Safe and Secure

The voters of the US, seem to have ditched Dubya’s plan to bail out Wall Street and the global banking crisis.  After all if you’re up for reelection in a few weeks, you don’t want to alienate all of those who are going to vote for you.

There are two main things that need to be done.

Savers and especially those at the bottom end of society need to be protected.  At present we have a limit in the UK, where the first £35,000 of your money in a bank is fully protected.  I suspect that like me, if you’re above that limit, you’ve got your money spread around a bit.  But one thing that the Brown government has promised is to raise the limit to £50,000.  This should be done now.

The other thing is that a lot of companies and especially those at the bottom end of the scale are increasingly having difficulty in raising funds, as banks either don’t have any money to lend or are too scared to do so.  So some means has to be found to unlock this logjam, otherwise good companies will go to the wall. 

On the other hand, this logjam may get unlocked by those good and solvent banks where people put their savings.  Now that is a virtuous circle.

An old friend came round for supper last night.  He is an unreconstructed control engineer, who has spent most of his life making complicated systems like nuclear power stations and aircraft work.  He’s retired now and spends most of his time writing books and letters to newspapers. He also likes to wind up the pompous in society.  Perhaps he should do a Henry Root.

I asked him what he’d do in this crisis.

His reply was based on his experience in his last job, where he worked for a large British electronics company.  This was a well run company, that was taken down a new route by new management and in the end it effectively went bust, due to their wrong decisions.

The outcome for those working for the company though was on the whole pretty good after a couple of years of hardship.  You may have destroyed the company, but you can’t destroy the intelligence of those that work for it and they used that intelligence to get good jobs or create new and better businesses.

He feels that if the US doesn’t put their $700 billion rescue together, then it might be a good thing, in that newer and better structures will arise.  In fact he feels that they will have to and if you look back in history, you’ll find that after every financial crisis, things have got better, after a period of pain.

I’m probably on balance against the bail-out, especially if it doesn’t get rid of the excess at the top.

I was at a meeting a few weeks ago with a senior director of a US investment bank, who was totally surprised when I said that I’d walked across London to meet him in the City.  It was a nice sunny day, so I’d said why not.  But he said what about my security!  I said that you’re always safer on the street or on the Tube, than you are in a limo with blacked-out windows.  You also learn more about how the people are thinking.

He didn’t like my dressing down.  Especially, after he’d approached me because I was the best dressed lady at the meeting.  Even if I was by far the oldest.

He’s the sort of dinosaur, who should be quietly retired.  He may have been ten years or so younger than me, but I was ten years fitter and I like to think a lot more experieneced.  Do we have enough experience at the top?

Returning to the people, we only hear about those in trouble.  But the majority of people out there are sensible, are paying their mortgage and generally carrying on as normal, albeit with a few savings and adjustments.  Even Bradford and Bingley apparently only has a default rate of 1.78% on their own mortgages.

Here’s what the BBC says.

The key issue that distinguishes the B&B from other lenders is that some of its loans to home owners have been turning bad at an alarming rate.

Loans which it has made itself had a default rate of 1.78% by the end of June.

But those mortgages which it had been buying in from other lenders, such as GMAC-RFC, have a much higher default rate of 5.11%.

So it’s down to fat-cat bad managemnent.

We live in interesting times. 

But the good people of the world rather than the politicians will get us out of this mess.

She seems to have got a lot of coverage in the press lately, because she hasn’t had too much coverage in another area.

The Times put it more bluntly.

As images emerge of the German Chancellor in a plunging evening gown, we ask again: should a world leader dare to bare? Well, if anyone can, Merkel can. With a cleavage the size of two pitchers of Warsteiner, and a steely demeanour, who would mess with the Iron Lady of Europe (and that bosom?). Hands off, Dubya.

I think the lady made an error.

The dress was probably very expensive and I don’t think it really suits her and she could have done a lot better.

But perhaps underneath it all, there is one of Wagner’s heroines struggling to get out.

If so! Watch out world!

This was the title of a piece by Martin Amis in The Times yesterday.

The sub-heading was :-

Our correspondent contends that our response to September 11 has been deficient. Radical Islam, he argues, must be recognised as a fanatical death cult, such as Nazism or Bolshevism.

He is right.

One other quote :-

Accordingly, given the choice between George Bush and Osama bin Laden, the liberal relativist, it seems, is obliged to plump for the Saudi, thus becoming the appeaser of an armed doctrine with the following tenets: it is racist, misogynist, homophobic, totalitarian, inquisitional, imperialist, and genocidal.

Read the article and make up your own mind.

Gonzales was unfit from the outset was today’s lead editorial in the FT.

I read it whilst having my lunch and it brought a warm glow to me, as one of the world’s leading newspapers, put the boot into the former Attorney General of the United States. They didn’t spare Dubya either.

To call the resignation of Alberto Gonzales as US attorney-general overdue seems barely adequate. From the outset, he was the most delinquent and incompetent holder of that vital office in living memory. Yet to the end, President George W. Bush seemed blithely unaware of Mr Gonzales’ limitations, calling him “a man of integrity, decency and principle” who was “impeded from doing important work as his good name was dragged through the mud for political reasons”. One can only hope Mr Bush was insincere, wishing to show kindness to a humiliated friend. If those remarks really do express the president’s understanding of the matter, his incapacity to learn from mistakes is indeed boundless.

Read more on their site, as it gets harder and more critical.

Rupert Cornwell has an interesting piece in the Sindie today called Car-loving Californians rely on alcohol to keep them on the road.

He illustrates the illusion of how ethanol will still allow Americans to drive with impunity. And especially in large overweight, inefficient ones. A few facts :-

• Only one in fifty of the US’s 238 million cars can run on ethanol.
• There are only four garages that sell it in California.
• To produce the 36 billion gallons of ethanol that the Senate wants would need 90 million acres of maize (corn to Americans). The current crop which is used mainly for foodstuffs uses 80 million acres. So how much virgin land will have to be cultivated? And how much will food prices rise?
• George Bush refuses to raise energy taxes or make Detroit produce more fuel-efficient vehicles.

It all sounds to me like an explosive disaster to me.

Simon Mayo’s program on BBC Radio 5 Live yesterday had an interview with Sidney Blumenthal, who was an adviser to President Bill Clinton.

He had some interesting things to say about Blair’s relationship with two American Presidents.

Unfortunately, Tony Blair’s achievements have been overshadowed by his relationship with George Bush and his involvement with the Iraq war. From an American perspective the Blair Prime Ministership is divided into two parts. The two Presidents that he worked with President Clinton and President Bush. Under President Clinton it was a very fruitful relationship and the arrival of Blair was seen as a conformation of a new kind of modernising politics on the centre left and a new internationlism. And it gave a lot of incentive to the centre left in Europe and elsewhere in the world.

Blair also had Clinton in a way to protect him and while Blair could act out all of his impulses, Clinton was protecting the Western Alliance at the same time. The truth of the matter is that contrary to the theory that Britain would be the bridge between the United States and Europe, it was the United States that protected the Western Coalition from Blair’s more messianic impulses. During the Kosovo war for example, Blair wanted to take a much more forward position on putting troops in Kosovo which would have disrupted the Western Alliance and Clinton understood that and kept all these things in balance.

Under Bush there was a completely different relationship and Blair thought he could guide this inexperienced American president, curb his unilateral impulses and somehow turn him into more productive International channels. And that’s not what happened and by the end Blair embraced Bush’s messianism and Blair was not listened to. Blair was trapped and Blair also found that his influence had decreased to almost nil by the end. I find that Bush used Blair not as a partner but as a PR instrument.

It’s lucky that I trained as an audio typist, so I was able to type it off the Internet copy of Simon’s program. I’ve checked it and I hope there aren’t too many mistakes.

I don’t like George W. Bush, as I believe he has put the world at risk by his actions.

I’ve just been sent this piece by a friend.  It comes from a blog and is titled, No one wants to have dinner with George W. Bush.

George Bush is no fan of state dinners. In the eight years of Bill Clinton’s presidency, the White House hosted no fewer than 30 such events, whereas Dubya has hosted a mere four. So, it’s something of a big deal that Bush invited Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, a close friend of the Bush family, to be guest of honor at a state dinner in mid-April.

But Abdullah declined, which is, shall we say, a tad embarrassing.

It’s a pity George doesn’t invite me to dinner, as if he did, I think I’d wear my daughter’s boots and give him a good kicking.

Do you think he’d like that?

On the other hand, I love to see him licking them and saying sorry for all the wrongs he has done.