Welcome to the latest of our TwitterTicker posts - the conversion of minutiae into matter.
Finance Is Fucked
On May 7th, the Bank of England announced that it was buying a further £50 billion worth of government bonds, taking the total to £125 billion.
The Economist: "The point of quantitative easing (QE) is presumably to keep down bond yields so that high rates do not choke off the economic recovery. But if the economy does recover, then yields should naturally rise. If at that stage, central banks give up QE then yields will get a further push higher. So this is a policy that will prove very hard to retreat from... we have a circular system where the government lends (or buys stakes) in the banks which then lend it back to the government in the form of gilts. This creates a potential conflict of interest; one that already exists in the US where bankers seem to float between the government and the private sectors. QE may seem like a clever short-term measure to relieve market pressure but we will be dealing with its after-effects for years to come."
John Authers of the Financial Times: "It is the finances of the governments rather than the banks that are causing the greatest concern."
Old Slack Jaw, Britain's Depression Minder General, the man who gave the Bank of England control of interest rates, the man who established the toothless regulator, the man who abolished boom-and-bust, the man who will be costing us all oodles of assets for years to come through his role in the transference of a crisis of banking and financial greed into a social crisis that effects us all, the man who added the private finance initiative (PFI) as the cherry on the cake.
PFI - pretty fucked, innit?
The Slimings Of Our Great Leader
Our Great Leader, Richard Scudamore, has crawled out of his burrow on a couple of occasions recently.
Firstly, in order to offer support for the BSkyB/Premier League candidate for the AFC presidential election, Mr Bin Hammam and, secondly, to offer some platitudes to Andrew Burnham over the mismanagement of the said league.
The new fit-and-proper-persons test (FPPT) rulings are not a change that we can believe in.
In fact, in the areas of greatest concern - club ownership issues, the decision on what is a fit-and-proper-person, the unsustainable levels of debt - there is no change at all.
##########################################################################
#####################################################################
#############################################################################
#########################################################################
############################################################################
Our Great Leader glanced down from his pedestal to decree: "I think it is probably right, on balance, that the public should know and supporters should know who owns their football club."
Some points...
###############################################################################
##########################################################################
###########################################################################
##################################################################
############################################################################
###############################################################################
#############################################################################
#############################################################################
############################################################################
###########################################################################
###############################################################################
#################################################################################
################################################################################
#############################################################################
##############################################################################
The most revealing part of the monologue, and there always is one mirror into the workings of the mind of Our Great Leader, was when Scudamore muttered about his "... journey of self-regulation".
That is the crux of the matter.
##############################################################################
##########################################################################
############################################################################
###################################################################
Meanwhile, the Premier League and BSkyB can collectively rub their grubby little hands together in celebration of the fact that Setanta is struggling to pay the next £60 million instalment for tv rights due at the end of the month.
Down And Out In Paris And London And New York And Tokyo and Berlin And Reykjavik And Moscow And Madrid And Dublin And Talinn And Montreal...
So, toxic debts are now to be known as legacy assets.
Orwell would have approved.
In the unholy union between our elected representatives and the financial industry, we have been stitched up yet again.
The French are flirting with Revolutionary Socialism while the English are understood to be ever so vaguely dissatisfied.
Investors are to receive 85 cents on the dollar subsidy just for owning these 'legacy assets', ie these investors are guaranteed 85% of their money being returned to them in the worst case scenario. If these 'legacy assets' appreciate in value, even for just a window, then investors will be able to cash in on their risk-free investment.
And this is a rational response to the massive toxicity still in the global financial architecture?
Former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson portrays Wall Street as an oligarchy that has left a generation of politicians and regulators "mesmerised", while Thomas Hoenig, the president of the Federal Reserve bank of Kansas City, thinks that the banks have been "subsidised in becoming more economically and politically powerful".
The 'legacy asset' farce needs a swift deconstruction.
Take Wigan Athletic versus Manchester United match tonight.
The 'legacy asset' bet would go like this...
You bet on Manchester United to win at 1.30 (3/10).
If they win, you win.
If they don't, you are returned 5/6ths of your stake, which you may reinvest etc etc.
Do the maths, it is yet another redistributive asset grab.
Jean Baudrillard: "Every society that internalises its mad is a society invested in its depths by madness, which alone and everywhere ends up being symbolically exchanged under the legal status of normality. Madness has for several centuries worked hard on the society which confines it, and today the asylum walls have been removed, not because of some miraculous tolerance, but because madness has completed its normalising labour on society: madness has become pervasive, while at the same time it is forbidden a resting place. The asylum has been reabsorbed into the core of the social field, because normality has reached the point of perfection and assumed the characteristics of the asylum, because the virus of confinement has worked its way into every fibre of 'normal' existence."
Michael Owen Plays A Squiggly Doogle
##############################################################################
###########################################################################
#############################################################################
##########################################################################
################################################################################
#############################################################################
##############################################################################
###########################################################################
###############################################################################
##############################################################################
###############################################################################
##############################################################################
############################################################################
The Power Of The Markets
Financial Times: "The football bureaucracies, so innovative in marketing the sport, are strangely reactionary about keeping what happens on the pitch the same as it ever was... no-one wins from having games poorly refereed."
###############################################################################
###########################################################################
###########################################################################
#############################################################################
###########################################################################
Howard Webb: "I never want to have a negative impact on a game. I get no pleasure from not reaching the high standards we set ourselves."
#####################################################################################
###############################################################################
##############################################################################
##############################################################################
############################################################################
Lo And Behold!
Andrew Lo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: "Systemic risk is not even being measured."
And what about Fractal Risk?
And Super-Systemic Risk?
Thought not...
Lo: "If you have human personality and free markets, you are going to get crises. If you get rid of one, you won't."
And this is a free-marketeer speaking!
Now, which one shall we get rid of?
Trickledown Economics, You're Having A Laugh
Not too many free market delusionals shouting about the number of the poor who have been lifted out of poverty due to their odious system nowadays, are there?
Jean Baudrillard: "... the increasing hold of rationality on our culture has meant the successive extradition of inanimate nature, animals and inferior races into the Inhuman, while the cancer of the Human has invested the very society it claimed to contain within its absolute superiority."
Hiddink Hyperreality
With all the nonsense in the aftermath of the Barca victory, there was no focus whatsoever on the Real reason that Chelsea lost - ##########################
############################################################################
##########################################################################
############################################################################
#############################################################################
############################################################################
###################################################################
That was the big deal.
The dichotomous biased refereeing is what you get in a hyperreal world.
The mainstream media then relishes and enhances this hyperreality until it becomes something totally Surreal.
Corruption experiences the Butterfly Effect too.
Not Nudge, But Grudge
Flann O'Brien: "What is important is food, money and opportunities for scoring off one's enemies."
The success of the recent free market bible, 'Nudge', together with the wisdom of Myles has encouraged us to add a 'Grudge' section to future TwitterTicker posts.
We will get it off our collective chests.
In homage to Myles, we will even borrow his historical template (of the type: "The Man Who Spoke Irish At A Time When It Was Neither Profitable Nor Popular").
And, finally, on this very point, we'll introduce you to "The Man Who Still Sings Wolfetones Songs In The Shower When The Neighbours Are Out"...
Why are the British Lions called the British Lions when Eire is represented?
Should it not be the 'British and Irish Leprechaun Lions?
Especially when Eire have just won the Grand Slam.
And remember, the average English person gets by on 400 words while a Gaelic speaker uses 4,000.
As Myles told us all: "The plight of the English speaker with his wretched box of 400 vocal beads may be imagined when I say that a really good Irish speaker would blurt out the whole 400 in one cosmic grunt. In Donegal there are native speakers who know so many million words that it is a matter of pride with them never to use the same word twice in a life-time."
And what is all this from 'A World To Win' (WTW) about the resurrection of a latter day Oliver Cromwell to deal with The Crisis?
Cromwell did genocide.
WTW is supposed to be on the Left and their last two columns have promoted a Cromwellian solution (plus a dig at Sinn Fein).
So, Cromwell or Revolutionary Socialism?
_____________________________________________________________________________________
* All posts labelled # are only available in full by subscription.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
