I'm getting annoyed by the miserable dribble of self-serving wank issuing from the apologists for the banks. Bad deal for shareholders my arse. They backed companies that didn't know what they were doing and exposed themselves to massive, and patently obvious for the last decade, agency risk. Now the tax payer has put itself in hock for the next ten years or more to save the bank and leave them with a chance of making their money back. And still they expect more!
Fuck them. Seriously.
As for Brown... yeah he did an OK job in fixing the crisis, for now at least. Well, the senior civil servants who actually did the work (and according to the FT had a struggle persuading him to act) did a good job. But it's largely a mess of his own making. The explosion in dodgy derivatives and the consequent, crazy ballooning of liquidity ratios came about on his watch. In darker moments I sometimes wonder if he actually wanted this to happen so it would give him a chance to shine. I think he's a selfish fucker in any case. This whole thing is bad for Labour. But it's just as bad for the Tories, as Rich says they can't lay a finger on Labour over this. It really is the collapse of Thatcherite deregulation. It would benefit the Lib Dems if Vince Cable was in charge but it's my nice but dim local MP instead, so it won't. It is good for Obama, but I don't know if it's good enough; I think we'll find out just how racist America is in three weeks and I think we might get a nasty surprise.
In five years the economy will have bounced back (and in all likelihood another asset bubble will have blown up). Hopefully the good side of hedge funds will re-emerge - that of providing greater transparency and liquidity - though since they have largely been doing the exact opposite of that for the last four or five years (bundling toxic loans with good ones is the very definition of pricing opacity). But stock markets will bounce along the bottom for a good while yet.