Many years ago, when I worked in a public library in Kensington a peculiar man, frequently clad in lederhosen, would come in and chat with the male workers and request a series of arcane (for me at the time) books – most of them eventually had to be acquired from the British Library and other specialist sources. One author whose name I remember cropping up many times was Frederick Rolfe, also known as Baron Corvo; I didn’t have a clue who he was.
I am very happy to report that Bill Bruford will be reading from his autobiography at Westminster Reference Library on the evening of 17th June. He played with some of my favourite groups in the 1970s, although when I try to think of the occasions I've seen him live I can only remember the Discipline (before they reverted to King Crimson) concert at Her Majesty's Theatre on 10th May 1981. I'm probably going to be introducing him - below is the text I've compiled for the poster. It hasn't been advertised on the website yet.
Tonight I walked home from St Leonards station along the seafront and saw a beautiful full moon creating a corridor of light across the water. Apparently tonight's moon is unusually large - a perigee moon in fact. I saw numerous camera flashes going off including one on the pier, which is supposed to be off limits as a dangerous structure since the fire last year. The view of the moon through the substructure of the pier was probably the most impressive of all, the tide was out and the sandbanks and spits were gently illuminated. Until I moved to the seaside I had never witnessed the effect of moonlight on water - I had to rely on painters such Wright of Derby - but when I occasionally feel that I should have stayed in London, sights such as this convince me otherwise. Pity I didn't have my camera with me.
The East London line extension to Highbury & Islington did indeed open yesterday morning. The Londonist has a post about it with links to further information.
Just completed Whoops! by John Lanchester, an idiot's guide to an idiotic financial system which many of us shall be bailing out for the foreseeable future while the people responsible for the recent disasters pocket large bonuses and generous pensions. In 200 pages Lanchester manages to explain, even to finance ignoramuses such as myself, the ‘flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works’, in the words of Alan Greenspan, the man in charge of US financial policy (and disciple of dodgy ‘philosopher’ Ayn Rand) during the crucial years.
In a nutshell Lanchester believes that the credit crunch, ‘was based on a climate (the post-Cold War victory of free-market capitalism), a problem (the sub-prime mortgages), a mistake (the mathematical models of risk) and a failure, that of the regulators.’ He describes in damning detail the origins of the crisis in a quasi-religious, self-deluding belief amongst financial ‘experts’ and governments such as those in the US, UK, Ireland, Iceland and Spain in ‘the market’ and its miraculous self-regulating properties, coupled with newly minted financial instruments such as CDOs (collateralized default swaps) CDSs (credit default swaps), which few fully understood but in which many bankers had blind unswerving belief, especially when they were earning them huge salaries and bonuses. This money-making edifice was built on foundations so shaky and insubstantial that most intelligent outsiders, had they been properly informed of the nature of these transactions, could have predicted a disaster waiting to happen – a few astute bankers and journalists did, but they were ignored or shouted down by the true believers. In the US in particular outright fraud was perpetrated by the likes of Enron and Bernard Madoff.
Over here the inevitably dire outcome was not helped by a housing-price bubble that was bound to burst hyped up by hours and hours of daily gung-ho television programmes telling us we were stupid not to be buying up properties to rent out, or purchase a couple of extra houses to do-up and sell for a massive profit; these shows seem strangely to have diminished in number now. He also points out that Britain has half the total European credit-card debt.
For those put off by the finance jargon of the first five chapters, the final two chapters of the book could be read on their own as they encapsulate the central problems of the whole enterprise. This is pretty much summed up in the section quoted below [from pp187-188]:
‘Mrs Thatcher began, and Labour continued, a switch towards an economy that was reliant on financial services, at the expense of other areas of society. One can disagree…with that policy, but what was equally damaging for Britain was the hegemony of economic, or quasi-economic thinking. The economic metaphor came to be applied to every aspect of modern life, especially the areas where it simply didn’t belong. In fields such as education, equality of opportunity, health, employees’ rights, the social contract and culture, the first conversation to happen should be about values and principles; then you have the conversation about costs, and what you as a society can afford. In Britain for the last twenty to thirty years that has all been the wrong way round. There was a kind of reverse takeover, in which City values came to dominate the whole of British life. There needs to be a general acceptance that the model has failed. The brakes-off, deregulate or die, privatise or stagnate, lunch if for wimps, greed is good, what’s good for the financial sector is good for the economy model; the sack the bottom 10 per cent, bonus-driven, if you can’t measure it it isn’t real model which spread from the City to government and from there through the whole culture, in which the idea of value has gradually faded to be replaced by the idea of price.’
No lessons appear to have been learned from the recent debacle. In The Quiet Coup, Simon Johnson, formerly chief economist of the IMF recorded that as part of his work he had, ‘acquired an extensive experience of countries which had effectively been captured by a ruling elite who governed entirely in their own interests. His startling conclusion about the current crisis is that the US has become one of those countries.’ Given the number of millionaires and ex-public schoolboys in the current cabinet, the same conclusion might be drawn about our own present situation.
