Of Hearts and Minds

Sounds intriguing, am looking forward to seeing it 🙂

I shall tune in courtesy of foxy proxy.

I went to see the Cure last Night Robert Smith had Citizens not Subjects emplzoned across two of his Guitars. which figures in a blog I have just done about Pythogoruses Learning as remembering. And the Management by Walking about practiced by Sir John Harvey Jones in trouble Shooter.

http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2012/07/socratic-management-learning-by.html

Apologies, correction the VPN title is : ExpressVPN.

Can’t flippin’ wait – I’ll spread the word as best I can.

Swedish Guy

In lieu of an appropriate doc from DM, here is a suggestion:

Quants: The Alchemists of Wall St

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed2FWNWwE3I

It’s not overly technical but does cover some important aspects of derivatives. It features Paul Wilmott, who is perhaps finance’s answer to Brian Cox !!

Dear David,

thank you for a wonderful film. I have followed your work since ‘Dangerous Knowledge’ (even bought the DVD). I knew from your previous film about waves that what would be shown would not be just a dry scientific exploration but something lyrical, poetic and deeply personal. When the underlying reason for the film became clear it struck such a cord with me as I have been, and still am, in a similar situation. Both in the sense of watching my wife suffer from this terrible illness, and its associated effects upon my son and I, and the fact that previous to this illness I too inhabited the secure, safe world of reason. I have had to start listening more to my heart (and gut – perhaps the next film?!) and less to my cold rational reason and associated doctors, shrinks, relatives and well meaning outsiders asking “What has she got to be sad about?” etc etc etc. This course of action helps and makes me less hard on myself and, at times, deal with the frustration I have with the whole situation. It’s not much. But right now it’s all I’ve got and your film made me feel less alone when it’s one of those ‘bad days’ and appreciate more the ‘good days’. Sorry for rambling on. I think that’s all I have to say right now. Still processing my thoughts on the film, as you probably can tell. Many thanks again.

Watched Heart vs Mind tonight and thought it excellent and informative. I wish we had more intelligent TV such as this.

Ps the aorta vortex was breathtaking !

With David busy I thought I’d purloin another worthy article from Ian Bell.

Not entirely topical to the essence of David’s post but possibly something that has exercised all our heats and minds in the recent past and foreseeable future.

Five years on, do we have power to tame the banks?

Ian Bell
Columnist

Five years ago, your chances of meeting anyone with a working knowledge of the London interbank offered rate were slim.

Sub-prime, unless it counted as an arcane reference to second-rate meat products, had not entered the language. Credit default swaps – though this probably counted as prescient – were a mystery to all.

Money laundering was the province of movie villains. Bonuses, for most, were a bob or two granted to the lucky few at Christmas. The payment protection insurance (PPI) on your credit card or loan meant – didn’t it? – exactly what it said. Quantitive easing was probably something best discussed with a doctor. Credit flowed, it did not crunch, and the euro was the future.

Last week, stuck in a car, I heard Radio Four’s World At One. One topic under discussion was the so-called packaged bank account, the kind you pay for in exchange for certain “products”. Martha Kearney hadn’t been talking for long before the same old thought arose: here we go again.

Some ten million people have these accounts, paying up to £25 a month for the privilege. In return, they get – so they hope – travel insurance, mobile phone insurance, and other bargains. They get these things, that is, if the bank sales person chasing a bonus remembers to mention that some individuals are excluded from travel insurance on the grounds of age or a pre-existing conditions, or points out that the phone has to be registered within 28 days.

If not, the insurance is worthless. If not, the industry that was supposed to learn all sorts of “lessons” over PPI has been at it again. The Financial Services Authority (FSA) has been leaning towards that conclusion and intends to oblige banks to contact affected customers. Yet again, the Financial Ombudsman Service is bracing itself for a flood of complaints.

What was striking about the radio discussion, however, was the language. Neither the representative from the FSA, nor the man from the ombudsman service, was in much doubt about what has been going on, but each was miserly with his words. Kearney meanwhile mentioned the bonuses available to the banks’ reps and asked whether these were an incentive to “hoodwink” customers.

Hoodwink? And this of the industry that “mis-sold” PPI? This of the banks accused by a stern FSA of “serious failings” in sticking small businesses with punitively expensive interest rate swaps? In the wake of the review of Libor by Martin Wheatley, managing director of the FSA, it has even been suggested that attempts to rig the benchmark mechanism should be treated as – pass the smelling salts – a crime. Imagine that.

In August five years ago, banking’s facade began to crack. In France, BNP Paribas ran into deep trouble because of its involvement in bonds based on the American sub-prime mortgage market. Around the world, lending between banks, many of them similarly afflicted, began to dry up. In Britain, Northern Rock’s merry habit of borrowing wholesale in order to throw loans at customers duly ended in crisis and collapse. Global banking approached the brink of catastrophe.

We bailed them out, of course. Remember that each time George Osborne returns to his lecture on Britain’s debts. One way or another, we are short of a £1 trillion, or thereabouts, thanks to the banks. That should have led to recriminations, perhaps even to court appearances, but it turned out to be a mere preface to the full story. That tale is more serious even than our abiding fears over the length and depth of Britain’s recession.

This week, the consumer magazine Which? produced a survey on public attitudes towards banking. Have your feather ready, and prepare to be knocked over. Is it surprising that 71% of people believe banks have failed to learn the lessons of the past five years, or astonishing that 29% have yet to reach that conclusion? Is it amazing that three out of four of those surveyed think a parliamentary inquiry into banking ethics will make not a blind bit of difference, or staggering that 26% are still optimistic?

You can begin at any point in the narrative and arrive at the same judgment. By one estimate, the ring involved in Libor rigging deprived customers globally of $1.5trn over a period of years by misrepresenting the value of contracts and the strength of banks. At the last count, meanwhile, 10 international banks had been caught and fined for cleaning up dirty money.

Standard Chartered denies absolutely that it laundered $250bn for Iran: that’s for the record. But JP Morgan has coughed up $88m for offences that are not in doubt; the Dutch bank ING has paid $619m; Barclays has settled for $176m; Lloyds TSB for $350m. Being helpful to Iran cost Credit Suisse $536m for “egregious violations”. HSBC has meanwhile admitted laundering $16bn in cash from Mexico, cash alleged to have come from drugs cartels.

This is before the usual suspects follow Barclays into the dock over Libor, an escapade that has cost that bank small change to the tune of £290m. This is before the final bills are totted up for mis-selling, a game that has already cost RBS £310m. This is before anyone even attempts to work out how much the banks have filched through wholesale tax avoidance and bonuses.

Meanwhile, the Bank of England tab for quantitive easing – the money is not actually fictional – runs to £375bn. Little of that has reached the real economy to which the banks are reluctant to lend, despite every solemn promise.

These are just snapshots from the past five years. Some big headlines have already been forgotten – did that minnow Northern Rock really cost us £24bn? – as the political appetite for reform has faded. We are still supposed to talk of customers “hoodwinked”, of products “mis-sold”, “mistakes” made and “failings” regretted. Yet in any other context banking’s record over the past five years would be described as a criminal conspiracy exposed.

You can take your pick: a pensioner ripped off for PPI, or a soldier dying thanks to explosives bought with laundered dollars. Nor is that notion melodramatic. Contrary to their delusions, banks operate in the real world, where money makes things happen. In five years we have learned how reality has been shaped by banking’s masters of the universe, and learned how fragile that reality has become.

They interpret the fact as a mark of their enduring power. They might be right. No matter how often crookedness is exposed, the self-evident truth is that the world depends on its banking systems. If anything, the past five years have rammed the lesson home.

Only one detail is overlooked: this is no way to run a planet. Each of the offences listed above has done damage to the economy and to ordinary lives. In some cases, as in the interest protection scam inflicted on small businesses, that was, explicitly, the idea. In another, distant part of the global zoo, meanwhile, Iran’s nuclear ambitions prosper thanks to freshly laundered dollars.

For democracies, it comes down to a test of strength. It is no longer a question of what should be done – there is no shortage of ideas – but of what can be done. Who’s really in charge?

Hawkeye thanks for the Lilliputians view which seems most sane. Capitalism is cheated because of zombie banks. Stop the dead walking and we will thrive..

Do not under rate yourself Bob Rocket – your thoughts and feelings are as relevant as any other persons.

I’m sure David, like most of us. has the usual difficulties of trying to balance the fight for the possible with the everyday demands and nuances of existence. From the little I know I doubt the profession he has chosen allows little scope for a fixed type of life schedule.

In the meantime there’s plenty to comment on. From the bling of the Olympics, the Standard Chartered fiasco to the inhuman destruction of the UK welfare system by idealogical dinosaurs.

it has been said -we live in an interesting time – this is true, but the interest is of a frightening nature and the changes its bringing are not in the direction we should be heading.

We need a fundamental re-evaluation of our values and an irrevocable commitment to seeing these are met by the people we chose to represent us.

Here is my take on the subject . ( I may have posted this before -I’m a bit lax with my index)

The Gadarenes of Finance.

“we are a people possessed
like the madman of the Gadarenes
our souls howl with contempt
as greedy lips consume us
our “democracy”
silences the wise
our “prosperity”
impoverishes the meek
our “freedom”
imprisons the beloved
devoured by the Legion.”

Martin Gadaran.

: The People Business.

Intro.

This exercise is about us. All of us, the Homo sapiens that dominate this planet we call earth and the world we manufacture in order to pass our time on it.

As a species we are dominant. We have conquered land, sea and sky, beginning to probe into the universe and in most cases can choose either to decimate or manage every other species on earth from whale to virus – though the latter causes us the greater problems. Animal, vegetable or mineral we regard as resources dormant until we uncover their latent potentials, which are then ours to exploit.

We are not unique in our exploitation. Viruses exploit anything that suits them in the animal and vegetable world, whales exploit the food of the oceans, plants the nutrients of sun, soil and rains, and minerals the geophysics created by change through the ages. However it is only our specie that can reason and understand these things. And even if we don’t understand, we know that there are others in our species that do and if the need arises, we can study their understanding and learn from them.

Even in this team learning approach we are not unique, though other species may use the suckling bribe in order in order to establish its practice. Nor are we unique in our flaws, the propensity to kill or intimate anger or violence is used through most if not all of the species. Even our ability to reason is not unique; a dog learns tricks or performs duties because it associates it with – probably in some, to it, mysterious way – a duty or game pleasing to its master. That’s still reasoning.

So in the natural sense we have no specifically unique qualities. We can’t dive like a whale, run at the speed of a cheetah or fly like a bird but by the development of our brain and its ability to construct abstract thought we can beat the abilities of the natural species in all these ventures. Now abstract thought isn’t inventiveness. Man didn’t invent fire; he witnessed it through some natural occurrence. Just as he noticed a round rock was easier to roll than a square one. The abstract was in seeing how both of these could be used to advantage.

This was the time when Homo sapiens began to exploit his nature; the foundation of civilization and the gestation of the People Business.

What won’t be included in this discourse are masses of dates, statistics, graphs or formula. Whether this genesis of abstract thought happened one hundred thousand, fifty or thirty thousand years ago is totally irrelevant.

As is recorded history; which in itself is a product of abstract thought – perhaps a fairly advanced thought, since the need was seen to hold an account of the past in order to explain the present and to try and shape the future – but in essence its only a sophistication of folk lore, tribal squabbles, a record of animal movement and numbers and the time to reap and sow. And as a record of account in The People Business it has proved to be flawed through the abilities to apply the same abstract capabilities to its construction, interpretation and exploitation.

So, dismissing all the yesterdays as irrelevant, how do we handle our day and hopefully our tomorrows, in what, by the sheer chance of birth, is the business we are thrust in to.

I suppose the first thing we must recognise is that ‘The People Business’ has a hierarchy. A hierarchy created sometimes by the same chances awarded by birth, at others by the environment we find ourselves in and the values that environment regards as our potential usefulness as a resource in the business.

Taking the above as a given surely we have to ask a question as to the purpose and objectives of this business that only death or imbecility (at times not even that) excuses us from participating in.

But before we do we have to consider how we are capable of asking it. Nature created this earth and every form of life that’s ever been on it and, while we may be capable of exploiting the elements of nature we are a long way off, if ever, of being able to claim dominion over them. Nature is by its nature a dictator. Perhaps generally benign, avuncular, acquiescent it never the less has no care whether we as a species choose to continue to thrive on its planet or be wiped out by nature itself or by self destruction. This is the irrevocable ‘given’ without which the gestation of ‘T he People Business’ would never have been formed and must be the primary factor on which the scales of values and solvency of the business is measured.

The role of Nature accepted, we then have to ask; whether in the affairs of humanity, any concept, system, practice or ideology which doesn’t improve the wellbeing, contentment, security and advancement of the majority of the species and its survival, has any claim to legitimacy or continuance by establishment or custom?

If the answer is no – we have gazillions of problems to sort out.

If the answer is yes – then life for most will continue to be a vale of tears waiting for a death date.

While I believe the answer to the question as posed would result in an overwhelming majority of No’s over the Yes’s, it leads us to ponder on what we actually mean by concepts such as wellbeing, contentment, security, advancement and how we tie these in with the species survival.

This is a problem that has exercised the minds of philosophers and thinkers throughout the ages. At the basic level they have divided it into two camps, called one Determinism, and the other Free Will. Again at the basic level Determinists maintain every happening in life or nature is preordained and humanity has no more control over its outcome than a rock can change into a horse; therefore humanity has no capacity for exercising or claiming the ability of true Free Will. We could call this the God camp.

Advocates of Free Will argue; we have to have free will because we have the ability to make choices. That while we may feel anger enough to kill in some circumstance, we choose not to and choose instead to adopt reason and apply restraint.

Throughout the ages these arguments have developed and formed sects then sub sects; some with a tentative toe in the other camp while others firmly straddle both while rejecting some of each, and so on. Candidly much of the argument is esoteric, often to the level of vanity, and could be summed up as an argument over whether a static ball bearing is downside up or upside down.

Yet the paradox of this hypothesis is not only how little consideration we give to it in our daily lives, it is the scale in which we use it to form our values, morality and our place in society. To clarify, I’ll give you an example – Scientists generally consider themselves free thinkers. While that may well be a true and honest belief, much of their work as scientist is to un-cover and understand inherent qualities and potentials in whatever subject or substance they’re working on. Whether their work proves true or false or they trip over the discovery of the millennium is entirely determined by the inherent qualities that have always existed in that subject or substance. So as individuals they practice free will, or think they do; but in work they’re controlled and measured by determinism.

Confused? Well aren’t we all, and that includes those who are devoting their lives to defining the solution. But take some heart, generally these people are looking for truth with no malicious intent or goal of global dominance; perhaps a little glory and personal comfort from a prize or two and again generally, they’re a pretty egalitarian lot who want to serve humanity.

So in order to define the purpose(s) of The People Business we have to accept another irrevocable truth.

a) God – is not an excuse.
b) gods – are not an excuse.

And beliefs are doubts that can only be truly dispelled by truths.

So the question facing us today is whether the beliefs being thrust on us by the Gadarenes of finance and their armies of acolytes does improve or offer any legitimate purpose to the life of our species or is it merely an element of control engineered as bulwarks of beliefs against blindingly obvious, and eventually, irrevocable truths?

Some time ago, in a forgotten article based on the financial meltdown and Browns stupid response to it, I posited the question – “Were governments acting as Human Resource Managers for the Global Conglomerates?”

At the time I was advocating the Banks should be resourced in order to meet their retail and genuine business functions – but all other activities should be placed in moratorium until such time as these have been forensically analysed and a true value awarded.

A few commentators agreed, but most got carried away on the lexicon of acronyms and the vanity of their ability, or belief, that they understood the complexities and labyrinthine formulas used in the alchemy’s of this most infinitely plastic of all commodities. In fact ‘plastic’ is too constricting – this commodity is the virtuoso of versatility. It can be used to buy or sell without ever having to be accounted for, it can lever its value up or down without ever having to produce a product or supply a service. Of late even the little it had to produce in order to prove its existence has been reduced to pieces of plastic for the minions or the production of digital zero digits for its acolytes – all together not a bad ‘miracle’ for these modern day Gadarenes to bring about.

Unfortunately there are another couple of adjectives beginning with V that we have to apply: the miracle like the substance it’s based on is without virtue – both are in essence ‘virtual’ and who has ever been troubled by a ‘virtual’ conscience?

The Gadarenes want to impose their virtual world on us, not because they believe it will lead to a better world – they know it won’t. But they slaver over the possibilities of global domination.

How’s that for an ambition based on an armoury of smoke, mirrors and propaganda? And could it be done without the contrivance of our politicians and governments?

(Extract from: The People Business.)

John Souter
30/09/11

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