about this scandal, on all sides of the House, seems strangely lacking.
Employment Minister Tony McNulty has now admitted that he has also been claiming a second home allowance. His principal home is a flat in Hammersmith, in West London. His constituency is in Harrow, in north-west London, and he claims an allowance for a home there, in which he allows his parents to live. Even if McNulty ever used the Harrow home -- and it appears he doesn't -- there is no possible justification for the allowance. Harrow and Hammersmith are not just within easy commuting distance of Westminster -- they're both on the Tube, for heaven's sake. McNulty is declining requests to repay the £60,000 he received in allowances on the Harrow home. Although he has now stopped claiming the money, he may still be hauled up before the parliamentary sleaze watchdog, a body whose scariness is perhaps best judged from the frequency with which politicians of all stripes are prepared to flout the rules.
McNulty, of course, claims that he hasn't flouted any rules. He does, however, admit that the situation may look strange "to outsiders". Just to remind you, Tony (and Jacqui and the rest of you): a synonym for "outsiders" in this particular context is "voters".
A footnote to this. After I wrote it I came across a list of second-home allowances claimed by London-area MPs. Several MPs with easy access to the Tube have claimed well over £100,000 over the past few years. Jacqui Smith and Tony McNulty are among the most high-profile abusers of the system, but the rot is widespread. The inquiry into all of this may not get going until October, which will probably mean that it doesn't get completed before next year's general election. How convenient. The will to do anything about this scandal, on all sides of the House, seems strangely lacking.
Sunday, 22 March 2009
Who'd want to be me??
One morning this week my mail included a nice letter from a hotel in Vienna, thanking me for the positive feedback I'd given them on my recent stay. Vienna, we have a problem! I haven't been to that fine city for several years and have never stayed at the hotel in question. I contacted them to see if there had been some mistake, but was told that someone using my name and my exact home address had indeed spent a night there in mid-March.
A quick check of my bank accounts has confirmed that no money has disappeared, and there are no dodgy entries on my credit report. Still, it's a bit worrying. Fortunately my bank has provided me with the services of a security company, and they're looking into it for me. One thing we're agreed on is that we're probably not looking for a master criminal here: if you're going around pretending to be someone else, it's probably not the smartest idea to fill out the feedback form when you check out of a hotel!
More on this as it happens....
A quick check of my bank accounts has confirmed that no money has disappeared, and there are no dodgy entries on my credit report. Still, it's a bit worrying. Fortunately my bank has provided me with the services of a security company, and they're looking into it for me. One thing we're agreed on is that we're probably not looking for a master criminal here: if you're going around pretending to be someone else, it's probably not the smartest idea to fill out the feedback form when you check out of a hotel!
More on this as it happens....
Monday, 16 March 2009
Moneygrubber gets day in court
A couple of UK local authority pension funds who own shares in RBS are launching a class-action lawsuit in the US against the bank's former management (Sir Fred et al) to try to recoup their losses. To represent them the've chosen....Cherie Blair. Well, at least it isn't hard to figure out who's the likeliest to get rich as this case plays out. (If you need a clue, it's not Sir Fred and it's not the pension funds).
In her professional capacity, Cherie normally uses her maiden name, Booth. As in tollbooth, I suppose, as nobody seems to get past her with their wallet intact. The most delightful thought of all is that if the pension funds win their case, they (and Cherie) will presumably be looking to the UK taxpayer to fork out the compensation. You can just imagine how pleased Gordon Brown will be if he has to sign that cheque.
In her professional capacity, Cherie normally uses her maiden name, Booth. As in tollbooth, I suppose, as nobody seems to get past her with their wallet intact. The most delightful thought of all is that if the pension funds win their case, they (and Cherie) will presumably be looking to the UK taxpayer to fork out the compensation. You can just imagine how pleased Gordon Brown will be if he has to sign that cheque.
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