Pussy Riot

It's not really my kind of music.  But if Vladimir Putin wants to throw them in jail for seven years on trumped-up charges, then I'm inclined to lend a favourable ear.  Go girls!

Clash of cultures

The scribblers meet the bank.  Here is The Independent's report of yesterday's HSBC presser:

The participants on the call were a bunch of hacks straining to hide their incredulity at what was being said and a bunch of HSBC executives who genuinely seemed to imagine that they were giving frank replies to rather mean questions.

Why are we going on about that cocaine money-laundering thing when their continued capital strength is such a source of reassurance?

That Libor scandal is not to be discussed. We've said all we can. Now about the 12 per cent rise in commercial banking revenues... They did touch on the various scandals, but it seemed to think these things had happened at some other company, with them mere innocent bystanders.

"The banking industry is operating in a hostile climate," said the chairman Douglas Flint, as if HSBC had nothing to do with creating public and political anger at the sector. The bank's leadership – Flint and chief executive Stuart Gulliver – insist that HSBC's issues are a matter of structure rather than culture.

Would his own bonus be affected by the money-laundering fiasco, Gulliver was asked. He pushed back: "That's a matter for the remuneration committee," which sounds very like "no, why should it?"

"We get it," insisted Gulliver, sounding for all the world like a man who does not.

When will they ever learn?

What's on when?

Confused about the Olympics schedule?  I know I was.

This site is of some modest assistance - just click on the blue buttons.  Then all you have to do is find out which programme on the red button is showing it.

Quote of the day

From The Independent (here):

The commercialisation of the Olympic Games and the heavy-handed policing of the Olympic "brand" by the organisers and their lawyers may in later years become a case study in how not to do it. It is hard to believe the McDonald's image is improved by insisting that it be the only provider of chips in the park. It is even less likely Visa will benefit from its insistence only its cards can be used.

The idea of sponsorship is surely that the image of the brand is enhanced because it is associated with something as uplifting as sport at its best, not that it seeks to drag sporting events down to the grasping commercial reality of everyday life.

Only too true.

   

Quote of the day

From Mitt the twit (here):  

In his book,No Apology, he writes:

"England [sic] is just a small island. Its roads and houses are small. With few exceptions, it doesn't make things that people in the rest of the world want to buy. And if it hadn't been separated from the continent by water, it almost certainly would have been lost to Hitler's ambitions."

   

It's fate

Inanimate objects.  The Tories are condemned to ridicule:  they can't even ring a bell without it going wrong.

                   
                   
                   
             


                   

No but yes but maybe

It is a peculiar strategy but it seems to be working.  Every time Vince denies wanting the job of Chancellor, he moves a little closer to achieving it.  The Independent reports:

Vince Cable has denied he is angling for the job of Chancellor as George Osborne's credentials were questioned by two Conservative politicians.

A day after he angered Mr Osborne by saying he would "probably" be a good Chancellor, the Liberal Democrat Business Secretary was on his best behaviour yesterday.

"I am not pushing for the job. We are part of a team," Mr Cable said. "We have a collective agreed policy and I am delivering on my bit of it, which centres on the area of industrial strategy. I am not proposing a radically different approach." If he were to be made Chancellor, Mr Cable stressed, "I would be building on what George Osborne has already achieved". He dismissed Labour's criticism that Mr Osborne was a "part-time chancellor" because of his role as a strategist.

Who knows?  Given the doldrums of Slasher Osborne, perhaps Cinders will actually go to the ball.

Music of the week

I am not usually keen on cover versions but this is a tremendous elaboration on what was a good song to begin with.  I commend to you the keyboards solo in the middle, backed up by the pounding bass and eventually the lead guitar.  (Whit a poseur! - ed).

A learning experience?

What lesson will the airport authorities learn from this security lapse?

The 11-year-old boy sparked a security alert after managing to fly from Manchester to Rome on his own without a passport, ticket or boarding pass.The schoolboy passed through security without being checked, before boarding the Jet2.com flight yesterday

.Liam had travelled less than three miles from a nearby shopping centre, before evading five security checks to successfully board flight LS791 to the Italian capital.

The captain was only alerted to the extra passenger when holidaymakers raised concerns during the flight.

It would be a foolish dream to suggest that they should limit themselves to one security check and do it properly.  No, I suspect that it will involve additional tedious and futile checks, to the discomfort and inconvenience of travellers.

  

God shuffled his feet

It was Tom Nairn who said "Scotland will be free when the last minister is strangled by the last copy of the Sunday Post."


The Independent reports:

“The Scottish government is embarking on a dangerous social experiment on a massive scale,” said a spokesman for the Catholic Church in Scotland. “We strongly suspect that time will show the Church to have been completely correct in explaining that same-sex sexual relationships are detrimental to any love expressed within profound friendships."

The Church of Scotland was more measured in its response but accused legislators of needlessly rushing ahead with legislation that many of its members found difficult."We are acutely aware that opinions differ among our own members and that many people are anxious and hurt in the current situation,” said Rev Alan Hamilton. "We believe homophobia to be sinful and we reaffirm our strong pastoral commitment to all people in Scotland, regardless of sexual orientation or beliefs."

Sad to see the churches lining up once again with the forces of reaction, especially when the proposed legislation will force no-one and no church to do what it doesn't want to do.

The incredible shrinking economy

Time for plan B?

Something wrong here

Well, well. well, there's a surprise - the bankster bosses want to charge us for current accounts.  The Independent reports:

In a wide-ranging speech, Financial Services Authority chairman Lord Turner called on bank bosses to act as "custodians of institutions of great public interest, as well as custodians of shareholder value".

He warned the end of free current accounts might be needed to drive more competition into the sector and move away from a model where banks sought profit instead from higher-margin products, leading to the mis-selling of payment protection insurance.

So the banks mis-sell products (it used to be known as swindling) to their customers and, in order to stop them, customers are expected to pay more in regular fees?  When I lend money to a bank, I expect them to pay me for that privilege, just as they expect me to pay when they lend me money.  And heaven knows the banks are far from slow to impose extra charges on the slightest excuse.

And I thought that the FSA was supposed to be on the side of the customer ...

Mixing with the wrong sort

So posh Dave invited into his office a man who may turn out to have been a criminal.  Our Dave didna ken, I hear you say.  Aye, but did he ask sufficient questions?   The Leveson Inquiry indicated that there is room for doubt.  The Independent reports:

Issue: How many times did David Cameron seek assurances from Andy Coulson about his past?

What Cameron said: The Prime Minister said he asked the former News of the World editor for assurances about his past before he hired him at a meeting in his office in March 2007. Following reports in July 2009 of widespread phone hacking at the News of the World, "I asked Andy Coulson to repeat the assurances."

What Andy Coulson said: Asked whether Mr Cameron sought further assurances from him in 2009, Mr Coulson replied: "Not that I recall."

Other evidence: In July 2011, Mr Cameron said he had appointed Mr Coulson as his communications director "on the basis of assurances he gave me that he did not know about the phone-hacking and he was not involved in criminality".

Furthermore, posh Dave became involved with a wumman who might also turn out to have been a criminal.  All those country suppers, and then there was Raisa (the horse);  all very messy and more than a bit grubby.  And now that she has been charged with criminal offences, who knows what else may emerge?

Bandits

There are times when I wonder about the sanity of our legislators.  Take this:

In a report, the House of Commons' Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee called for local authorities to approve the creation of more casinos, which should be permitted to provide up to 20 high stakes gambling machines.

Betting shops would also be able to increase from four the number of “B2” fruit machines on which punters can place bets of as much as £100 a time, under the committee’s recommendation.

The proposals raise the prospect that high streets up and down the country could offer the machines, which invite gamblers to bet an amount representing a quarter of the average amount taken home each week by workers with a single press of a button.

One senior MP, John Whittingdale, the Conservative chairman of the committee, described the current system of gambling regulation as “reluctantly permissive,” and insisted that fruit machines were “legitimate entertainment”.

Are there not already more than sufficient opportunities for gambling?  And why bet on such machines, as they are fixed to deliver a return to the owners?  At least, the pools, the horses and the stock exchange offer the possibility of a decent return ...

  

Quote of the day

From Mr Tony in The Telegraph (here):

We must not start thinking that society will be better off “if we hang 20 bankers at the end of the street”, Mr Blair says.

All together now - "Oh yes it will!"

Crying wolf

How did we get into this shambles?  And where will it all end?  The Guardian reports on a crisis coming to a head:

Spain is heading inexorably towards a bailout, probably quite soon. It was always a case of smoke and mirrors to imagine that the promised €100bn (£78bn) package of support for Spanish banks would be enough and so it has proved.

This is a country with a collapsing economy, an imploding property market, banks nursing colossal losses, and 10-year bond yields at 7.5%. The question is not whether there will be a bailout, but how big it will be. At least €300bn in all probability.

The second conclusion is that the trapdoor is opening up under Greece. German patience with Athens has run out, and the IMF was forced to deny reports on Monday it was preparing to cut off financial support. The Greek government is now faced with the choice of agreeing to a new range of demand-reducing measures it knows will be both counter-productive and politically toxic in order to be able to pay its bills inside the euro zone, or to devalue and default outside monetary union. A voluntary Greek exit would be ideal for Angela Merkel.

If Greece exits, Spain and Italy will be next; and they are too big to bail out.  Meanwhile the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the German Government are fiddling while the euro collapses:

Germany insists the new system of rigorous European supervision of banks has to be operating before common eurozone funds can go to a country's banks. Critics suspect Berlin is playing for time, to delay the creeping mutualisation of liability in what one of the senior officials describes as the developing "mechanism to run a continental economy".

...

The aim, likely to prove over-ambitious, is to have the new regime up and running by the new year. British and European officials believe it will be an improvement on the way things are currently supervised. Yet they doubt if it would be fit to handle a full-blown banking crisis, and would instead be a fairweather regime that would struggle to cope with a storm.

But will it ever get the chance?  Will the euro survive until the new year?

 

It's a hard life

Don't you feel sorry for those cabinet ministers having to use public transport?  After all, they're not used to mixing with ordinary people and it will come as a shock to the system.  The Telegraph reports:

Ministers have been banned from taking cars and using the so-called Zil lanes, named after the routes formerly reserved for Soviet leaders, which have been established across London for VIPs.

A Government spokeswoman said: "All ministers will be expected to travel to the Games like everybody else. There will be some limited circumstances when this might be waved but as a general rule that is what they have been told."

...
However, some ministers have been irritated by the order to take the Tube.
One Cabinet minister told The Independent: "This has caused a lot of ill-feeling and frankly some of us would rather not be going to anything at all.
"The rules are unbelievably draconian. We've basically been told we're on our own and have to look after our guests with no official support and we'll have to go by Tube as well. 

Of course most of us don't have any opportunity to take advantage of a chauffeur-driven limo.  But ministers are different - at least, they think they are ...

Crackers

Some people are strange.  You could buy a lot of pan loaves instead.

Someone has paid £230 at auction for a 30-year-old piece of toast. Not just any old piece of toast, however – a piece of toast served to, but not eaten by, Prince Charles on the morning of his wedding to Diana Spencer in 1981. The provenance was impeccable.
What an extraordinary, moving bit of carbohydrate. The scene constructs itself: the young Prince, about to reach for his usual second piece of toast, but suddenly overcome with doubt; the toast, returned, untouched, puzzled over by the staff; and finally one says, "That toast, colleagues, is history. In that toast, we shall see this marriage unfold. I am keeping that, to sell it at a profit in decades to come." The age of the reliquary is not over. God knows what it would have fetched if the royal toast had been proffered to the sainted Diana herself, or if evidence of marital doubt were present in a single, uncommitted bite mark.

It will be mouldy by now.  Even with marmalade (which hides a lot of sins), it will be inedible ...

Where did it all go wrong?

The Guardian Diary has the answer:

So let's get this straight. Who at games organisers Locog was monitoring the contract with G4S? A fair and simple question for the home affairs committee chairman Keith Vaz to put. Here's the answer Locog's Paul Deighton provided in a letter to Vaz on Monday: "The contract was initially monitored weekly by the multi-agency Security Workforce Board. From January 2012, this body was subsumed into the Venue Security Delivery Board ('VDSB') [sic], a multi-agency body, meeting weekly, reporting directly to the Olympic Security Board, with members from the Home Office, GOE, Police, MOD, G4S and Locog. The VSDB monitored the G4S progress on the recruitment, training and accreditation of security guards for the Games and received weekly reports." There's more. "Locog established two bodies operating jointly with G4S. These bodies — the Contract Management Board and the Contract Performance Board, respectively — reported into the VSDB and initially met bi-weekly before moving to weekly meetings several months ago." In May, Locog also instituted weekly meetings with G4S "to review performance". Let's not forget the regular reviews by another Locog body, the Contract Review Board. And yet, with all those cooks stirring the broth, it all went wrong. Incredible, really.

 

It's a start, at least

As a long-suffering Lloyds shareholder, I suppose I should be irritated at the disposal of so many branches, sold off for a song.  The Guardian sets out the position:

Lloyds knew bad news was inevitable. A forced sale, in a depressed market, with only one and a half bidders, was never going to secure a decent price. Even against this undemanding yardstick, however, the proceeds from transferring 632 branches to the Co-op count as miserable.
Lloyds, under Project Verde – the name for Lloyds Banking's enforced sale of hundreds of its branches – is getting only £350m at first, against an original dream of £1.5bn, albeit the size of the asset book has been cut. It is also underwriting the debt the Co-op is raising to do the deal.
Long-suffering shareholders in the old Lloyds TSB, the pre bailout bank, have been stung twice – once when their former board paid an absurd sum in 2008 to tow away HBOS; and now to satisfy the European commission's state-aid rules.
To add salt to the wound, the TSB brand is being thrown into the job-lot.

Force majeure applies however and, in the longer term, the Co-op may prove to be a satisfactory home.  Lloyds is still too big and, sooner or later, unbundling Halifax/Bank of Scotland from the remaining Lloyds operation must be on the cards (hopefully at a better price).

More info on the Co-op transfer here.