“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, 12^th 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.

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