Who is bailing out who?

Let's get this straight - we are not bailing out the banks, we are not even bailing out the government - we (in the UK) are bailing out Gordon Brown's inestimable hubris and "reputation" as he struggles to deflect attention from his integral role in the shambles.

This bloke has been in effective control of the UK finances for 11 years, and it is simply unacceptable that he should pretend that it's all someone else's fault. Brown should be put on trial for criminal negligence; in fact, since there are doubtless now suicides attributable to recession failure, he and every one of the cabinet ministers over the past 11 years might as well be charged with corporate manslaughter.

The ongoing complete inability to explain what these toxic debts were secured upon is certainly criminal negligence. Do we own vast estates of property in the USA? If so, we might as well send over some our homeless to live in them.

Were these toxic assets bought by UK banks at $2/£1 In which case, are these 25% more valuable at $1.50? No one has a bloody clue - or at least if they do, they aren't telling us, which suggests that "they" don't want to tell us because the news is so awful.

As the economy continues to slide, so many more businesses and individuals become progressively less credit worthy. Hence the quaint idea that zero interest rates can slow down the procession to more bankruptcy and toxic loans - so it's too bad the banks are still charging 7% on very well-secured loans in order to keep their discredited managements in "away days" and bubbly.

Whatever else, we must follow the US and have an election ASAP so that we can flush out ALL the old failures and have a new administration that is not going to be so obviously obsessed with protecting its own arse, and burying its own bodies before anyone else can sniff them out.

Sterling Crisis

It is traditional that a Labour government will destroy the UK economy and drive the country into a full-blown sterling crisis. With new depths being plumbed on all fronts, surely it cannot be possible that anyone can be capable of voting for Gordon to have another 5 years to finish off the job?

Brown's claim that the UK was well placed to weather the financial storm have been proved (as most of us suspected) to be a complete pack of lies, although if he seriously believed what he was saying, his delusion is more terrifying than his dishonesty.

Why should any of the world's leaders now want to listen to more advice from this discredited old fraud? His 15 minutes on the world stage really ought to be all over by now.

No time for novices

This is certainly no time for novices, Gordon. But despite all the practise, you still can't tell a convincing lie.

Surely Gordon Brown and his puppet Darling are too deep in the economic mire to be hauled out this time..? The IMF now warns that UK economy is far, far deeper in distress than Brown has been protesting, and effectively confirms that Broon's febrile assertions about it being well placed are yet so many more unctuous lies to add to his already outstanding litany of deceptions.

So of course the battered £ is also sliding away from view, and a full-scale sterling crisis is once again around the corner. The once unthinkable - parity with the Euro - now seems inescapable.

Labour does it yet again, as we said it would. Sometimes it would be wonderful to proved wrong when predicting the depths of the next disaster that Blair and now Brown have taken this country to, but in all the time this blog has been running, it has yet to happen.

If they can be caught so flat footed by the banking crisis and then smugly tell so many unmitigated lies and untruths about the state of the economy, why should anyone believe anything this this wretched and discredited government has to say?

For all our sakes, go now.

Well then, it's the turnips

Brown's miracle cure seems to be getting the finger from the market.

In the UK, Lloyds long suffering shareholders are livid that Gordon's drinking pal Lloyds' Chairman (for the time being...) Victor Blank swallowed the punitive terms of the cash quite so readily in the rush for HBOS and its wonderful mortgage and retail businesses, and effectively wrote off the value of Lloyds shares for the next 5 years!

And this seems to have set the the tone for a general reaction to all the indicators that the economy is indeed, deep in the Brown stuff. The FTSE is still plumbing the depths. Unemployment is up, and the government cannot spin them any harder to hide the truth.

Of all the banks, Lloyds was least exposed to the toxic market, mostly because it was dozing quietly for the past few years, almost devoid of ambition to do anything more than sweep up as many small retail bank accounts as possible, when they got the feeling their competitors had taken their eye of that steady if unexciting "bread and butter" ball. So what are they now doing on their (shareholders') knees, with their shareholders holding the unwanted, unlovely and extremely bastard offspring of messrs Broon and Blank?

But far from "swivelling", Brown leaves Harriet Harperson in charge as he sweeps through the corridors of international power on his familiar cushion of self-importance and hubris as he tries desperately to leverage his temporary omniscience to set up a global conference on finance and trade, to "prevent excessive risk". That's fine by us, since clearly the biggest risk we face as a nation is the possibility of Labour remaining in charge of the UK.

Listen up Gordon, we STILL have not been told exactly what went wrong and why - so how come you know all about fixing it? It just might be as simple as a series of criminal acts of evasion of perfectly adequate existing regulations, coupled to dopey regulators that were not up to the job - and the dubious collusion of politicians that were determined to believe in the continued existence of the credit fairy, which had been so handy for securing feelgood votes.

In fact, if you do know so much about fixing it, then it begs the question why did you allow it to happen in the first place? Or will you conveniently try to hang that one on the old sleasemeister Blair: "I voz only following orders, mein Fuhrer..."

Since this is mostly about a crisis of confidence, then just maybe people have no confidence in his ability to continue to govern ? Sooner or later he's going to be rumbled for what his old boss Blair always understood him to be: an obsessive control freak, creative with numbers, devoid of vision. And now properly undone by the most laughable statement of modern political times:

"There will be no more Boom and Bust"

Which works very well as an epitaph.