credit crunch » 21stCenturyFix.org.uk

Withdrawing welfare: kind of like knee-capping the defenceless

a con, Coalition, Coalition capitalism, Coalition cuts, Coalition economics, credit crunch, criminals, crisis, economic chemotherapy, economy, econopocalypse, Labour, LibDems, Tories, welfare, Welfare State, wellbeing No Responses »

Jun 062013

On the subject of welfare, I have the following to say:

When a system breaks down because the wealthy have buggered up, you don’t have the right to blame the system’s victims.
Demonising poor, sick and disabled people is evil under all circumstances.
Lying about statistics is an act of intellectual criminality.
Manifesting incompetence in the face of severe socioeconomic crisis is an act of unaffordable luxury.
Not being honest about one’s failings is stupidity squared – and infuses in absolutely no one the otherwise necessary confidence which our society needs to properly function.

To blame welfare for the crisis we’re suffering from – as well as arguing it needs to be controlled in order to recover a semblance of economic normality – is like saying you can have an overdraft facility, which, by the by, they charge you for, exactly when you don’t want it, and then withdrawing it precisely at the moment you go overdrawn.

(This, by the way, once happened to me. I shall never forget the moment. I shall always remember, from that moment on, how it coloured my view of life – and banks in particular.)

But then that is how politicians, business leaders and hangers-on various – who don’t do or need welfare personally at all – all prefer to see the lie of the land.

We’ll charge you for welfare until and unless you actually need it. And then, particularly if it is our fault, we will take away what is becoming in our eyes a disproportionate right to access it.

Never mind that the suffering is more than equal to its disproportionate access. Never mind that disproportionate access is symptomatic of terrible suffering.

To cap it all, let’s go and cap welfare. Sounds much less painful – don’t you think? – than capping people.

Yes. Kind of like capping the knees of the most defenceless. And whoever needed to care at all when those that hobbled were the least vocal in society?

Feb 092013

The Observer reports tonight on a story which will no doubt run and run (in an equine sense if no other):

Sources close to the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Food Standards Agency said it appeared that the contamination of beefurgers, lasagne and other products [with horsemeat] was the result of fraud that had an “international dimension”.

Substitute some of the actors with our friends in the financial services community – even the Financial Services Authority shares the same TLA with the Food Standards Agency – and you’ll see why I’m beginning to get the feeling that horsemeat DNA on a criminal scale bears an uncanny resemblance to Libor fixing on a criminal scale. In both cases, it would seem that insiders have been stuffing outsiders – and the outsiders have been suffering the consequences, generally unknowingly. A mafia is a mafia, however genteel or besuited it may show itself to be. We are, it would appear, in the grip of such mafias.

In fact, to state – as the Observer does in its headline – that the “Horsemeat scandal [is] blamed on international fraud by mafia gangs” is just a tad disingenuous: it may be true, of course, but a) it doesn’t half let the government and the regulatory authorities off the hook of ultimate responsibility and b) it doesn’t half beg the question why whoever’s doing the blaming didn’t realise this any earlier.

The process and sequence of events is exactly the same as that which assailed us during the 2008 credit crunch. All of it essentially down to light-touch regulatory mindsets which believe stupidly in the magical powers of utterly unleashed corporate environments: environments which start out – in our hopeful and ever-optimistic politico-economic models – as virtuous circles of efficient business, only to end up being populated with dysfunctionally greedy individuals, systemic failures no one could have predicted or even – as in this case – Eastern European mafias.

The all-too-predictable result of a hands-off and responsibility-abdicating approach to the business of government and governance.

By trusting the market to run itself, by not inspecting the opportunities for greed and irresponsible behaviours, by believing that organised crime won’t care to get involved in the daily operation of customer choice, these latterday governments of ours are destroying the very integrity of our economic checks and balances.

And that their mentality should argue that customers vote freely with their purchases every day of the blessed week is appalling in the extreme: whilst we cannot take our own personal DNA testers to every prepared meal, and prick them and poke them before every purchase, we are at the mercy of those processes we should surely have every right to trust.

The Independent concludes in the following way its report on the obfuscation currently at play:

‘Bute’ aside, the unlabelled horse may indeed be safe to eat. But that’s not to say that people wanted to eat it, nor, more importantly, that anyone in the food supply system was aware of the existence of what seems to have been a massive undetected fraud.

It was just the presence of an unknown substance – prions that caused BSE (and the ensuing complacency and cover-up) – that led to a collapse in confidence in British farming.

Judging by the events and attitudes of the last few weeks, the lessons have not been learnt.

Not learnt indeed. That is all too clear.

But what’s even more clear to me tonight is that business today, whether white collar or abattoir, needs a massive kick up the backside from about as fearsome and heavy-touch legislative and inspection regimes as we can possibly manage to invent and devise.

If for no other reason than to guarantee the safety of hapless human beings in a complex and interdependent century – human beings who still don’t come complete or supplied with their own portable laboratories.

A market for cheap and easy-to-use DNA testers then?

Perhaps the need is wider than that. Maybe the market that’s really waiting to be exploited is for an algorithmic comparer of prices and products, which automatically suggests the potential presence of fraudulent behaviours in any supply chain.

For until we as consumers get far more access to information about what goes on behind the scenes in such B2B transactions, there is little we can do but to resign ourselves to further and ever-increasing fraud in banking, technology and food products various.

How wonga.com turns your hair grey

Coalition, Coalition capitalism, Coalition economics, credit crunch, in a hole, wonga.com 2 Responses »

May 232012

You’ll grow old and grey with wonga.com. Not me that says it, but their curiously couched TV ads.

http://youtu.be/8SYCFeWdj1Y

So is their main target market the elderly struggling in Coalition Britain to make ends meet? Or is it, in fact, the young who have no alternative but to age rapidly before their time? From university students to the rest of us who occupy the squeezed middle, is a lifetime of indebtedness becoming the new aspiration for us all?

As Carl indicates over at Though Cowards Flinch:

Cllr Osborne has blogged about it himself:

The CAB has rightly been held in high esteem by politicians and public alike for holding to a firm line; that these types of loan shops are predators in our community, leaches on society, and should be vigorously opposed at all levels. The CAB does immense good in Medway and has been working very closely on getting money from government; they are a fantastic example of good intentions.

However, make no mistake, Wonga is giving the money and paying for the service and that to them is small change for maximum benefit; legitimacy. These types of firms are desperately seeking to legitimise themselves to the public and I would personally feel very very uncomfortable seeking sponsorship from this type of firm.

This, perhaps, is the true face of social mobility in the UK today. Not the crass attempt by Mr Clegg to hijack an agenda he and his cohorts have deliberately worsened in their time at the top. No. Quite the opposite, in fact.

In the snakes and ladders of British privilege, the ladders belong to those already at the top – even as the government’s sponsors and supporters do everything they can to ensure the snakes are the lot of the rest of us. And companies like wonga.com, which form part of a flocking set of interests, are clearly playing their part in keeping the people under the thumbs of a very bad capitalism.

When it could be so different.

Hardly surprising, then, that wonga.com should choose the greying and balding imagery of its TV ads to describe where you will end up if you use its services.

Curious, though, how they manage to make it seem attractive. Is the subtext really a gently authoritarian “as British as fish & chips and grandfatherly cuppas” kind of idea perhaps? Does wonga.com revert to the wartime Dunkirk spirit of doing your national service, whatever the personal consequences? Are they asking us to believe that we do the economy a favour by falling into awful debt?

That seems to be the general message our government more generally is now transmitting – if not directly, at least by implication.

The Coalition as flag-waving standard bearer of social mobility? Not really. Not the sort of mobility we’re looking for, anyhow. Whilst these kinds of businesses continue to impose their will and offer outrageous levels of interest to desperate clients, the power they exert will continue to be unjust and unfair. Bordering, in fact, on a kind of financial bullying.

And meanwhile our political leaders talk about aspiration and freedom from class boundaries.

Do they truly not see the wider reality?

The only aspiration that those who journey on the snakes of social mobility can possibly have is being less at the bottom of the pile than their neighbours. And that is not the sign of a society on the move.

That is a sign of a society on the make.

When investment bankers and rioters are mirror images of each other

a con, banks, credit crunch, credit rating agencies, free surface effect, in a hole, information cascade, politics, riots, RORO effect No Responses »

Aug 092011

Every two summers or so, as a kid, I, along with my siblings, would be hauled across Europe to what was then still called Yugoslavia. When I say hauled across Europe, I mean, really, that it took quite a while – maybe a week – to get there, as my father would be driving us in a Volkswagen Dormobile camper-van. This involved crossing the Straits of Dover in ferry. My father used to get very stressed by these journeys – especially getting down from Chester to Dover itself in time for the crossing.

As most of the holiday money went on feeding the thirsty van, as far as I remember we used to go for the most competitive crossing possible. Sometimes, this meant unearthly times. Inevitably, it meant the cheapest operator. And if I remember rightly, this meant – more often than not – Townsend Thoresen.

I am reminded of these travails of ours by another piece from Chris over at Stumbling and Mumbling. He describes how what are called information cascades might trigger the kind of rioting we have witnessed over the past few days. More on this subject can be found here.

And the connection between the former and the latter? Well. As Chris concludes:

This suggests that small changes in the extent to which we use public signals versus private information might lead to quite large changes in behaviour. Analogously, it implies that only small cascades can make the difference between peaceable behaviour and lawlessness.
Perhaps, then, social orders are more brittle than we like to think.

Meanwhile, this is the result of what happened in the mid-Eighties to a roll-on roll-off – or RORO – car ferry which was owned and operated by Townsend Thoresen:

The ship left its berth in Zeebrugge inner harbour at 18:05 (GMT) with a crew of 80 and carrying 459 passengers, 81 cars, 3 buses and 47 lorries. She passed the outer mole at 18:24 and capsized about 20 minutes later.[7]

When the ferry reached 18.9 knots (35.0 km/h; 21.7 mph) 90 seconds after leaving the harbour, water began to enter the car deck in large quantities. The resulting free surface effect destroyed her stability.

In a matter of seconds, the ship began to list 30 degrees to port. The ship briefly righted herself before listing to port once more, this time capsizing. The entire event took place within 90 seconds.[8] The water quickly reached the ship’s electrical systems, destroying both main and emergency power and leaving the ship in darkness.

The resulting tragedy – leading to the deaths of 193 people – was caused, as indicated above, by what is known as the free surface effect:

The free surface effect[1] is one of several mechanisms which can cause a craft to become unstable and roll over (capsize). It refers to the tendency of liquids — and of aggregates of small solid objects, like seeds, gravel, or crushed ore which can act as liquids — to slosh about: to move in response to changes in the attitude of a craft’s cargo holds, decks, or liquid tanks in reaction to operator-induced motions (or sea states caused by waves & wind acting upon the craft).

It seems to me that this free surface effect and its result on structures like RORO ferries is very similar to the impact described in Chris’s piece of an information cascade on both investment bankers and rioters. And it is – I must admit – most striking that the resulting chaos should be so very topologically similar.

Without forgetting, of course, that one of the reasons we are where we now find ourselves is precisely because the RORO effect capsized the financial system in the first place.

In that sense, the “mindless thugs” of easy political response these days are no more or less bad apples in the barrel than the “mindful thugs” of credit-crunch lore. It is, in fact, arguably quite appropriate that now – after the upper-classes did their very worst – the under-classes should follow suit. Both have chosen to turn their backs on a wider society by looking to benefit in the very short-term. And neither have cared to avoid trashing their own communities as they proceed to ignore all signs of moral exactitude.

That the world’s financial markets should – at the very same time – be acting chaotically is, thus, a perfect corollary for a London beset by street-rioting. People at either ends of the social spectrum are behaving like mirror images of each other. The only thing I find difficult to understand is why our politicians find it so easy to get on their hobby-horses when it’s burning cars in the streets – and yet so often prefer to step back from criticising widescale destruction of sovereign economies.

Definite disconnect there.

Definitely a case of leaving the bow doors wide open.

Pretty Standard and very Poor

a con, credit crunch, credit rating agencies, mathematical errors, political chicanery, Standard and Poor's No Responses »

Aug 072011

Paul’s been after the ratings agencies for a while now. This, from one of his more recent pieces:

Moody’s, Standard & Poor and Fitch’s do not, as far as I can work out, actually get paid directly by anybody for the pronouncements they give out on sovereign debt. They offer their opinions as some kind of twisted ‘public service’ to the investor world, although of course this does raise suspicion about their real motives, as this article suggests (in its outraged reaction to S&P’s threat to cut the US’s credit rating):

[T]he financial markets should be monitored on a constant basis, with unscrupulous operators nailed at the first sign of any suspicious activity. Like, for example, checking who was selling big right before S&P came out with its assessment yesterday and then buying big at a discount.

Meanwhile, whilst this was the kind of liberal reaction yesterday brought us …

GOP trashes balanced budget, balloons Nat’l Debt, creates no jobs 4 8 yrs, crashes economy, risks default, earns downgrade, blames Obama.

… Senator Bernie Sanders then tweeted the following:

Where was S&P 4 years ago when they helped cause the recession by providing AAA ratings to sub-prime mortgage securities?

A most pointed question I’ve yet to see a considered response to.

Yet it gets worse. The American Treasury actually picked up on the fact that Standard and Poor’s had made an arithmetical error in the calculations that led it to downgrade the American economy, an error the Treasury communicated to S&P before it announced the downgrade – and the communication of which had absolutely no impact on S&P’s intention to go ahead with the aforementioned downgrade anyway.

As the Treasury fairly points out:

In a document provided to Treasury on Friday afternoon, Standard and Poor’s (S&P) presented a judgment about the credit rating of the U.S. that was based on a $2 trillion mistake. After Treasury pointed out this error – a basic math error of significant consequence – S&P still chose to proceed with their flawed judgment by simply changing their principal rationale for their credit rating decision from an economic one to a political one.

More details here.

So let’s just summarise for the sleepier ones amongst us (myself it has to be said included). The American body politic – with the connivance of Blair’s New Labour – sends us off on military adventures galore and turns Clinton’s surpluses into an awful public debt; in the meantime, credit rating agencies offer maximum guarantees for (what will become) infamously poor financial products, leading to an economic meltdown which corporate socialism (ie the paying of massive amounts of public funds to save private industry from termination) only just manages to ameliorate; only for these very same credit rating agencies to then go off on a spree of nation-destroying activities as, in self-fulfilling prophetic mode, they pick off the weakest world economies little by little – and with an inevitably revolting panache.

Where, indeed, were Standard and Poor’s when we needed you? And why did the communication by the US Treasury of a fundamental flaw in your calculations not change a single element of your decision to downgrade the US economy – when precisely we really didn’t need you?

The politicisation of stratospheric economics was never so disgustingly patent as now. And it’s the rest of us who are going to suffer the consequences of such careless – bordering on the blatant – game-playing.

From First World to Third World in three terrible years (or what the bankers have done to Spain)

banks, credit crunch, passport renewal, Spain, Student Finance, student loans, Student Loans Company, students, unclassifiable No Responses »

Jul 132011

It’s summer of course: which means passports, tickets, last-minute bookings and – for those of us who are still able to learn new stuff – student loan applications. The latter – for us – has been a nightmare of a year already. It looks set to continue as the website once more bemused us in June and indicated that my son hadn’t requested his tuition fees and maintenance loan when he had. We sent in a paper document to remedy the situation as requested, which arrived at Student Finance on 28th June by recorded delivery – only to discover today that his original “request” as registered by the website still stands. When we phoned up this morning, we were told that it would take several weeks to process absolutely anything out of the ordinary – and all for one simple reason: normally, the organisation receives 200,000 applications a year but this year, due to the tuition fees hike proposed by the government for 2012, the applications have jumped to 1.4 million!

I wonder if – amongst all the cuts – they have the staff to do the job properly.

At least they answered the phone.

Yesterday, I mentioned the problems we were having getting my son’s Spanish passport renewed – today the situation just gets worse. After about twenty fruitless and unanswered calls, we are still really no closer to resolving the issue. The embassy in London hasn’t taken any of our calls this morning, whilst the consulate in Edinburgh has done – under apparently impossible circumstances – what it can. Meanwhile, we phoned Madrid to question the current situation on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ main worldwide telephone lines (the very first of which actually has a recorded message on it saying it’s recently been closed down) – only to discover that my beloved previously First World country of online government and efficient customer service (yes, that’s truly been mostly my experience with the Spanish state over the past decade), in three short years has stumbled into being a Third World country of nightmare procedures and infrastructures.

Here’s one simply Catch-22 for you to admire before I finish my rant:

My son, whose passport has run out (his fault), may be able to get a piece of paper which allows him to go to Spain and thus get a new passport there – but he needs to go to Edinburgh first (a rather pricey and long train journey) instead of London (shorter and much cheaper) in order that he may then go to Spain. He also needs to take his plane ticket – but in order to get the plane ticket he needs to provide a valid passport number. The logical impossibility of this situation didn’t escape the lady my wife spoke to – but she was unable to offer any comfort or further advice as to how the situation might be resolved.

The alternative to the above was to contact London first and ask them if they can issue him with a three- or six-month passport instead: an eventuality we’d love to confirm but are unable to do so as the London embassy refuses to take any calls in much the same way as its counterparts in Madrid.

The last time we renewed a passport, it involved a nearby journey to Manchester and a wait via Special Delivery of three or four days.

The Manchester Consulate apparently closed on June 30th this year.

At the moment, according to at least one person in Edinburgh, the infrastructure and procedures are in a period of transition.

More may be known tomorrow.

Or not, as the case may be.

My conclusion? This is where the banking crises of recent times really begin to bite. This is when proud and progressive nations such as Spain are really going to get ground down. This is where the immorality of the high-flying and careless rich really hurts the ordinary folk.

This, in fact, is the end of good governance and the beginning of dog-eat-dog democracy.

How civic society is driven to utter meltdown by the moneyed and powerful (II)

a con, credit crunch, crisis, Greece, in a hole No Responses »

Jun 182011

This is how I reacted recently, in a rather visceral way, to what I saw as rank injustice in Greece. First, a contextualising quote from Wikipedia; second, my reaction:

The 1997 Asian financial crisis began as the property bubble in the Far East began to burst in Thailand, causing large financial losses in those countries that greatly affected foreign investors. While Bill Clinton was preoccupied with the Monica Lewinski scandal, Robert Rubin took control of foreign policy and forced loans onto the affected countries. However, after each country agreed to IMF bailout loans, foreign investors immediately withdrew their money, leaving the tax payers with enormous debts and triggering massive economic disasters.

Perhaps Greece is not so much a foretaste of things to come as a reminder of things that have gone.

Daylight robbery is what this is really all about. A daylight robbery which channels the livelihoods of ordinary folk into the pockets of the rich and undeserving. Greece may not be a case of a property boom gone bad – but it is most definitely an example of a wealthy world which doesn’t know how to function on behalf of the opportunities and welfare of the majority. And there the parallels are absolutely in sync.

And this is what the Guardian reports today (via a tweet from zopalok and another here) on the subject – again – of what are clearly looking to be big-time speculators (the bold is mine, and you have to be very eagle-eyed to even alight on what the paper seems to see as a throwaway line of little importance):

Steven Major, global head of fixed income research at HSBC, warned that events in Greece could have far-reaching consequences if they are not controlled. “It matters to the UK economy,” he said. This is because a default by Greece or a renegotiation of a bailout could be taken as a signal by the Irish and Portuguese governments to alter their own bailout terms: “This is why it starts to matter. The UK has very little exposure to Greece, tiny exposure to its bonds and the inter-bank market. But the UK has much larger exposure to Ireland and Spain.” He added that some speculators were hoping to profit from a default.

Meanwhile, from the same story, we have further confirmation that the oxymoron of brilliantly clever financial idiocy leads to results which no one – right now – knows how to predict (again the bold is mine):

Danny Gabay of City consultancy Fathom said the major concern for central bankers if the chaos in the eurozone deepens is banks’ indirect exposure to it through complex financial products such as credit default swaps.

“We have absolutely no idea where this is going to end until somebody pulls the plug,” he said. “I don’t know what the FPC can possibly do about this: there are no levers we can pull except ‘sell, sell, sell’, but who’s going to buy?”

Great stuff, ain’t it? And there was I, feeling bad for acting all emotional, as I argued that in the case of Greece the world’s financial institutions would be looking to allow their friends in high places to bail themselves out before finally shutting up shop.

But isn’t now exactly the time we should be using our emotions? Isn’t now precisely the time we should be aware of how this is going to affect ordinary blameless working people?

And if it isn’t, then tell me why I’m wrong – and explain clearly the alternative.
____________________

Further reading: this article appears to suggest the black economy is part of the problem. I would suspect, knowing as I do quite intimately Spanish culture and its mores, that, for the Greeks, their black economy has been part of the solution. The real issue may lie more at the feet of a system of government which has rarely functioned fairly. The black economy is therefore a simple mechanism used by ordinary men and women for dealing with systemic injustice. But I may be wrong.

How civic society is driven to utter meltdown by the moneyed and powerful

a con, civil war, credit crunch, mainstream media, social media No Responses »

Jun 162011

I’ve just read this from the BBC on the civic meltdown in Greece:

There is a social crisis under way and I think it is different from the one our history books teach us to expect. It’s not like the cracking of the state, or mass unrest, but simply that the Greek state – whose reach was never far into society – is beginning to lose its grip slightly on the actual functions a state should do.

The article goes on to point out:

It cannot decide its economic policy; it can’t convince its own people of any good intent; the rule of law is imposed hard here – with the impounding of yachts bought through tax evasion – only to break down somewhere else, as people begin to pledge non-payment of bills for the privatised utilities.

It is not anarchy here, but – to use another Hellenic word – neither is there catharsis. As the conservative daily Kathimerini put it in an editorial last night: “Prime Minister George Papandreou does not seem to be on top of things anymore.”

In a sense, there are parallels here in Britain. Perhaps we won’t reach such levels of distress for a while yet, although the public sector strikes planned for June 30th could quite easily serve to radicalise people even more. There is a small difference, however, between Greece and ourselves: the truth of the matter is that over here in Britain we are in the grip of a government which deliberately goes out of its way to make us feel we are not on top of things any more.

The famous shock-and-awe effect, in fact.

Meanwhile, what’s happening in Greece is the rapid seeping-away of all sovereign legitimacy as the international financial institutions ensure – as happened in Asia a decade and a half ago – that their friends in high places are able to duly retrieve their booty before a country and its people are allowed finally to collapse. As Adam Curtis pointed out in his recent documentary series and Wikipedia summarises thus:

The 1997 Asian financial crisis began as the property bubble in the Far East began to burst in Thailand, causing large financial losses in those countries that greatly affected foreign investors. While Bill Clinton was preoccupied with the Monica Lewinski scandal, Robert Rubin took control of foreign policy and forced loans onto the affected countries. However, after each country agreed to IMF bailout loans, foreign investors immediately withdrew their money, leaving the tax payers with enormous debts and triggering massive economic disasters.

Perhaps Greece is not so much a foretaste of things to come as a reminder of things that have gone.

Daylight robbery is what this is really all about. A daylight robbery which channels the livelihoods of ordinary folk into the pockets of the rich and undeserving. Greece may not be a case of a property boom gone bad – but it is most definitely an example of a wealthy world which doesn’t know how to function on behalf of the opportunities and welfare of the majority. And there the parallels are absolutely in sync.

This capitalism we talk so proudly of is so demonstrably inefficient at what it claims to be best at. It uses and abuses government intervention when it pleases – and completely ignores the intellectual incoherence this generates. It preaches the natural cycles of rise and fall – and then creates institutions, organisations, companies and corporations which serve to outlast any and all discrete human life on this blessed planet we sadly inhabit.

And meltdown in our civic societies happens precisely when the poor know not just that the rich are always going to be on top but that, also, they don’t care to hide it any more.

As the journalist of the BBC article I linked to above concludes:

And I will repeat the point about hostility to the media: it’s not a problem for me and my colleagues to be hounded off demos as “representatives of big capital”, “Zionists”, “scum and police informers” etc. But to get this reaction from almost every demographic – from balaclava kids to pensioners – should be a warning sign to the policymaking elite. The “mainstream” – whether it’s the media, politicians or business people – is beginning to seem illegitimate to large numbers of people.

The mainstream is no longer main. It’s not even that it ever was – but until today there was never anything else to publicly demonstrate the lie it represented: the disjunctions it fashioned. For it is social media which has served to show us all a far truer reflection of the reality of our poverty-stricken and hollow lives.

Those lies at the very centre of that binding nexus of marketing- and advertising-tied feature journalism – a nexus which claims to provide us with tough and brave truths when in reality it’s never been anything more than a bunch of clever angles.
____________________

Update to this post: the Guardian publishes the following report tonight on powerplays galore. Just makes me want to heave.

On the futures market that is Fifa (or the credit crunch revisited)

a con, credit crunch, Fifa, futures market, the future No Responses »

Jun 012011

I wonder if there aren’t any similarities between what is happening to Fifa at the moment and what happened to the banks – and by extension the rest of us – three years or so ago.

It’s been reported that a number of high-profile sponsors are expressing their reservations about the allegations, even as those at the very top of the organisation deny there is anything critical going on. We have, therefore, yet again a situation where a massive infrastructure run by the very biggest money on the planet shies away from what appear to be self-evident truths. The parallels between what took place during the almost-financial-meltdown of 2008 and the current situation in world football could not be closer.

So why is this? A simple answer exists: where money believes that there is future in a sales pitch, sales pitches and their mindscapes will – in any organisation – end up ruling over proper risk management.

In a sense, the high-level sponsors only have themselves to blame. They make money out of the dreams and aspirations of hundreds of millions across the globe – how can they honestly criticise Fifa for doing precisely the same thing?

Dreams and aspirations are beautiful things when tied to individuals and their families. They do, however, become dirty button-pushing mechanisms of control when they are multiplied by big money for its own ends. The credit crunch came about through a systemic understanding that the service sector of complex financial products was worth more – that is to say, added more value – to the economy than the manufacturing bases on which they parasitically operated. And Fifa’s own credit crunch – that moment when its powerful image became a Berlin Wall-like puff pastry of a structure – is a straightforward consequence of a business built on the tricks of marketing.

Fifa is, in fact, a futures market – just like any other.

And that’s the real problem: it’s just like any other.

Money is like horseradish

banks, credit cards, credit crunch, Denmark, in a hole, Marmite, personal information, racism, salespeople, Vegemite No Responses »

May 242011

Well. They’re both the root of something, aren’t they?

Whilst recovering this evening from the shock of Denmark’s reported ban on my two favourite spreads* – the Australian Vegemite (which I currently have in my cupboard) and our own homegrown Marmite (which I used to miss so very much whilst living in Spain) – I received a phonecall to my mobile purporting to be from my bank. A lady called Cheryl who said she was from the __________ asked me to identify myself. When I effectively said that I didn’t know her from Adam, she told me she had all my details in front of her and that my date of birth added up to twenty-two – at which point I asked her to tell me what the call was about. She claimed she couldn’t tell me because I hadn’t identified myself. I said that I had been trained not to provide sensitive information to people who were effectively cold-calling. I explained that if she had obtained my data fraudulently, she would be able to walk me through the same process she had suggested we used at the beginning of the call. Finally, realising I was rather too stubborn for her needs, she provided me with an 0800 telephone number which she said I could call to verify her identity – and then said she would call me later on once I was satisfied she was bona fide. I concluded the call by saying I would doublecheck the number on the bank’s website before calling it. And then I went off to do my evening shop.

Some three-quarters of an hour later, I phoned the bank on the number they had on their website, after being unable to find the 0800 number I’d been provided with anywhere on the Internet. Once I managed to get through to the call centre, I explained to a very helpful gentleman exactly what had happened, provided him with Cheryl’s number as it had appeared on my mobile, the 0800 number she’d given me to verify her identity and said I would like to make a complaint about either the process which had been used – if she was indeed bona fide – or the training I had been given at work (coincidentally, I currently work in a bank at a very humble level) on the subject of giving out sensitive information. For either one or the other had to be wrong – this, I said, I was absolutely clear about. I was then put on hold for about five minutes, after which time the helpful gentleman came back to me and explained that they had called the 0800 number, which was a number belonging to the bank, but hadn’t been able to get through as the department was now closed. He suggested I phone the number in the morning and see what exactly the issue was. When I asked him what the original call might have been about, and after duly carrying out further security questions, he wondered if it was about transfers I had been making between accounts and the need to further verify my identity.

I thanked him for his attention, he ensured that my complaint was properly registered and I finished the call, twenty minutes later, more or less satisfied with the support I had received.

However, before I laid the issue to rest, I decided to do one more search using the services of Mr Google. This was when I discovered that the 0845 number Cheryl had phoned my mobile from was actually mentioned on the multifarious caller id websites and forums that can be found out there – and definitely in pest-like terms. Apparently, the number in question is used not only by my bank to sell credit cards and convince consumers to increase borrowing levels on their bank accounts but also by at least one energy utility to try and convince people to move supplier.

You can guess my reaction when the implications began to sink in – and perhaps, even, how I feel at the moment. One thing I can assure you: Cheryl is definitely going to get a good talking to tomorrow. And, as you might imagine, I can feel another measured complaint just waiting to make itself known.

Anyhow, small beer in the wider scheme of things. But it does make me realise how money is still driving the more profound and ineradicable stupidities of our civilisation. Despite the lessons we should have learned from the recent credit crisis, banks would appear to still be in the thrall of sales-driven philosophies and ways of thinking which, when they are looking to contact potential leads, encourage them to ignore their own advice on what to do and not to do with personal information over the telephone and via other cold-calling methods.

Money? Hmm. You can tell I far prefer horseradish!
____________________

*The Guardian unhappily reports the following about what might be Denmark’s real intentions in this matter:

Recent comments from the Danish immigration minister, Søren Pind, that foreigners should “assimilate” or leave, coupled with the country’s recent unilateral decision to reinstate border checks, have left some residents questioning the motivation behind the crackdown.

I do hope this is not the case.

Uppers and downers from Spanish quarters

a con, credit crunch, filesharing, LinEx, on a high, welfare No Responses »

Jun 092010

This story from TechDirt today cheers me up mightily. It shows that at the very least Spanish judges seem to understand the history behind sharing intellectual property – and the difference between sharing altruistically and making money out of such content:

Once again, adding to the increasingly long list of similar rulings in Spain, a Spanish court has ruled that a popular file sharing site, CVCDGO, did not actually transfer or host any copyrighted works, and therefore did not violate copyright law. This is the same thing that numerous Spanish courts have found. [...]

The tangential observation which the judges in this particular case made is however what most cheered me up:

In their ruling, judges Ocariz, Gutierrez and Campillo said that “…since ancient times there has been the loan or sale of books, movies, music and more. The difference now is mainly on the medium used — previously it was paper or analog media and now everything is in a digital format which allows a much faster exchange of a higher quality and also with global reach through the Internet.”

I suspect that the decade-long influence of Spanish initiatives like LinEx has impacted on the judiciary here, and allowed it to see beyond the simple restrictions of current law towards a wider and more sophisticated understanding of the digital era.

If the supporters of traditional copyright law believe in analogous comparisons to justify their stances in relation to virtual worlds, they must accept all the analogies which the real world provides – and “filesharing” things such as books, videos, DVDs, paintings, music and so forth are all perfect examples of rights and tools we have had since time immemorial.

That, anyhow, is today’s upper from the Spanish quarter. The downer can be found here (in Spanish), as the Spanish authorities begin to grapple with the deficit that clever and wealthy people have left behind them. One of the measures which seems to be currently on the table (or not as the case may be – “let’s see how people react” appears to be the strategy at the moment) is charging a fiver to visit the GP, a tenner for A&E.

This depresses me enormously. The capacity of politicians to ignore the morality of a situation – to unfairly assess the just relationship between blame and punishment – continues to surprise and sadden me. If we are all scurrying around now like headless chickens, worrying how best to cut the most from our public services, it is entirely due to the fact that a society of the rich – which requested that it be left in peace to do its ingenious business and that it be allowed to flourish under a light-touch regulatory regime – ended up effecting a massive fail in almost everything it aimed to achieve when the credit crunch finally hit home eighteen months or so ago.

They are to blame. They should suffer the most – if, indeed, we feel suffering is a suitable solution and remedy to the ills we currently face.

Personally, I don’t think suffering should be a tool any government or organisation should gladly contemplate using on anyone.

But then I’m not in government. Like most of us, I’m just waiting for the punishment which is not fairly mine to be applied to millions of families who can only look on with bemusement – and possibly fear.

People’s capitalism? Oh what a stupid oxymoron that is.