Aqua Sea Foam Shame

A select committee had a group of senior bankers for lunch yesterday. The main dish being served was Humble Pie. The bankers said they were terribly, terribly sorry for the banking crisis. They were each asked if they took personal responsibility for excessive lending and an untenable business model (lend people money for twenty-five years with money borrowed for a couple of weeks at a time) and they each explained that “no, they didn’t feel, that they, personally, had done anything, actually, wrong” but they were terribly, terribly sorry for all the hardship their decisions had caused.

Simon Jenkins of The Times has a wonderful analysis which goes along the lines: the only people that Labour politicians know who know about economics are bankers, when anything goes wrong the ruling party call for some expert advice. The bankers say that the government must give lots of money to the banks and policy progresses accordingly.

Amongst the endlessly gloomy economic data there may be a case for investing heavily in lampposts and rope as we are clearly going to need something to hang our former Masters Of The Universe from and with.

If the bosses of HBOS, RBS and other historic acronyms weren’t to blame who was? It could be their inquisitors, our legislators, for driving us into a world of capitalist running pigs incentivised only by greed for not coupling the market to the general “good” or it could be the poor “victim” public who wanted nothing more than a roof over their heads and unearned capital gains beyond anything we were likely to earn at a desk with a keyboard.

For better or for worse we no longer live in a hierarchy, wake up one morning as Prime Minister or Chief Executive of Global Corp or Rupert Murdoch or General Sir Michael de Snootyboots KCB, CBE, DSO, QGM and you will find every decision that you think of taking is suffocatingly constrained by various “considerations”.
We now live in a networked society.

This means that a set of manga trading cards is as likely to capture the hopes and fears of our children as a Prince’s Trust initiative for rebuilding self-esteem amongst the inner city dispossessed. Conspiracy theorists are social luddites longing for a bygone era of deference when the surf was beholden to the squire who was beholden to the knight who was beholden to the king who represented God who was responsible for everything. When the world went against you, it was obvious who to blame.

In the new world we have to blame ourselves. The only questions are “How did I contribute to this recession, how can I devise a sustainable life to follow, who can I help and how can I help.”

Fortunately for my wafer thin self esteem, there is no time to write my answers to these questions today, however it is a question that cannot be ignored indefinitely.