Tonight:
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With stock markets in meltdown and half the world's banks too scared to lend money to the other half it seemed curiously appropriate for a headhunter to say, as one did the other day, that two-thirds of the people working in the City had just received bigger bonuses this year than last, for their work in the past 12 months. It somehow seemed to underline the disconnection between those working in the financial world and the rest of us. Given the damage that has been done to the financial system, what horrors need to be inflicted before it really does make an impact?
This seems to confirm that finance occupies a parallel universe from the rest of us. Banks and bankers started life as servants of the economic system but somewhere along the way they became detached.
Driven by greed, they began to do deals for no other reason than that they could be done, and to invent products for no other reason than that they could be sold. The only criterion for success was an ability to separate fools from their money.
In the process they built a monstrous inverted pyramid of speculation and borrowing - and of course commission - which balanced precariously on only the smallest wedge of genuine economic activity. Now it is beginning to fall, it is a very long way down.
Naturally those receiving the bonuses will say, and with justification, that the losses are not their fault - that they do different things in different areas of the markets. And that is of course true, as far as it goes.
From the outside, though, it looks rather like someone in a rowing boat saying that the leak is not at their end. It rests even more uneasily that they continue to pass Go and collect their £2 million bonus while taxpayers in Britain and America have to pick up the bills for the damage their deeds have done.
It has been obvious to insiders for some time that we would be unlikely to get through this crisis without some bank or other going bust. The New York firm of Bear Stearns, which was rescued over the weekend, is thought by some to fill that bill but it does not really.
First, it is not a bank in the recognised sense, second, few outside the financial markets have ever heard of it; third, and this is the key point, its losses though big enough to end its days of independence are as nothing compared with what has been lost by the likes of Citigroup in America or UBS of Switzerland. As a firm, its role was to bring on the oranges at half time, not take part in the penalty shoot-out.
But its abrupt demise has spooked the markets, and for good reason. The price paid by JP Morgan Chase for the entire business of Bear Stearns was derisory - some two and a half per cent of the assets on the firm's books. If that is a genuine reflection of how bad things are or what these assets are really worth, then things are more massively worse than even the pessimists feared. So a shock like that inevitably raises questions about who will be next, makes people think no one is safe and sends the shares of the likely suspects crashing round the globe.
Second, it underlines that the authoritiesfor all their efforts are not in control-of this crisis, because of course they are in the wrong universe along with the rest of us. Central bankers' traditional instruments of control are rooted in the real not the virtual world. They are like the toddler furiously driving one of those coin-operated toy cars found outside supermarkets. They think they are steering but in fact their controls are not attached to anything. They make no difference to the speed or the direction of the car.
Nor are they likely to. All the authorities can do is pump money into the system. That works if the reason people are unwilling to lend is that they have no money themselves. It does not work when the reason people don't lend is they don't think they will get the money back. What started as the former, a liquidity crisis, is now the latter - one fuelled by doubts about solvency and fear of widespread bank failure.
The other odd thing in all this is how detached it still all seems from the real world. The screens run red but the sky outside is still blue. True it is slower to sell a house, harder to get a mortgage, and shops are seeing fewer customers flashing the plastic but by and large the nonfinancial world shows little sign of stress.
Unfortunately, this might only be a matter of time. The UK economy is in so many ways a smaller version of the US that trouble looks impossible to avoid. We have the same personal debt mountain, the same house price bubble, the same heavy involvement of finance in the overall economy and the same absence of room to manoeuvre. We see trouble coming but we can't get out of the way.
As the banks cut back on lending, consumer spending will slow and growth will slump. As that pain spreads personally, bankruptcy will mount and we will be very lucky to avoid a plunge in house prices.
Our politicians say that won't happen - witness Chancellor Alistair Darling in last week's Budget - but interestingly the foreign exchanges tell a different story. The exchange rate is a country's share price in that it reflects what other detached observers think of us. And at the moment they don't like what they see. The pound has plunged against every currency except the equally troubled dollar. Indeed it has fallen by 15 per cent in the past few months, which is more than at any time since 1993 when we were ejected from the Exchange Rate Mechanism.
What all this means is that the crisis which has been rumbling away for the past eight months has taken a decided turn for the worse and gained a new and still more terrifying momentum. Last time this happened in the United States, 20 years ago with its Savings and Loans crisis, the government eventually shouldered the losses of its entire building society movement at a cost of untold billions. It is significant that in recent days for the first time people have begun to suggest that something similar is needed this time - nothing less than for the US government to buy all those distressed assets so banks will be solvent again and confidence can return to the system.
That such a proposal is now being seriously suggested shows that the parallel universe of finance has collided with the real world to devastating effect. The cost of such an action is beyond comprehension - only exceeded perhaps by the cost of not doing it. But that's what happens when worlds collide.
Reader views (1)
An excellent article which hits the nails on the head all the way. Could this be the partial downfall of the lunatic fringe of capitalism.
- Pierre Dench, Horley , Surrey, 18/03/2008 20:35
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