The Intro and the Outro

A recent promotion and one or two other events in real life have left me with insufficient time to spend on this blog. As a result, and with some considerable regret, I have decided to end it. This will accordingly be the last post. It will also be the first post for anyone who happens to stumble across the blog in the future. I thought I would therefore try and say a few words about the blog and the blogging experience by way of both conclusion and introduction.

This is, or was, the blog of a half Kiwi/half English lawyer who likes cricket, current affairs, law and various bits of Western civilisation. It contains a few arguments and rants by me on various issues, usually whatever was current in the daily press, and also links to other sites I find interesting. More information on my personal tastes can be found on my profile on the right hand side of the screen.

As to cricket, I am entirely high church, without apology. That is to say, test cricket, and little else, holds my attention. I tried to enjoy the last limited overs world cup; I failed. Five nil defeats in the Ashes provided more enjoyment, and that's saying something (and nothing good either).

Politically I suppose I incline towards the Classical Liberalism of JS Mill. Needless to say I find it hard to identify with any of today's political parties. Hence I find so much political comment in the UK so tedious. Too many commentators blind themselves to the failings of their own whilst aggressively traducing the 'other side'. Even esteemed journalists like Polly Toynbee aren't immune; indeed, she might be the paradigmatic example. Besides, virtually all of British Politics was neatly summed up more than twenty years ago by Yes Minister.

As well as issues of the day, I have posted some modest efforts on somewhat weighty topics such as religion, climate change and animal rights, which I'm beginning to wonder might be the same thing, or at least variations on a theme. I have also attempted to discuss discrimination and multiculturalism and learned how much of a hornet's nest one might end up poking.

Looking back I see I have 81 posts tagged "Law", but I hope most have been written on a subject and in a way that might be of interest to general readers too.

Culturally I am unapologetically in favour of classical Western Civilisation, at least when there was such a thing. Modern art I despise. Most (though not all) of what is in the Tate Modern and almost every Turner Prize entry in history is crap. Some is literally crap. A torn canvass is not a work of art. Nor is a screwed up piece of paper. Nor a room with the light flickering on and off. Gangsta’ Rap and Simon Cowellesque fluffy pop music is not as good as Bach or Beethoven or Pink Floyd or Clapton or Led Zeppelin or Alison Krauss. Enough said.

Similarly, I disdain witchdoctors and spin doctors. Homeopathy does not work. It cannot, on its own terms. Nor does astrology. The Easter Bunny isn't real either. I could go on. I have, at length, already.

I do, however, enjoy military history, in particular the Great War, where curiously the popular British view seem to be the opposite of party politics: they dish the dirt on their own, whilst blinding themselves to the failings of others. I also enjoy films, particularly those of Stanley Kubrick, Terrence Malick and Martin Scorcese. Most of my cultural witterings were done under this link or this one.

It only remains for me to offer thanks to all those who have contributed to the comments over the time I have been writing it, they have enriched the blog immensely. I would like to say a few words about everyone out individually, but fear that I have neither the time to say it properly and, worse, would be bound to forget someone! I will still try and visit my favourite blogs when I have the chance - and, who knows, like a professional boxer, will unwisely decide to come out of retirement from time to time here. For now, however, it is time for a break, and a substantial one at that.

Thanks once again for stopping by.

The Financial Crisis

During the Vice Presidential debate the candidates were naturally asked about the present financial crisis. I was interested to hear Governor Palin for the Republicans (answering according to her prepared script, of course) ascribe it to greed on Wall Street; that no doubt is one of the causes and will remain the media's favourite, but it is by no means the only one.

Greed in borrowing money, after all, requires two to tango: a greedy borrower wanting money that he or she can't afford to repay, and a greedy lender prepared to lend it. The benighted individuals who racked up the national debt of a small third world country on their credit cards were as greedy as the lenders who kept moronically dolling out the cash. The media were irresponsible for promoting the consumer culture and the public were irresponsible for buying into it. The state in Britain didn't regulate the lending market and the market didn't regulate itself. As a result we developed in many instances a pyramid-scheme economy.

The first manifestation of the pyramid economy was in personal debt. Credit cards were offered so easily that many (including some sophisticated city workers of my acquaintance) were tempted to borrow and borrow by the offering of no repayments for substantial periods coupled with 0% on balance transfers for new customers. As long as they could, at the end of the 0% interest period, shift the ever increasing balance onto a new provider, the cycle could continue. Necessarily the run would have to come to an end at some point, but too many people turned a blind eye to that mathematical certainty.

The second pyramid scheme involved mortgages. As long as the housing market continued to increase, people were tempted to borrow and borrow against the theoretically increasing equity. Others were tempted to try their hand at becoming property tycoons, by continually buying-to-let with as much borrowing as they could find. On paper in a rising market they were multi-millionares; once the bubble burst they were on paper very broke indeed. Once again, the housing market could not increase forever, but the borrowing culture depending upon it doing so. Therefore, it was a mathematical certainty that the market would crash in that respect too.

The third manifestation of the pyramid scheme came in how the banks dealt with the ever-increasing amount of mortgage debt on their books. A mortgage is a transaction whereby the lender makes a profit out of the fact that the borrower pays back the capital sum plus interest. Therefore, the profit is made once the borrower starts - and only to the extent that he continues - paying back the debt and interest. Yet the banks acted as though the very act of signing up a mortgage generated a profit in itself. Salesmen were awarded commissions by signing up new mortgagors. They were therefore given every incentive to sign as many as they could. The lending departments of a bank would be rewarded for this activity, as would those in charge of the bank. None of that bore any relation to the underlying profitability - or non-profitability - of the mortgage contract itself. The bank would therefore have to generate money to pay for it all. A favoured tactic was to dress up the mortgage and sell it into the securities market. Here many buyers made the mistake that small investors often do: assuming that because the product they were buying came from someone with a good name, it must be a good product. But junk mortgages disguised as Bear Sterns securites products were still junk mortgages. As each was bought and sold the vendor would have to take a cut to make the deal profitable. Thus the underlying transaction would be even less profitable each time it was bought and sold. And so, once again, a spiral with only one end was created.

Having drafted the above, I picked up a copy of the Spectator, which had a further explanation for the US mortgage disaster behind so much of the global chaos. According to this article by Dennis Sewell:

The root problem was not financial — it was political, and those truly responsible for this fiasco were not bankers, nor even Bush Republicans; they were Clinton Democrats.

For generations, America’s bankers have been firmly refusing credit to those they judged unworthy of it. Yet the mountain of toxic subprime debt that has threatened to overwhelm the entire financial system, and the astonishing number of mortgage foreclosures across the United States, is proof that, at some point in the relatively recent past, bankers radically altered their behaviour and began to shower mortgages on borrowers who had no realistic prospect of keeping up their repayments. What could possibly have induced them to act so recklessly, and so out of character? The facile answer to that question is greed, the lure of a fast and easy buck. The correct answer is that banks were bullied, cajoled and coerced into lowering their lending standards by politicians in pursuit of an ideological agenda.

(...)

The main thrust of the Clinton housing strategy was to increase home ownership among the poor, and particularly among blacks and Hispanics. White House aides, in familiar West Wing style, could parrot the many social advantages that would accrue: high levels of home ownership correlated with less violent crime, better school performance, a heightened sense of commun-ity. But standing in the way of the realisation of this dream were the conservative lending policies of the banks, which required such inconvenient and old-fashioned things as cash deposits and regular repayments — things the poor and minorities often could not provide. Clinton told the banks to be more creative.

(...)

[W]hen little or no overt or deliberate racial discrimination was discovered among the mortgage lenders, [the state] turned to trying to prove ‘disparate treatment’ of minority groups, a notion similar to that of unintentional ‘institutional racism’. If a bank refused loans to proportionally more black applicants than white ones, for instance, the onus would fall on it to prove it had good grounds for doing so or face settlement penalties running into millions of dollars. A series of highly publicised cases were brought on this basis, starting in 1994. Eventually the investigators would turn somewhat desperately to ‘disparate impact’, a form of discrimination so abstract and rarefied as to be imperceptible to its supposed victims, and indeed often only discernible at all through the application of multivariate regression analysis to information stored on regulators’ databases.

These mortgage banks, which have been responsible for issuing about three quarters of the dodgy subprime loans that are proving troublesome today, quickly took the hint. From the mid-1990s they began to abandon their formerly rigorous lending criteria. Mortgages were offered with only 3 per cent deposit requirements, and eventually with no deposit requirement at all. The mortgage banks fell over one another to provide loans to low-income households and especially to minority customers. ...

The national banks, responsible for the remaining quarter of the current subprime loans, were put under a different kind of pressure by the Clinton team to boost their low-income and minority lending too. Changes were made to the Community Reinvestment Act to establish a system by which banks were rated according to how much lending they did in low-income neighbourhoods. A good CRA rating was necessary if a bank wanted to get regulators to sign off on mergers, expansions, even new branch openings. A poor rating could be disastrous for a bank’s business plan. It was a different kind of coercion, but just as effective.

How much blame can truly be apportioned to the Clinton Administration's interventions, as opposed to the general increased recklesness of banks I cannot answer. In Britain there was not the state did not act in the same way (in Britain we tend to respond to low income/minority housing problems with council stock). The pyramid scheme I described above was clearly driven by greed and short-sightedness. The American crash, whatever its cause, only hastened the inevitable. I tend to answer the question of whether it was the greedy public, the irresponsible media, the greedy lenders, the slack regulators or the non-existent self regulators, with the short answer that it was all of them.

The much more important question is what to do next. Talk of a taxpayer bail-out needs more detail. Take the housing market. Are we to give taxpayers' money to the homeowners, thus giving them a windfall for silly borrowing (at the expense of those such as myself who deliberately maintained conservative mortgages)? Or are we to give it straight to the lenders, thus giving them a windfall for silly lending and enabling them to reposess the houses of the failed borrowers and give themselves a second windfall, and thus also enabling them to continue the pyramid scheme lending system for longer? This I find particularly infuriating given that those in charge of the lending institutions have paid themselves absurdly high bonuses over the years (most of which they pumped into the housing market thus fuelling the boom and the continuation of the pyramid scheme) and didn't always pay taxes with any enthusiasm, the taxes they now seek to have given to them to save them from themselves.

Stephen of Rough Trade gives his thoughts here. I agree with his conclusion that the chips should be left to lie where they fall. The only argument I can see for the state intervening is that it would have to deal with the fallout of the destroyed savings accounts should it come to it (by the social welfare safety net) and so if it could intervene to prevent that happening it might as well. But I'm not comfortable with the proposed uses of taxpayers' money that I have seen. The British state is guaranteeing deposits up to £35k; the Irish and Greek governments have offered unlimited guarantees. This is the sort of rash financial act that caused the crash in the first place: if things got really bad, the only way the state could make good that promise would be by printing more money a la Germany in the 20s or Zimbabwe today; far from saving everyone's savings it would render them worthless. Else the state just borrows and borrows on more and more unfavourable terms and leaves the next generation to pay the bill (in other words, just like rash credit card behaviour ....).

Better, I would submit, that we allow the market to take the consequences. If the state must intervene, let it do so to only to the extent of ensuring an orderly wind-down of failed institutions. In other words, no more Northern Rocks. Let the state appoint administrators to selll off the assets in an orderly fashion and decide the best way to deal with those that are left broke, but no more lending and no more allowing unsustainable businesses to continue. In the usual course of events, of course, it is illegal for a company to trade whilst insolvent. There are sound reasons for this, and they apply with equal force when it is the state behind the insolvent company.

That proposed solution may seem harsh. But if it means a lesson to this generation on the value of things as well as their price, then so much the better.

Post script: here, from Stray, is an entirely different way to reach the same conclusion.

The Gurkhas and the Chagos Islanders

Stephen of Rough Trade correctly applauds the court decision to allow former Gurkha soldiers to settle in the UK. He contrasts their victory with the continuing plight of the Chagos Islanders, who were evicted years ago so the Americans could build their base on Diego Garcia and keep it secure (from those well-known insurgent islanders ... or not ....). I have commented thus:

The two cases are distinguishable, if on a morally tawdry basis. The Gurkhas are about the most respected fighting unit in any army in the world; they have given magnificent service to Britain in every single conflict in which they have been involved. Whichever demented idiot thought they ought to be excluded from living in the country for which they have fought with such distinction ought to be taken out the back and physically re-engineered with a Kukri knife. This is, after all, the country which can't bring itself to deport admitted terrorists. I despair.

The Chagos Islanders are innocent people who got turfed out of their homes because our very much bigger brother the Americans decided they wanted the land for defensive (and often offensive) purposes. As we are in thrall to our bigger brother, we complied. Much as there was no arguing with China when they wanted Hong Kong, irrespective of what anyone actually living there might have wanted. So we can write off the unfortunate plight of the Chagos Islanders to realpolitik, but there isn't the beginning of an excuse - bad or otherwise - for the prior exclusion of the Gurkhas.

RIP Paul Newman

Lord Reith, who was the head of the BBC in the days when that was something to be proud of, issued many sound edicts. One was that the word 'famous' was redundant. If someone was famous, he reasoned, they didn't need to be called so, and if they weren't famous, they shouldn't be called it. If that axiom was in force today, most of Britain's 'celebrity' media would be out of a job, and I for one wouldn't be shedding any tears.

One person who was genuinely famous however was Paul Newman, who died over the weekend. He was most famous to an older generation than mine, it is true; not simply for his great acting skills or his looks (there was a trace of irony behind his piercing blue eyes: he was in fact colour blind) but also his salad dressings. Here is a good example of Newman's greatness and the accompanying smallness of most so-called 'celebrities'. It began when he asked a shopkeeper to sell some leftover salad dressing of his. The shopkeeper agreed, but only if he could put Newman's face on the bottles, or no-one would recognise the connection. Newman agreed, but reasoned that if he was going to do something that tacky (his word), the money ought to go to a worthwhile cause. And thus one of his extensive charitable causes began. That's the sort of thing great people used to do.

Back to Newman's acting. I suppose modern audiences might not be so familiar with Cool Hand Luke, The Sting or The Hustler. They might, however, have seen Newman's last film, Sam Mendes' Road to Perdition. It also stars Tom Hanks and Jude Law, amongst others. Newman effortlessly acts them off the screen. That's what great actors have always done.

Cricketing thoughts

Some fine words here by Mukul Kesavan, trenchant and depressing in equal measure. I agree with every word, and that's why I am in a rather more glum mood than normally obtains on a Friday:

"You can't help feeling that at the very moment that Twenty20 cricket, in the shape of the second IPL season, threatens to take centre-stage in world cricket because of its showbiz potential, its silly money and its compressed excitement, the Indian Test team is about to lose the star quality that sustained it in recent times. Ganguly's gone; now think of the Test team without Tendulkar, Dravid, Laxman and Kumble. You're left with one quality batsman, Virender Sehwag; one promising one who's yet to make his Test debut, Rohit Sharma; one spinner who occasionally runs through a side, Harbhajan Singh; and a bunch of interesting but injury-prone seamers. Not the best ingredients with which to sustain interest in Test cricket at a time when the long game is under siege.

In contrast the limited-overs teams are full of exciting young players made for that format: Dhoni, Yuvraj, Raina, Robin Uthappa, Praveen Kumar, Rohit, the brothers Pathan - the list seems endless. If I were a young boy excited about cricket today, why would I follow the fortunes of a middling Test team packed with players of moderate ability once our veterans have retired, taking their glorious careers with them?

Worse still, the Australians, who single-handedly kept interest in Test cricket alive by geeing up the Test game, upping the run-rate, forcing results (generally wins for themselves), and nearly making the draw extinct, are themselves entering a period of ordinariness and decline. It's typical of the times that the most celebrated new entrant into the Australian Test squad is Shane Watson, the quintessential Twenty20 player, who made such a huge impression on the first season of the IPL. And I don't think Jason Krejza and Bryce McGain are going to take the Test world by storm simply because Australia have been scraping the barrel in search of spinners to replace Shane Warne and Stuart MacGill. It costs me to say it but this golden age of Australian cricket, from Mark Taylor to Ricky Ponting via Steve Waugh, through which they produced a whole regiment of modern greats, gave Test cricket a longer lease of the cricketing limelight than it might have had in the normal course of cricket history. If we're at the end of Australia's modern heyday, we might well be looking at the end, not of Test cricket, but of its reign as the hegemonic form of the game."

Certainly test clashes between Australia and India without Warne, McGrath, Langer, Gilchrist, Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly and others won't have the same ring to them, but as the author suggests, this could be a far greater malaise indeed.

Elegantly Dressed Wednesday - Glamour Girls of the 1960s

Taken at the Goodwood Festival of Speed over the weekend, these finely turned out young ladies are supposedly representative of the 1960s. I wasn't alive in that decade, so am unable to confirm either way, but if it wasn't the 60s, maybe it should have been. Rose-tinted spectacles might explain the colour of the outfits anyway.

The Thin Red Line: Melanesian songs

Stephen of Rough Trade and I have been discussing films. One in particular which I singled out for praise, and he hasn't dissented, is Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line. Superficially it is a war film; to me, that would be like calling Strauss' Blue Danube a tune to which people like to dance. Pressure of work, including an overseas trip for which I am about to leave, precludes a detailed discussion of my own views at the moment. To kick off the discussion, however, here is an example of one of the incidental pleasures of the film, a song by the Melanesian choir which forms an integral part of the soundtrack to the film. The accompanying images (of course I lifted it all from Youtube) are rather shaky shots from the film, but they too give some idea.

Why English football is not a real sport

One thing I can't stand about football is the pathetic diving and otherwise ludicrous overreactions in search of penalties. Not much of that goes on in rugby league.

Pink Floyd again

Introducing this song in their famous Live 8 reunion, Roger Waters explains that it's for everyone whose not here, "particularly of course for Syd". And now, of course, Rick Wright isn't here either. Waters said how emotional it was standing up there with the three others after all those years. He couldn't have known how much extra weight those words would carry just three years later as, now, they won't be standing together again however many hatchets get buried.