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It's a Gender thing
Oct. 14th, 2008 02:26 pmI distinctly enjoyed No Man's Land at the Duke of York's on Saturday. It would be nice to see all of the Pinter canon before I die. Perhaps I shall make that one of my collecting fads.
The top performer of the quartet was definitely David Bradley as Spooner. I always remember Bradley as the renegade Labour MP from Our Friends In The North. but he has been in tons of other stuff. While Gambon seemed to carry on being, well, Gambon, and David Walliams put in a fine effort as the servant/slash son Hirst (or was it Briggs?), and while Nick Dunning did his best with the other servant role Briggs (or was it Hirst?), albeit at a rather high volume for my taste, Bradley was a master of the theatre (and a not-that-easy script) and (very important with Pinter) comic timing.
The performance was only slightly disturbed for me by the fact that Bradley played Spooner as if he were Richard Sharp, an old (well, deceased, actuially) friend of mine of a distinct character. Indeed, I almost felt that either Bradley (or Pinter), must have met Richard as a younger man and based the character on him, because the similarities (right the way down to the accent and manner of speech), were uncanny.
++++++++++
Collecting "full sets" is, of course, a man thing. And I sometimes think that politics is as well. At least, when I was young, my main reason for an incredible interest in politics was that I wanted to understand how it worked. While other kids wanted to see how a car worked, or various other physical things, I had this fascination for how the world operated, and politics was the obvious thing to try to understand.
In that sense, my gravitation towards studying politics at university was no more noble than signing up for a course teaching you to become a car mechanic.
Latterly, I thought that I had figured out how politics worked, and I didn't like what I saw -- mainly because it was clear that having the right ideas and right answers got you stone-cold nowhere. Having sussed it out, my mind turned to something which now seemed to be more important when considering the quality of our lives -- economics. I'm still trying to figure out how that works, but all I can say is that, in the main, it's rather more of a meritocracy.
That principle has, of course, taken a bit of a battering this week. Mickey Clark generated a snowfall of emails this morning on "Wake Up To Money" when he questioneed whether it was a good idea to let government into running banks, because good salaries needed to be paid to "attract the right talent".
Within minutes his partner Andy was reading out emails which pointed out that good salaries had been paid before, and if that was the quality of the talent that they attracted, perhaps good salaries didn't quite achieve what people such as Mickey claimed they did.
Mickey then fell into defensive mode and, stupidly, declined to stop digging. "But there is talent out there", he said, "and, don't forget, the banking industry created a lot of jobs".
As Keynes might have observed, it's rather easy to create a lot of jobs. You just pay people to move holes from one end of the road to another. The trick is to create real jobs that create wealth. The banks pretended for years that they were creating wealth, and we can now see that, in one area in particular, this was bollocks. Much of the Canary Wharf extravaganza didn't so much employ people to move holes from one end of Canary Wharf to another, as to systematically set fire to the bank notes which other parts of the bank were generating. As justfications go for the banking system of 2000 to 2008 and the high salaries being paid to senior executives, this one is fairly weak.
++++++++++
The US government has come up with its "UK-lite" regeneration plan, diverting $250bn of the $700bn approved to capital injections. Fearful of any nationalization accusation (why? the FMs are nationalized entities) Bush said that the government was not taking control of the free market, but was preserving it. It's doing so by buying preference shares. Nine companies will get $125bn: Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America (really Nationsbank renamed), Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, State Street and Bank of New York Mellon.
Participating banks will need to accept limits on executive pay and golden parachutes. They also will need to give the Treasury warrants for an amount equal to 15% of the senior preferred investment.
The senior preferred shares will pay a dividend of 5% for the first five years and 9% after that.
Now, two things are apparent here. The first is that the UK government has got a better deal than the US government, and the second is that the disparate (and in a sense non-federal) nature of the US banking system is making it harder to get things to work. This is really common sense, actually. It's a lot easier to get seven or eight people who haven't been trusting each other to begin doing so again than it is to get 100 such people to do the same thing. The US banking system is very much more a creature of its own will, and it's much harder to prod it in any particular direction.
The cited US banks rose on the news (compare with the fall in the value of the banks being rescued in the UK -- that if nothing else shows you who is getting the better side of the deal), with Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and State Street all up by 16% or more. But the movement in the S&P 500 was more muted (admittedly on the back of a stonking gain yesterday) -- up 4%. If you strip out the banks' contribution, that isn't very encouraging. I suspect that much of the market in the US is still "waiting and seeing".
And that could take a while. Interbank lending just doesn't turn on and off like a tap and the three-month Libor will not come down in an instant. Indeed, it will be a classic case of waking up one morning in the not-too-near future and saying "oh, I think the crisis is over".
Or perhaps not.
_____________
The top performer of the quartet was definitely David Bradley as Spooner. I always remember Bradley as the renegade Labour MP from Our Friends In The North. but he has been in tons of other stuff. While Gambon seemed to carry on being, well, Gambon, and David Walliams put in a fine effort as the servant/slash son Hirst (or was it Briggs?), and while Nick Dunning did his best with the other servant role Briggs (or was it Hirst?), albeit at a rather high volume for my taste, Bradley was a master of the theatre (and a not-that-easy script) and (very important with Pinter) comic timing.
The performance was only slightly disturbed for me by the fact that Bradley played Spooner as if he were Richard Sharp, an old (well, deceased, actuially) friend of mine of a distinct character. Indeed, I almost felt that either Bradley (or Pinter), must have met Richard as a younger man and based the character on him, because the similarities (right the way down to the accent and manner of speech), were uncanny.
++++++++++
Collecting "full sets" is, of course, a man thing. And I sometimes think that politics is as well. At least, when I was young, my main reason for an incredible interest in politics was that I wanted to understand how it worked. While other kids wanted to see how a car worked, or various other physical things, I had this fascination for how the world operated, and politics was the obvious thing to try to understand.
In that sense, my gravitation towards studying politics at university was no more noble than signing up for a course teaching you to become a car mechanic.
Latterly, I thought that I had figured out how politics worked, and I didn't like what I saw -- mainly because it was clear that having the right ideas and right answers got you stone-cold nowhere. Having sussed it out, my mind turned to something which now seemed to be more important when considering the quality of our lives -- economics. I'm still trying to figure out how that works, but all I can say is that, in the main, it's rather more of a meritocracy.
That principle has, of course, taken a bit of a battering this week. Mickey Clark generated a snowfall of emails this morning on "Wake Up To Money" when he questioneed whether it was a good idea to let government into running banks, because good salaries needed to be paid to "attract the right talent".
Within minutes his partner Andy was reading out emails which pointed out that good salaries had been paid before, and if that was the quality of the talent that they attracted, perhaps good salaries didn't quite achieve what people such as Mickey claimed they did.
Mickey then fell into defensive mode and, stupidly, declined to stop digging. "But there is talent out there", he said, "and, don't forget, the banking industry created a lot of jobs".
As Keynes might have observed, it's rather easy to create a lot of jobs. You just pay people to move holes from one end of the road to another. The trick is to create real jobs that create wealth. The banks pretended for years that they were creating wealth, and we can now see that, in one area in particular, this was bollocks. Much of the Canary Wharf extravaganza didn't so much employ people to move holes from one end of Canary Wharf to another, as to systematically set fire to the bank notes which other parts of the bank were generating. As justfications go for the banking system of 2000 to 2008 and the high salaries being paid to senior executives, this one is fairly weak.
++++++++++
The US government has come up with its "UK-lite" regeneration plan, diverting $250bn of the $700bn approved to capital injections. Fearful of any nationalization accusation (why? the FMs are nationalized entities) Bush said that the government was not taking control of the free market, but was preserving it. It's doing so by buying preference shares. Nine companies will get $125bn: Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America (really Nationsbank renamed), Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, State Street and Bank of New York Mellon.
Participating banks will need to accept limits on executive pay and golden parachutes. They also will need to give the Treasury warrants for an amount equal to 15% of the senior preferred investment.
The senior preferred shares will pay a dividend of 5% for the first five years and 9% after that.
Now, two things are apparent here. The first is that the UK government has got a better deal than the US government, and the second is that the disparate (and in a sense non-federal) nature of the US banking system is making it harder to get things to work. This is really common sense, actually. It's a lot easier to get seven or eight people who haven't been trusting each other to begin doing so again than it is to get 100 such people to do the same thing. The US banking system is very much more a creature of its own will, and it's much harder to prod it in any particular direction.
The cited US banks rose on the news (compare with the fall in the value of the banks being rescued in the UK -- that if nothing else shows you who is getting the better side of the deal), with Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and State Street all up by 16% or more. But the movement in the S&P 500 was more muted (admittedly on the back of a stonking gain yesterday) -- up 4%. If you strip out the banks' contribution, that isn't very encouraging. I suspect that much of the market in the US is still "waiting and seeing".
And that could take a while. Interbank lending just doesn't turn on and off like a tap and the three-month Libor will not come down in an instant. Indeed, it will be a classic case of waking up one morning in the not-too-near future and saying "oh, I think the crisis is over".
Or perhaps not.
_____________
