“HBOS’ share price began to drop
last summer when the City became nervous about its reliance on UK mortgages.
There were denials that the firm was in crisis, which is always a terrible
sign. In September 2008, the Big Four bank Lloyds bought HBOS after its boss,
Victor Blank – this is the part you couldn’t make up – bumped into Gordon Brown
at a drinks party and got him to give an assurance that a takeover would not be
referred to the monopolies commission..
Most of us have had a few drinks
at a party and done something embarrassing, usually along the lines of
I’ve-always-fancied-you-isn’t-it-time-we-did-something-about-it, but let’s take
comfort in the following truth: none of us has ever done anything as
embarrassing as buying HBOS.”
- John
Lanchester, London Review of Books, “It’s Finished”, May 2009.
“Kenneth Feinberg, the Obama
administration’s special master for executive compensation, said he is “very
concerned” about the possibility his pay cuts may drive talent away from
companies bailed out by US taxpayers.”
- Bloomberg
News, 12th November 2009.
Well, with talent like that, who
needs grubbily self-interested morons ? And yet in our Looking Glass world, the
overarching policy mistakes just keep coming. Last week saw an announcement
from the UK’s Nursing and Midwifery Council that from 2013, all would-be nurses
will have to have a degree. Two thoughts spring to mind by way of response. One
is that the current Labour government has done its damnedest to dilute the
rigour of a university degree with its fatuous and statistically arbitrary
objective of pushing 50% of the young population into higher “education,”
resulting in a strangely underpowered graduate workforce that in some cases can
barely read or write. The second is that the City has, for at least the past
two decades, insisted that all front office positions should be held
exclusively by graduates. That comparably arbitrary hurdle has not had a
particularly successful outcome, in anything other than the narrowest economic
and financial terms. From 2013, sick people may wish to try and heal themselves,
or to self-medicate via random pharmaceutical internet sites, rather than take
their chances on the NHS. Let us hope that at least some of those nursing
graduates do not hold previous qualifications in economics.
To read more,
Download Triumph of the Realists, Part II
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