This is the currency of power today. Fiat truth.

We are not allowed to have any secrets any more.  And yet those who insist they must know the truth about us, who spy upon us to extract our secrets, tell us in return, only lies.

It is a dangerous, corroding imbalance of power, because lies, like debts, compound.

Living the lie

We all know the famous Goebbels quote,

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.

From Sadam’s weapons of mass destruction and missiles that could hit us in just 40 minutes of sexed up bullshit, to the stress tests that show us every bank is perfectly solvent and however many billions they launder they are never guilty and no one goes to gaol because they are too big to fail and too connected to even question.

The eye of providence looks out and approves of what is done – Annuit cœptis.

But who does the all seeing eye, that sits atop  the pyramid of power on the mighty dollar bill, work for now? Is it really you and me?  That is what we are told to believe. But is it true? I think there are too many secrets but few of them are yours and mine.

The private dealings of the ordinary citizen are considered suspect and must, we are told, be rooted out. The secrets and outright lies of the corporate and governmental worlds, however – they are confidential. They are protected – behind razor-wire threats of  legal action and closed door tribunals of hand picked experts.

A few weeks ago I sat and listened to the former leader of the Conservative party, now an elder statesman of British politics, Michael Howard, tell an audience that governments need to lie. He is a clever man. He quoted Goebbels and then gave this carefully chosen example.

Imagine, he said, that a Chancellor knew that he was going to have to devalue the currency. The evening before the appointed hour, he is asked by a journalist if he is going to devalue. If he tells the truth and says yes, there will be a run on the currency and great damage will be done. So he lies. “No”, he says, “I have absolutely no plans to devalue at all.” And then next morning he devalues as he had planned.

“Was this not”, Mr Howard asked, “the right thing, the only thing to do?” And all agreed it was. The unspoken lesson that everyone seemed to accept was stability is more important than the truth.

I find this a very frightening notion.

But Mr Howard presented his lie well. He went on to quote the next, less well known line from the Goebbels quote.

The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie.

And this, he said smiling at us, is what protects you. The chancellor’s lie only needed to last a few hours. The nation only lived inside his lie overnight.

But now think of the lies we have been told since 2008. Our banking system and the  banks in it, we were told, were basically sound just suffering from a shortage of liquidity. And yet, in reality, it was not a problem of  liquidity, it was insolvency.

The liquidity lie had to be rolled over and the interest on it, paid. So another lie, that  bank assets were not worthless just ‘impaired’, had to be told and maintained. And to do that the truth had to be hidden, off balance sheet, in mark to model and offshore.

Our governments have spent trillions maintaining their lies and have forced us to live those lies for five years now. But there are costs. Living a lie is morally and politically corrosive, not to mention expensive.  Just this week, as reported in the FT, the Italian Treasury ‘uncovered’ a nest of lies. It appears that the Italian government, in the run up to joining the euro,  paid at least one of the big banks to help it hide the true extent of its debts by agreeing  derivative swaps. Greece used similar swaps to massage its debts. The now infamous Titlos agreement with Goldman Sachs being the best known.

The Italian agreements – there were several amounting to around €36 billion in value – would have been known to Mario Draghi who was at the time of some of the agreements at least  (1998-9) Secretary of the Treasury. Shortly after this (2002) he left the government and joined Goldman.

It now turns out the terms of the agreements were such that the Italian tax payer could face billions in losses. Of course those who will be forced to pay, were never consulted, not even told of the agreements. They were …confidential of course. Commercially sensitive and politically secret – so often bedfellows aren’t they? Kept secret from those who would be required to pay the bill when it came due.

Our leaders, our liars, haven’t bothered to protect us from the consequences of the lies at all. Too expensive. So austerity, disparity and stagnation are everywhere around us. Forced on us by those who suffer none of them, insulated as they are by wealth and power and privilege. Consequences are for little people, not their Betters.

Our ‘Betters’ have found Goebbels was wrong. You don’t have to protect the people from the consequences of the lies you tell them, as long as you can blame those consequences on someone else. On unforeseen global economic forces, on conniving foreigners who devalue their currency, or terrorists or whistleblowers. Or even the people themselves for taking on debts they couldn’t afford or on ‘necessity’ and ‘precedent’ – the bond holders cannot be made to pay – it goes against international precedent.

We, the people, need to strike back at the secret deals done between the elites of  the political and financial revolving door, and make it clear that we will not pay for anything about which we were not told.

Once the cry was, “No taxation without representation”. Today the cry must be, “No debt without consultation.”

Suppressing the Truth

What Mr Howard did not quote is the next line from Goebbels.

It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

But again Goebbels has been superceded. Repression is so last century. Why repress when you can simply drown it out. All it takes is for the media outlets to be owned by a few powerful and like- minded friends. A few media moguls and corporate giants, whose plastic pundits raise their voices while the dolly bird presenters flash their thighs. It’s all so full throttle and frantic, and charged with desire and greed.

Anyone who disagrees is a conspiracy theorist. Anyone who breaks ranks is a whistleblower and whistleblowers are domestic terrorists, dysfunctional loners with personality problems and axes to grind.

When the truth is vilified, hunted, gagged and goaled, then the State has chosen to go to war with the nation.

We are at war.

If the banks were to be wound up it is their [the wealthiest 10%’s] credit/debt backed ‘money and the assets held in it, which would burn to ash….So the simple reason our rulers insist on bailing out the banks is that by doing so the wealthy and the powerful are simply bailing out themselves and guaranteeing the continuation of a system which suits them perfectly.

In part two I argued that while the simple selfishness answer is true there are also theoretical justifications (albeit flawed ones) for the bail and cut policy.

The two aspects of their policy ‘bail and cut’, they will insist are not contradictory at all. Simply put, they will say they are loosening or increasing the  money supply (QE) in order to invest in growth (classic Keynesian) while simultaneously cutting those expenditures which they feel do not generate growth and which are in fact ‘drains’ on productivity – in their view any ‘public’ expenditure (Classic Free-market). Growth, for them, equals the free-market/private sector, while drains on growth equal government, public spending….Basically – Private Debt good, Public Debt bad.

I argued that one of the legion problems with this world view is the fact that whatever the ideology says should happen, the reality is that giving money to the banks for them to invest has simply not worked. It was never going to work because it is founded on a misapprehension about the nature and business of modern banks. Namely – that they invest for growth. They do not – certainly not in the broader economy during a recession. Banks used to ‘invest’. Today they much prefer to speculate. Investing is long and slow and does not make big bonuses. Speculating on food prices, currency fluctuations and sovereign debt, lending for leveraged, debt ladened buy-outs  – now these things can all provide the quick returns and big bonuses which old fashioned investment does not.

The idea that ‘we are all in this together’ coupled with the other idea that the banks are there to help – or are ‘there for the journey’ as a UK bank advert claims, is wishful thinking at best. These notions may make snappy sound bites but that is all they make. Banks are not there to help. They are NOT a service industry. Banks exist to make a profit as fast and as often as possible for those who own them and large bonuses for those who run them. Which is fine. They are a business. As long as we remember that and treat them accordingly I have no problem. I have a massive problem when, in the good times, the banks insist on being recognized as a business in the free market, to be treated with a laissez faire, light touch. But then in bad times insist even more fervently that they are not just a business to be allowed to live and die by the rules of the market like any other business, but claim instead to be an essential, – no, THE essential public service which must be protected above all else. So essential, in fact, that all ‘other’ public services must be cut in in order to better save the banks.

Let’s be clear the banks are not a public service. Banking – rather than the banks – could be a public service, but it is not run as such today. The banks are run as ruthless businesses. They exist according to an almost entirely selfish philosophy which extends from how they imagine human nature to be – no one, they think, would even turn up for work let alone do a good job unless rewarded more than anyone else – to justifying any and all fraud on the basis that if it makes a profit then who could blame you for trying. Be that as it may…

In part three I suggested that the official policy with its armature of ideological justifications and soundbite explanations was today’s Big Lie and looked at how and why Big Lies work.

In this last part, having looked at the origin and ideological justifications for the ‘bail the banks and cut everything else’ policy, I want to look at where the policy goes now. Because I believe the policies of the last four years have brought us to a critical and unstable juncture.

From crisis to opportunity – The top of the hill
For the last four years our Dear Leaders, political and financial, have been labouring to push everything back up the hill from which it slipped. As they have neared the top, however, I think they have come to see that the policies they have forced upon us can do much more for them than simply restore what they had before. Why stop there, they now wonder? The top of a hill is a place of fantastic opportunity. l think our leaders have come to see that shoved hard in the ‘right’ direction they could propell our societies in almost any direction they desired.

But this state of potential is also perilous. The top of a hill  is the place and the moment when the forces are all finely balanced and almost any ‘unauthorized’ push could send the system off in a direction the Dear Leaders would not like. Victory for the powerful and wealthy seems so close at hand and yet the crisis, far from being over, is also at its most critical juncture. So many possibilities exist together, like overlaid quantum states, in this one moment.

Just as our rulers prepare for one last push, to enforce one more round of austerity and bank bail outs upon us, to propel us more firmly to their desired future, they find there is a building and spreading opposition to everything they are doing. I believe we are at, or very near, that  place of maximum potential and maximum uncertainty where things could tumble down any number of quite different paths.  Irreversible victory is within our leader’s reach. Yet at the same time they are only a stumble, a determined opposing push away, from irrevocable disaster.

This place we are almost in, echoes with triumphant proclamations of imminent success while also being full of suspicion, fear and coercion. It is a moment that speaks of victory and a better future while feeling like the cusp of repression and paranoia, where free speech becomes seen as subversion and disagreement as dangerous dissent. This is the fascination of the non-linear moment when the pencil that writes our history is balanced on its end.

Fire sales and fire storms

When a business is so short of operating cash that it must sell assets in order to raise cash just to stay alive, and buyers know it, then the buyers hold all the power and prices tend to plummet. This is called a fire sale. On the high-street we would call it a ‘Closing-Down’ or ‘Everything Must Go’ sale. It is a perfectly normal part of the workings of the ‘free-market which the banks profess to be so keen on. Keen when it doesn’t apply to them, that is.

One of the many things hanging in the balance right now, I think, is who is going to be forced to sell their assets in a fire sale – the banks or us? No prizes for guessing the bankers preference. More revealing is to ask yourself who our current political leaders think should have them.

During the first two years of the bank debt crisis it was the constant worry of the banks and our Dear Leaders that without large and on-going injections of public cash, the banks would become so short of operating cash, or assets they could use as collateral for loans, that it would be the banks who would be forced to sell their assets in fire sales, which would burn the banks. And as I discussed in part one whose wealth do you  think would turn to dust with them? As this 2012 paper from the BIS (Bank for International Settlements the central bank’s central bank) notes,

At their peak, bank funding strains exacerbated fears of forced asset sales, … fears that funding strains and other pressures on European banks to deleverage could lead to forced asset sales,….

These fears were at crisis level globally in 09 and became a crisis again in Europe throughout ’11 and ’12. Each moment of renewed crisis resulted in our leaders releasing a flood of bail out money for the banks, so they did not have to sell their assets at any price, let alone at fire sale prices. On top of which the banks lobbied hard for and got two other measures both of which ‘protected’ the banks and the wealthy from having to sell anything at a price they did not like. Those measures were the suspension of mark to market accounting which they got in 2009 after some very heavy weight lobbying ( I wrote about it in Liar’s Lexicon – Mark to Market) and then being allowed to transfer all sorts of dodgy assets they had been holding in their Trading Books, where they have to be valued, to their Banking Books where they do not.

The amount of effort that has gone in to ‘protecting’ the banks from having to have fire-sales is a direct measure of the threat it posed and still posses to the banks and the wealthy. But that is only the first strand of the ‘bail and cut’ policy. While ‘bail’ is still very much on-going and about to be implemented again with another round of large bank bail outs, the second strand, ‘cutting’, is where we are now.

The official justification for cutting everything, as I argued in part two of this series, is that they are only cutting non-profit making, therefore non-essential things like welfare, and we should see the pain of those cuts as ‘our’ contribution, our part, of being ‘all in this together’.

It may be that this was indeed how they justified it in their own minds…at the start. But things have moved on. Today, the situation is that national central banks and behind them the Fed and ECB have made sure the banks have cash to operate. The ECB paper on bank funding again,

Euro area banks raised large amounts of funding via the ECB’s three-year LTROs [Euro area bank bail outs in 2012] , covering much of their potential funding needs from maturing bonds over the next few years. Across both operations, they bid for slightly more than €1 trillion. This was equivalent to around 80% of their 2012–14 debt redemption, more than covering their uncollateralised redemptions.

The bail out has bought time. Time for the next part of the evolving plan to take its effect.

It is now nations that are short of cash and finding it hard to borrow. And who is now clamouring for nations to reduce their debts by selling assets, even above investing for growth?  The banks.

The banks who refused to have their assets sold  at recessionary prices in a fire sale are delighted at the prospect – which they have helped bring to fruition – of arranging  a fire sale for ours.  The banks who did not want to see their assets valued in the teeth of a recession are happy to  value ours.  No mark to model for our assets. They will go to the lowest bidder.

And who do you think that bidder will be? Yes you got it. The same financial class who own the banks. The banks will bid and so will the leveraged buyout businesses the banks lend to. And what money will the bank use for this? Right again. The bail out money.

Those who keep assuring us that if we give the banks enough money they will start to invest in the real economy again are lying. The banks are not here to invest. They are here to predate, to scavenge. And our leaders have given them our money with which to do it.

This crisis has seen the paper wealth of the banks and the wealthiest 10% imperiled. The securities, derivatives and shares that make up so much of what the wealthy own, have all lost a great deal of their worth. That has left the banks with large holes in their balance sheets and for the wealthy, whose assets they hold, large losses if ever they were forced to admit them. Let’s not forget, when the banks are allowed to not mark to market it is not just the banks whose wealth is protected. The top 10% of all our nations also own huge swathes of this paper wealth. If the ‘assets’ – were marked to market or forced in to the market to be sold then those people, the people who own and run the banks, insurance companies, accountancy firms, law firms, media companies, the Senators and Members of Parliament, the Cabinet Ministers, lobbyists and experts would also see their ‘wealth’ go up in smoke.

But then along came the story which says nations are now in terrible debt and these debts are so large they cannot be carried, are in fact stifling growth (though how is never made clear) and must be paid down even if it means not only taxing the middle classes and cutting benefits to the poorer, but also also – sad though it makes us to tell you – also selling state assets.

Austerity is a wonderful thing if you want to force a fire sale. And not just any old fire sale either. It will be, if the banks and our leaders get their way, a fire-sale fire-storm.

A fire storm is created when a fire becomes so hot  that it creates a self sustaining feedback loop of in-rushing air which super-charges the original fire causing it to suck in even more air and so on. They have been known where brush fires have spread in tinder dry forests and famously in the carpet bombing of the German cities of Dresden and Hamburg in WWII.

If the banks had been forced to sell their assets, as each bank brought its assets to market they would have exposed the worthlessness of similar assets at other banks and the fire would have spread. An empire of debt backed wealth, that had long since ceased to be worth more than the paper upon which it was written, would have been lost. This did not happen.

Instead we now have banks who have secret losses; Vaults full of paper wealth whose value is still eroding. The question for the banks and our leaders has always been, not how to rescue us, but  how to replace all that lost value?

The answer to start with was just to buy time. Give the banks cash flow with bail outs. They thought that might be enough. But the rot was too deep. The paper assets could not be re-animated. Four years in, a new answer has emerged – an epic-fire storm fire-sale of public wealth and assets. Such a fire sale, if it can be made to sweep from nation to nation, will allow the banks to buy up assets, real ones, electricity grids, power stations, ports, water companies, telecoms companies, airports and roads. Things which produce real wealth not just paper valuations of derelict properties and derivative claims on other people’s debts.  The ‘cut everything’ austerity part of the official plan allows the banks to move from simply staving off admitting their losses to replacing their losses with real wealth producing assets. If the austerity plan can be maintained long enough, the fire will become self sustaining.

The Greek people already rejected the terms of the Austerity programme being force upon them once. This week their rulers will try to vote it through anyway. The plan whose details you can read here is to sell off Greece’s main airports and ports, its Gas company, Nickle industry, Phone company and mobile phone company, its water companies, its power company, Post system and motorways, plus sundry state owned properties, land and investments.

If the Greek fire-sale goes ahead it will set a bench mark, a low one, and a pressure, for similar sales in Portugal, Italy and Spain.  And it will not stop there. The fire will be spread, welcomed, enforced, in Britain and France and Belgium and Holland. Only Germany may escape. For a while.

A fire will have started and the banks will fan its flames. If the banks can force a fire sale they will have created a buying opportunity the likes of which only Russia has seen when it it was looted by the Oligarchs. And our banks and their owners will become the Oligarchs of the fading twilight of our democracy.

This is the bank’s chance to replace the shrinking value of their paper assets with new, ‘real’ assets that produce real wealth. With these assets they can rebuild their paper world of virtual assets and start their game over. All they need is for austerity to reach critical so that the fire storm takes hold.

Could they have acted differently?

I think they could. Still could. They could have put money in to the economy without using the banks. For example the UK has put up £1.4 trillion.  There are about 70 million people in the UK. The government could have ‘given’ £20K to every person earmarked to pay off their debts, with any remaining to be used as the person saw fit.  Or if you balk at funding for large families, and prefer something more modest how about £20K for each adult. My family would have got 40K. That would have paid off our mortgage. I would then have had more of my income to spend on other things. I would have bought double-glazing for my house.  The result would have been the banks having 40K paid off most household’s mortgage debt. That is 40K going in to the banks. So the banks would have still got their pound of flesh. But this way round would also have help the ordinary citizen. I think it was Steven Keen who first suggested this idea and it could still be done.

How different such a scheme would be. Giving money to the banks to lend means if we borrow it we owe them. If the money was given to us and we deposited any of it in the banks, then they would owe us.

“Moral hazard!” I hear someone crying.  Why should we bail out the feckless who got themselves in to debt?  Yet our leaders are happy we should reward the reckless and feckless banks. Moreover we apparently do not worry about the moral hazard of making those who did not create this mess pay to clean it up. What about those of us who did not partake of the orgy of credit and debt? What about those who saved and now see those savings and pensions being eroded?  Apparently the banks and our rulers are sensitive to the moral hazard of giving to us but not of taking.

Had we used stimulus money to pay off peoples’ debts, rather than the banks’ debts, that money would have still made its way to the banks. It would have shrunk their balance sheets, reduced their risk and made them safer – for us.  They would not have had the chance to divert the money to use it for speculating on food and currencies. All good so far. It would have left ordinary people with fewer debts and with more money to spend. This would have helped industry and therefore employment.

….But it would have come from the bottom up. People, ordinary people, would have decided what to do with whatever part of their bail out they had left. That, to me, IS the market deciding.  It is as Free Market as it comes. Financial decisions by the people for the people. Giving the money to the banks and asking them to lend to us, is letting them – just a few huge corporations and the handful of billionaires who own and run them – decide. That is NOT free market. It is banana republic cronyism.

In our present policy of bailing out the banks, they can then lend to us and we owe them interest.  In the bottom up bail out we would be lending to the banks. Remember putting money in to the bank is lending it to them.  They would therefore pay interest to us. Funny how the banks and the wealthy, rentier class who own them prefer the present arrangement where they get the money for cheap and IF they lend it to us, we owe them. In the other version, the heretical version, they would be paying us.

Wealth management and Povert management

The future our leaders see from the hill top is one where banks are there to manage the wealth of the wealthy and governments are there to manage the poverty of the rest. Wealth Investment and Austerity Enforcement – a perfect division of power. IF we let it happen.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

From the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

Officially?  Nothing whatsoever.  In my opinion? Everything.

But it requires reminding ourselves how we got to where we are now.

Back in 2008 the big banks were in fear for their lives, weighed down as they were with hundreds of billions in loans that were defaulting and assets that were losing value as the markets for them plunged and then closed.  The bank’s bad loans meant they had no cash flowing IN with which to pay their own debts.  And their capital was flowing OUT as the value of the assets they had in their vaults declined along with the markets in which they were valued.

They were running out of cash and needed a ton of it FAST. And they needed to stop their assets losing value, or they would be forced to sell more and more of them to raise capital to replace the value they had lost.

The banks had to find solutions to these two separate but related problems.

The losses from bad loans, the so called ‘Toxic Debts’, they solved by getting Henry Paulson to tell Congress that unless it bailed out the banks, there would be social breakdown and tanks on the streets.  The $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Programme (TARP) was duly passed by a cowed US Congress on 3rd October 2008.  The banks now had a new source of cash to replace that which they were NOT getting from their stupid loans. And that new source was you and me.

The second problem was trickier.  How were the banks to stop their assets from losing value?  The reason they were losing value was because fewer and fewer people wanted to buy them and those who did offered lower and lower prices because the whole market was in free fall.  Not a good moment for anyone to find they had to sell assets to get a little capital.  Such a sale is called a fire-sale.

The banks knew they couldn’t stop their assets losing value, so they did the next best thing. They got the accounting  rules changed so they no longer had to tell people that their assets were losing value.  If they didn’t have to tell people, then who could say the assets had lost any value.

After a frantic year of flooding lobbying money into the accounts of the relevant Senators and Congressmen and women, Mark to Market rules were suspended on 2nd April of 2009.  They were replaced by rules called Mark to Model by which the banks could “..use significant judgement in gauging  prices of some investments…”

And suddenly the banks were no longer insolvent and some handy bank-designed ‘stress tests’ were subsequently run to prove it.

Now fast forward to 2011.

Today the nations who bailed out the banks by taking the banks’ debts on to the national debt, are in terrible trouble themselves.  Sovereign debt levels are so bloated that nations are being warned that they MUST lower their debt levels and raise some cash.  And who is warning them? Turns out it is the same banks and financial system whose debts we bailed out.

So far we have borrowed money and printed money and both options are maxed out.  Plus we are now not getting as much cash flow IN to the exchequer because our tax base is shrinking due in turn to  rising unemployment. Two years ago cash flow was the banks problems. Now, magically it is ours.

And now our ever helpful and expert friends in the financial world are advising that we absolutely must cut spending on everything non-essential – which means anything that isn’t a further bank bail out and bond purchase.  (Those we are told are absolutely essential to ensure ‘the recovery’ continues and does not stall.)  And they are further advising that we could also raise some badly needed cash – by selling a few assets!

You might remember how this exactly what was suggested to Greece – that it could pay some of its debts by selling the odd island, or how Ireland could sell off its motorways or airports or electricity grid.

In the UK the advice is being taken up with unsuppressed glee. The British Government has just announced that it plans to sell off a quarter of a million hectares of  woodland that is currently owned by the people.

No one asked us, but don’t worry there will be a ‘consultation’ no doubt.

Our government is not selling this land because it’s an intrinsically good idea to not own any forests or because now is a propitious moment to sell. The government is selling because they say ‘we must’, in order to tackle our debts, whether it’s a good moment or not,  And let’s face it, in a recession it’s not a good moment. Thus it is a ‘forced’ sale – a fire sale.

But who I ask will have the money to buy all these forests? Will you?

The banks have cash. And what is more so do the bankers who work there.  Take RBS for example.  In 2009 RBS made a loss of 3.6 billion pounds.  It had no money to pay anyone for anything. But that didn’t stop them because we had put into the banks tens of billions. So the bank, decided to reward the very same bankers who had bankrupted the bank and lost 3.6 billion that year alone, 1.6 billion pounds in bonuses.

The bank did not pay that money. Remember the banks had no money. It had lost all its money. WE paid those bankers.

Now what do you think those bankers will do with 1.6 billion pounds in bonuses. What to buy?  Oh the decisions!  I know how, about a darling little woodland. There are going to be plenty for sale within easy reach of The City.

And for those big commercial forests, well, what will be needed there are some bank loans. So the banks will loan the money, our money, to companies and funds and ‘high net worth individuals’ (other bankers) who want to snap up a forest on sale at fire-sale prices.  And the banks will turn around and trumpet how they are lending in to the real economy!

The entire sale aims, according to the government’s own figures to raise about £140 – 200 million.  The debt we have saddled ourselves with as a direct result of bailing out the banks, according to more of the government’s own figures is somewhere between 800 billion and 1.4 trillion Pounds. 200 million from the forests will be 0.2 billion or between one four hundredth and one seven hundredth of the debt paid off!  Worth it?  A good use of the nation’s forests.

“Every little helps” though, doesn’t it? And those leases will be up in only 150 years during which time we won’t miss them, no restrictions on access will have been introduced and absolutely no harm will have come to them.  Trust us, we’re bankers!

I wonder why Mr Cameron and Mr Osbourne, feel it will be better to get this widow’s mite from selling a half to three quarters of the last remaining open public woodland into private hands rather than squeeze 200 million back from the banks whose bail out caused our debts to balloon as they have?

Are we selling things because it will really help then long term health of this nation, or are we doing so because this is a perfect opportunity to strip the nation of assets at fire-sale prices?  A perfect privatization.  Push the nation into a fire sale which does what the Tories have always wanted  and set up  the banks for their promised recovery by letting them buy up assets at knock down prices.  Two victories for half the price of one.

And in the logic of fire sales, as one nation sells at knock down prices it lowers the value of similar assets held by other nations.  Ireland won’t be able to get more for its forest than we sell ours for. The logic of fire sales, the reason the banks were so appalled at the prospect of their own assets being sold this way, is that fire sales create a downward spiral. Just exactly the buying opportunity banks love when they are fire is burning someone else’s house down not theirs.