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Gone-to-the-Wall St

Created:
10 October 2008
Updated:
17 October 2008
Written by:
Bernard Jones

FRIDAY 12 SEPTEMBER: Holidays at home

Eunice has just got back having dropped Irmgard and Nils off at Gatwick for a holiday. This trip apparently involves picking Fairtrade Guatemalan coffee beans and sharing the experience of TB, diphtheria and mosquitoes with the locals. How lovely! However, before she returns the phone rings and it is Irmgard herself, still at the airport. No check-in staff arrived and there are hundreds of passengers milling about, bereft of information. She asks me to check the internet, and I discover that XL Leisure, which operates her flight to Cancun, has gone belly up. I break the news to Eunice on her return. She blames me, of course.

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"What do you mean they can't afford the fuel, Bernard? I thought there were fuel surcharges already added in?"

"I'm just reading out what they say in their statement. It wasn't me that refused them credit."

"But I'll have to go all the way back to Gatwick and pick Irmgard up," she wailed. "I've got a hair appointment at 11.45."

"Why don't you leave them? I don't see why they can't have their holiday in Gatwick itself. They can hang their hammocks in the departure hall, hunt and gather edible items from the bins, help with the recycling of cardboard and plastics, and lecture the staff on how to do their jobs in a more environmentally sound way, just as if they were in Chichicastenango. Instead of being bumped off by death squads, it will just be a roughing up from Group 4 security staff, and the removal of suspicious liquids. When it's time to come back they can sit on the roof of a National Express bus or hitch-hike. Let's face it, there's nowhere in Britain better to experience third-world chaos than an airport departure lounge. And you can do it without creating all those nasty greenhouse gases."

MONDAY 15 SEPTEMBER: Lehman gone

Lehman Brothers has vanished over the weekend, just like a mislaid pair of reading spectacles. One Friday it was there, and stuffed with billions of dollars of assets. By Monday, it's history. As extinct as a dodo. Merrill Lynch? Oh, didn't I leave it down the back of the sofa? Now Bank of America has casually slipped it in its pocket in exchange for $50bn. What is the world coming to? I daren't even look at my portfolio. And what about Dot's? We'll have to sell most of it to pay this huge tax bill and, at this rate, it'll be like my old Ford Cellulite. I'll have to pay someone to tow it to the tip. The local authority will have a dozen different bins: recyclable plastics, green waste, re-usable paper, and finally shares, most useless of all, suitable only for landfill or incineration.

TUESDAY 16 SEPTEMBER: Ideological confusion

Good grief, the Americans have nationalised AIG, the giant insurer. It's almost as if Aneurin Bevan, Clement Attlee and Sir Stafford Cripps have clambered out of their graves and taken over the White House. Mortgage banks Fannie and Freddie? Let's have 'em. Insurers? Yep, them too. Yet all this is happening under the presidency of George W Bush. If the man looks even more confused than usual, it must be because Hank Paulson, the former boss of Goldman Sachs, is whispering in his ear the kind of suggestions found nowhere else but in the Leon Trotsky Beginner's Guide to Controlling the Means of Production.

WEDNESDAY 17 SEPTEMBER: All Martin's fault

Hardly had time to worry about HBOS, where Eunice keeps her current account, before the BBC says it's being shoved into the arms of Lloyds TSB. If Britain's biggest mortgage bank isn't safe, who is? Forget monopoly rules. God knows where this will end. I take a peek at the portfolio, and it looks awful. Head off to the Ring o'Bells for the share club, hoping for clarification and explanation. I arrive to find a full house, and a febrile and almost hysterical atmosphere. Russell Traugh even has a trailer-load of firewood in the car park. Perhaps they are planning a witch burning? If only they'd let me know, I'd have brought Eunice along.

Everyone gathers around the bar where pints of Speckled Hen are flowing as freely as the real-time prices on KP Sharma's laptop.

"This is all your fault, sonny," Harry says to Martin Gale, as he watches banks sagging further.

"Why me?" asks Martin.

"You are a classic piece of sub-prime. Borrowed to the hilt, and bringing the global banking system crashing down."

"Leave him alone," says Chantelle. "Poor Martin."

"I've already made my deal through the IVA," said Martin. "The banks know exactly how much of my debt they'll get back."

"Yes", said KP. "It's only if his debts had been parcelled up and sold on as high-yielding secure debt that they would be in trouble. At least we know he should never be AAA rated."

MORE FROM THE SAGE OF SUBURBIA..

Read more of Bernard's musings at his IC home page.

Write to him at bernard.jones@ft.com

You can buy the two Bernard Jones books at a discount in the IC bookstore.

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