Klutz of the day

You can tell how an iundependent Scotland would be run by the calibre of the people running Scottish businesses, siuch as the banks and its larger football clubs.  In both cases, downright appalling. Considering how easy it is for the top 2 clubs to stay in business with the almost hitherto guaranteed dose of Euro TV money, it takes a real incompetent to put one of them out of business,.

But it seems another kilted-know-nothing is lining up to set up a new Glasgow Rangers, and this particular numbskull thinks he can force the existing Rangers players to play for his new club under the TUPE rules.

Not so fast, Mr Green.  The TUPE rules are their to protect employees' rights not to allow employers to coerce them into working for them.

As a general rule it is not legal to assign, sell or transfer an employment contract (i.e. McDonalds can’rt just package up all the employment contracts of all their staff and sell them to KFC). This is because to do so could amount to trading in people (i.e. slavery or indentures) which as a civilised person we do not do.

The exception to this is when a business, but not a company, is sold or even where a company or organisation stops doing something and a new party takes over the operation. In those circumstances it seems reasonable that the employees can expect that they will be transferred with the business so that they keep their jobs, and to the maximum extent possible keep their terms and conditions of employment.

But since it would be unreasonable to expect every employee would always want to work for the new employee, the law gives them the right to opt out. But it never made it legal for employers to sell their staff in other circumstances. But when the putative transferor is insolvent TUPE does not apply, so while the employee gets no protection from TUPE, but the transfer of the contract would not be binding on the employee. without consent. It simply lapses when the transferor is liquidated.

No idea what this means

Well actually I think it is something to do with an "initiative" (πρωτοβουλία) by "journalists" (δημοσιογράφων), but I like this free advertising from Greece.

Our politicians aren't alone

Our politicians certainly come up with a lot of tripe from time to time, but they have competition in that field.

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has hailed a decision by eurozone finance ministers to help Spain shore up its struggling banks as a victory for the European common currency. "It was the credibility of the euro that won," he told reporters.

And, presumably, the credibility of the Spanish PM that lost. After all only two weeks ago he was telling the world that Spain didn't need a bail out.

Pull the other one Pedro.  How does an inter-government loan to several nearly bust financial institutions represent a victory for the currency?  If the Spanish banks had been able to borrow in the public markets in their own currency, that would have been a victory for the currency, albeit a very minor one.

If that is a victory, lend me a billion, and win again

21 June is Visit your Doctor Day

Doctors have voted to go on strike on June 21. Their union, the British Medical Association, which is just a fancy name for a trade union, insists that the “industrial action” (their term, I'd called non-industrial inaction, but there you go) won’t harm anyone, so no doctor will break the Hippocratic Oath, which includes the clause “do no harm”.

The trouble is that doctors of course do a lot of harm to the economy, so be sure to make an urgent appointment with your GP to tell them that their high pay is an unnecdessary burden on the state.  One of the post war socialists in government, I can't remember which, could have been a Bevin or a Bevan, warned that nationalising doctors could lead to doctors holding the government to ransom.

Doctors do a very valuable job; a job that requires a lot of training, paid for mostly by us, the tax payers.  After that training they earn an average salary of over £100,000 a year, a pension after 40 years service worth over £50,000 index-linked and a £150,000 lump sum on retirement.  Sounds pretty good to me, particularly considering the pension contributions of 8% over 40 years amount to 3 years salary, in return for which they will get a lump sum of 18 months salary and an expectation of 20 to 25 years pension. And becaus ethey might lose some of that they want to go on strike.

It is worth noting that half of the 1% of the most highly paid public sector workers work in the Health Service.  Healthcare takes a disproportionate share of the national income and the reason is that like many public services, and unlike the private sector, it doesn't respond to market conditions.

Wagers iun the private sector have been driven down by competition from Asia.  If you don't believe me, look at the wages in semiconductor fabrication.  nott so long ago, we actually had some of those plants in the UK.  Nowadays, they are all in the Far East. I rest my case.

but the doctors still think they should be paid as though they are servicing the healthcare needs of a vibrant workforce, when realistically it is more to do with hip operations of an ageing population.  Sureenough they deserve care, but economically it ain't worth paying a lot for it, and by rights doctors should be earning a lot less when the government is running a deficit.

The docors may not like it, but part of the problem is that the costs of caring for the elderly have to be spread more thinly because we are all living longer, and the only people to blame for that are the doctors.

Zuckerberg off the Billionaires Index

Still a billionaire though if you count worthless paper, but with FB shares fallling another 10% yesterday to put them at $10 below their offer price, Zuckerberg is no longer in the top 40 billionaires calculated daily by Bloomberg.

I said the value of this stock would decline inverse exponentially like lastminute.com, and judging by the graph, so far I am not wrong.

Let me restate that for you

In a letter to the prime minister, nearly 70 university heads are warning that changes to student visas would drive bright applicants away. They urge the government to take foreign students, who bring in £8bn a year, out of net immigration counts. In the letter, senior education figures called for the prime minister to class foreign students as temporary rather than permanent migrants. In their letter, the signatories expressed concern that Britain's higher education industry could be harmed by changes to immigration policy. Britain attracts around one in 10 students who study outside their home country, generating around £8bn a year in tuition fees, they said. This, they added, could increase to £17bn by 2025.

But ministers said the policy did not stop genuine students coming to the UK. Immigration Minister Damian Green said the government was "determined to prevent the abuse of student visas as part of our plans to get net migration down to the tens of thousands. Students coming to the UK for over a year are not visitors", he said. "Numbers affect communities, public services and infrastructure." But Mr Green pointed out that the Independent Office for National Statistics was responsible for producing net migration figures, which were based on an internationally agreed definition of a migrant - someone entering the country for more than a year. "Public confidence in statistics will not be enhanced by revising the way the net migration numbers are presented by removing students", he said.

Or if I may put it another way.  University heads should realise that the economic impact of illegal migration is far greater than the paltry loss of revenue they might suffer as a result of these measures.

I give you a new verb

A friend used a word yesterday that I feel deserves wider currency, so here is my new word for the day: outsmartphone (ˌaʊtˈsmɑːt.fəʊn)       verb (transitive)  1. To own a telephone handset with a higher specification and performance than a telephone owned by another person. 2. To win at competitive telephone ownership.

What's the mutter with that?

David Cameron has been rebuked for unparliamentary language after calling  Ed Balls a "muttering idiot".


Don't see anything wrong with that. If it is good enough for Aristotle then it is good enough for our parliament. Idiot as a word derived from the Greek ἰδιώτης, idiōtēs ("person lacking professional skill", "a private citizen", "individual"), from ἴδιος, idios ("private", "one's own").In Latin the word idiota ("ordinary person, layman") preceded the Late Latin meaning "uneducated or ignorant person." Its modern meaning and form dates back to Middle English around the year 1300, from the Old French idiote ("uneducated or ignorant person"). The related word idiocy dates to 1487 and may have been analogously modeled on the words prophet and prophecy The word has cognates in many other languages.


An idiot in Athenian democracy was someone who was characterized by self-centeredness and concerned almost exclusively with private—as opposed to public—affairs.  Idiocy was the natural state of ignorance into which all persons were born and its opposite, citizenship, was effected through formalized education.  In Athenian democracy, idiots were born and citizens were made through education (although citizenship was also largely hereditary). "Idiot" originally referred to "layman, person lacking professional skill", "person so mentally deficient as to be incapable of ordinary reasoning". Declining to take part in public life, such as democratic government of the polis (city state), was considered dishonorable.  "Idiots" were seen as having bad judgment in public and political matters. Over time, the term "idiot" shifted away from its original connotation of selfishness and came to refer to individuals with overall bad judgment–individuals who are "stupid".


According to the Bauer-Danker Lexicon, the noun ίδιωτής in ancient Greek meant "civilian", "private citizen" , "private soldier as opposed to officer," "relatively unskilled, not clever". The military connotation in Bauer's definition stems from the fact that ancient Greek armies in the time of total war mobilized all male citizens (to the age of 50) to fight, and many of these citizens tended to fight poorly and not very well.


Just like Ed Balls.

Is this a record?

3 Trading days - now that's impressive.


San Diego, CA -- (SBWIRE) -- 05/23/2012 -- An investor in NASDAQ:FB filed a lawsuit over alleged securities laws violations by Facebook and certain underwriters of the company’s IPO.


Investors who purchased shares of Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) in or traceable to the IPO from Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan and/ or those who purchased shares of Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) and had issues with the order on NASDAQ, have certain options and for certain investors are short and strict deadlines running. Deadline: July 23, 2012. NASDAQ:FB investors should contact the Shareholders Foundation, Inc.


The lawsuit was filed on behalf of all persons or entities who purchased the securities of Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) pursuant and/or traceable to the Registration Statement and Prospectus issued in connection with Facebook's IPO (including investors who purchased shares through May 22, 2012). The plaintiff alleges, among others, that the offering materials provided to potential investors were negligently prepared and failed to disclose material information about Facebook’s business, operations and prospects, in violation of federal securities laws.

Faceplant

As speculation mounts over whether FB could set the record for the shortest period between IPO and class action lawsuit, Reuters reports:

Massachusetts Secretary of Commonwealth William Galvin has issued a subpoena to Morgan Stanley over an analyst's discussions with investors on Facebook. 

"The Securities Division has put out a subpoena to Morgan Stanley in connection with the analyst's discussion with certain institutional investors about the revenue prospects for Facebook," a spokesman for Galvin's office said.


Word on The Street is that Goldman and Morgan Stanley revised down their opinion of FB just before the float, presumably after reading my tip. They may have told institutional investors, but left retail buyers out to dry. Allegedly.

Biggest faller on Friday amongst majors US stocks:  FB fell from $42 at opening to $38, the initial offer price
Biggest faller on Monday  amongst majors US stocks:  FB fell from $38 at opening to $34, down 13%

Biggest faller on Tuesday amongst majors US stocks:  FB fell from $38 at opening to $31, down 8.9%.

Not really a chartist but I think I see a trend.

Picture = 1,000 words

Last Friday was price support day from the underwriters who kept the price at $38 a share.  But this is a brand new week, price support is off and FB share price is down 13% in the first 45 minutes.  That's a $13.5 billion loss of theoretical value.

There goes nothing. Hope you all took my tip last week and shorted.

You couldn't make it up #94

It's been a pretty busy week here at the Financial Crimes with a lot of incoming readership from Zero Hedge, all because of a post I made a few years ago about Matt Zames, rising star at JPM.

Well it seems that not a lot of people spotted that Mr Zames was fingered in a court deposition as having suspicions about Bernie Madoff 18 months before the NY District Attorney got wind and closed him down.  Zames' suspicions were strong enough for him to mention them to a JPM risk officer, but obviously not strong enough to go to the authorities.

Anyway, the reason that Mr Zames, who incidentally is chairman of the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee (not bad going for a trader who worked at LTCM, the hedge fund whose failure was so large that it was bailed out to the tune of $3,625 million by US banks under the supervision of the Fed), is now in the news is that he has been but in charge of the $70 trillion derivatives book in the Central Investment Office at JPM.

Between Madoff, LTCM, the stinking carcass of the London Whale and telling the US government how much to borrow, something doesn't smell right.

They just keep coming

It's pretty hard for a bank to lose a billion all of a sudden, but when, like JPM, it is hiding a hedge fund amongst its federally insured businesses, it happens very quickly as the $2 billion loss of less than a week ago seems to have doubled.  A billion here, a billion there and pretty soon you are talking serious money.  much more of this and JPM will be looking for a new CEO.

Sell Facebook

Facebook is going public with a valuation of $104 billion, although they are only selling $16 billion worth of shares. Here's a tip. At that price avoid it like the plague. In fact, short the plague. Put all your assets into shorting the stock.  The price won't last, just like the radioactive decay that was Lastminute.com. And here's why:

Capped Revenues
Facebook makes its money from selling advertising space based on the information supplied by users. And it says it has a lot of users, about 845 million. So far, so smart. Facebook is currently valued at 100 times earnings, which sounds fine for an internet startup that has been around for a few years, but not so smart for a company that claims to have 70% of internet users signed up.  There isn't much room for growth there, and certainly no way to grow the revenues to bring up the "e" in the p/e ratio so that it hits the 8 to 12 expected of a mature company. Expect the "p" to fall.

Ever growing cost base
Unlike many internet companies, Facebook does have financial data, but the picture it shows is not that great.  It is profitable and it is growing fast, but the problem is that Facebook is not like most internet companies where the fantastic profits come because of the incredible scalability of the internet. At Facebook the rapidly increasing revenues are closely followed by rapidly increasing expenses.

That is not how it is supposed to work.  The idea of an internet venture is that you invest all your money up front in development and then you sit back while your fixed cost base produces an ever increasing revenue stream.  The trouble with Facebook is that this year's cost base is higher than last years revenues.  Eventually the revenues will stop growing and this year's bright star will become next year's dog.

New Entrants
Give me $104 billion and I can build a rival product that will eat into Facebook revenues. Easy.  In fact give me $104 *million* and I can do the same. So give me $1 billion and I can build a rival product, hand over $1 to every Facebook user who switches to my system and pay them $1 in cash, which is roughly all you would have to pay to get people to switch.

Existing Competitors
Actually, you don't need to worry about any new businesses because there are plenty of other companies that can advertise in your face while online and they have better business models.

Nobody gets onto Facebook to go shopping.

Ebay, Amazon and Google know what I want to buy because I search for it on their websites.

Facebook knows my favourite colour.

Ebay, Amazon and Google know that I want a 5V micro USB power supply, solid oak gate posts, hard to find cupboard hinges and a new satnav.

Facebook knows that I like the bands whose CD's I already own, and where I went on holiday last year.

I probably want to go somewhere else this year. I will check out that somewhere else on Google, thank you very much.

The World Moves On
Facebook started as a desktop system, but the world is going mobile. The IPO prospectus mentions the word "mobile" 123 times, and 425 million of the 845 million monthly active users (MAUs) at December 31, 2011 are mobile users. Mobile users are growing faster than other users, and expect that trend to increase if Facebook breaks into China where mobile phone usage far exceeds internet connections.

Facebook do not make any money out of mobile users.  The prospectus says "We do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven".  Worse still the prospectus says that the company's revenue growth could be harmed if it cannot "successfully implement monetization strategies for our mobile users".

Could? Make that will.

Crap Management
Zuckerberg. Say no more.  He actually says he doesn't really care about advertisers.  Do you really think he will care about shareholders once he has your money? Dream on.

Falling profits
To justify such a high p/e Facebook needs to be growing its profits. Sadly they fell 32% between Q4 2011 and Q1 2012. And revenues were down 6.5%.

At $104 billion this is a no-brainer. And if you want a feel for how screwed you would be, the shares on offer are "A" shares, which carry one vote per share, as is normal, but the current owners' shares are "B" shares, which carry 10 votes each. Zuckerberg will own less that 50% of the shares, but 56% of the votes. Go for it suckers.

Never mind, there's always another time

We note from the Court Pages of the national newspapers that Queen Sofia of Spain has been ordered to down turn an invitation from Queen Elizabeth to a Diamond Jubilee lunch for the world's sovereign monarchs because of Spain's persistent niggling over Gibraltar.

Queen Sofia had earlier accepted the invite to tomorrow's (Friday's) celebration at Windsor Castle, but in a last minute snub by Spain's government she has been told not to attend because it would be "inappropriate in the current circumstances".

Never mind, perhaps she would like to come back next April to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Treaty of Utrecht.

And of course, it could all be just a ploy to divert attention from the massive cost of borrowing for the Spanish government in today's news.

Yahoo! CEO! quits!

The Chief Executive of Yahoo! Scott Thompson has  resigned two weeks after it was revealed that he did not have a Computer Science degree as claimed, but an accounting degree. Which is a shame, because his CV is filed as part of the corporate filings with the SEC and that is a bit bad.

His real crime of course was to have such an appalling moustache. It takes a certain panache or dress sense to carry off the modern business-suit-with-no-tie look.  It rarely works, but your chances of success with a '70s style Mexican dollop of fluff on the top lip is never going to work.

The funny bit about this story was that Mr Thompson was not alone in his misdemeanours. Patti Hart,  chief executive of International Game Technology and a Yahoo director since 2010, who was tasked with finding a new CEO, had her own qualifications come under scrutiny. An investor alleged in a letter to the Yahoo board on Monday that she had exaggerated her academic background in claiming a bachelor’s degree in marketing and economics from Illinois State University, when she had in fact gained a business administration degree.

Personally I don't see much of a difference.

JPM make the case for Glass Steagall

The content and tone of JP Morgan chief Jamie Dimon’s telephone call to analysts explaining JP Morgan Chase’s regulatory filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission reporting a $2 billion loss in derivative trading demonstrates that the true cost to the bank should be measured in ideational and reputational terms.

The trading loss was an “egregious” error, the result of ‘self-inflicted’ mistakes that ‘violate our own standards and principles’ and which “plays right into the hands of a whole bunch of pundits out there,” he conceded.

The reputational damage is magnified by the fact that the losses reflected poor risk management within what the firm terms its Chief Investment Office. Buried within the filing (page 9), the firm notes that the “CIO has had significant mark-to-market losses in its synthetic credit portfolio, and this portfolio has proven to be riskier, more volatile and less effective as an economic hedge than the Firm previously believed.”

The frank admission of “sloppiness and bad judgement,” and determination that the firm would “admit it, we will learn from it, we will fix it, and we will move on” was an exercise in damage limitation.

Or in other words, banks that take government guaranteed deposits cannot be trusted to trade the funds they hold. If JPM, source of Value at Risk and the credit swap can mess up to the tune of $2 billion, what are the chances of the 1st Investment Bank of Mudville not making the same mistake?  It is hard to see a $2 billion loss arising on a portfolio of secured loans to medium sized industrials.  At least, not as an "egregious error" that pops up overnight.

Meanwhile, JPM directors have effectively overstated prior trading profits by $2billion and trousered the ensuing bonuses and LTIP payouts.

A word of thanks

to all the French voters, who have cut the cost of this year's summer holiday.

In a move that I think in fairness one would have to call courageous, the French electorate have decided that the solution to an over-borrowed state sector that already amounts to 56% of the economy is to spend more money that they don't have and will need to borrow.

This has of course had the obvious effect of reducing the value of the euro, making French holidays that much more enjoyable in sterling terms and possibly reducing the cost of my next German built car, albeit that that has raw materials and components priced in dollars.

One Harry Redknapp

One Harry Redknapp
There's only one Harry Redknapp
One Ha-arrry Re-edknapp
There's only one err.... Roy Hodgson
One Ro-oy Hodgson
There's only one Ro-oy Hodgson
One Ro-o-oy Hodgson ......

Lest we forget, although Roy Hodgson scored no goals during his time as an 18 year old on the books at Crystal Palace in the 1960s, this was hardly his fault because he never actually made any appearances. However, he did go on to forge a successful playing career at such household names as Tonbridge Angels, Gravesend & Northfleet, Maidstone United, Ashford Town, Berea Park, Carshalton Athletic the last of which recently made its mark by winning League Division 1 and earning promotion to the Championship, oh no, sorry that was Charlton Athletic.

Rough Diamond

Barclays have an AGM coming up so it is just as well for Bob Diamond that they announced an increase in basic earnings per share to 13.6p from 10.7p, although they held their interim dividend at 1p. After all, Mr Diamond is going to face a lot of criticism over his £11 million pay package for 2011, and that figure excludes a lot of tax liabilities the bank assumed on his relocation. Apparently another £7 million.

However, things are not so rosy in the Barclays cap because the £2.4 billion that is being reported to shareholders omits two big chunks of dosh.

First, the bank put aside another £300 million to meet the cost of mis-sold PPI (payment protection insurance) policies. This comes on top of £1 billion already set aside to pay compensation to swindled borrowers. Funny how the bank booked the PPI sales as ordinary income in the past, but when it comes to pay compensation this is not part of its reported trading profits.

 In the same vein there is an even bigger biggie, a loss of more than £2.6 billion on the fair value of their own debt. We have covered this before. When the credit rating of banks deteriorates, they claim that the fair value of the debt they have already issued reduces because a higher discount rate is applied to value that debt, so they book a profit.

Similarly when the creditworthiness of the bank improves and the spread on their debt tightens, they will suffer a loss. To my mind there is nothing wrong with saying that there is an extraordinary loss. The prior debt was always going to be repaid so I would happily forget this fair value charade. However, in the first nine months of 2011, Barclays' results were flattered by a £3 billion gain in the value of its own debt, so I see no reason why this figure is not also included in ordinary profits.

Taking these two figures into account, Barclays actually lost £475 million before tax, compared with a profit before tax of £1.7 billion last year.

Some people might think that makes them worth £11 million. Shine on you crazy, Diamond.

Root and branch

Not particularly interested in the media conflab about BSkyB, Murdoch, DCMS, Lenson but a couple of things are quite clear.  First of all, none of the current set of ministers, let alone the lot from the last government, has a clue about straightforward business dealings, open and fair discussion.  The difference between politicians and businesses is that businesses have to face up to reality because if they don't they will be wiped out whereas politicians try to abuse their power, hide from the truth and obfuscate. It works for a while or until enough people  have forgotten about a particular slip up and the politicians get away with it, but it makes for poor government.

Anyway, the one thing that is glaringly obvious is that Jeremy Hunt was inept in his handling of the BSkyB takeover, and it is clear that such rank amateurs should be nowhere near important decisions.  But it raises the bigger issue of whether we actually need a Department of Culture, Media and Sport, any more than we need a Ministry of, say, Bricklaying?  Sport and Culture existed long before the dead hand of government came into play, and while some aspects may benefit from government funding, that could probably be better handled by local government, by large national institutions (e.g. the National Gallery) funded directly by the Treasury or the National Lottery.

And as for media regulation, why should it be any different from any other business regulation? It is after all a business not an art and should be treated no differently than any other industry.

If there is one thing that can be learnt from the NOTW closure it is that incompetence and ineptitude can be most easily rooted out by closing down the whole organisation.

Yellowwash

Lots of bleating in the media today about Michael Brown, particularly from the LibDems about the Electoral Commission allowing them to keep £2.4 million of stolen money because they acted in "good faith".  Actually the Electoral Commission did nothing of the sort.  The good faith contention came from the LibDems, but as we all know, their leadership was drunk at the time. What the Electoral Commission said is recorded here, and the relevant extract was:

To be a permissible donor, a company must be registered under the Companies Act 1985, incorporated within the UK or another EU member state, and be carrying on business in the UK. The Commission has concluded that 5th Avenue Partners Limited met these requirements at the time the donations were made, and therefore was a permissible donor.

The Commission also considered whether there was a basis for concluding that either Michael Brown, as an individual, or 5th Avenue Partners GmbH (the parent company of 5th Avenue Partners Limited) was in fact the true donor. Neither of them would have qualified as permissible donors under PPERA.

The Commission has concluded that there is no reasonable basis to conclude that the true donor was someone other than 5th Avenue Partners Limited.

which all sounds fine and dandy except that when Brown was tried and convicted oif fraud, the High Court convinced themselves and made clear in their judgement that there was absolutely no business involved in 5th Avenue Partners.

The fact that the Electoral Commission didn't prosecute is down to a "political decision" by the Electoral Commission, originally by Sam Wardle the former Chief Executive.  I was the original complainant in May 2005 about Michael Brown, a few hours after the donation was announced (and I had done enough checks to spot that the donation was fishy).  I complained through my MP.  When there was no response after several months, he collared the Sam Wardle at his party conference.  Still nothing happened, and months later when pushed, the Electoral Commission said that they couldn't comment while Brown was under investigation by the police.  When I eventually reached Wardle by telephone, he said that it was unlikely the Electoral Commission would do anything because it was their job to preserve democracy, not to bankrupt political parties.

Would you drive a car designed by Ed Miliband?

Mercedes team boss Ross Brawn has expressed his frustration with politicians criticising the decision to go ahead with the Bahrain Grand Prix.

Labour leader Ed Miliband was among those who said it should be cancelled amid ongoing civil unrest. "Politicians in the UK were saying we should withdraw once we'd got here," Brawn said. "Why didn't they say something beforehand?"

Brawn also criticised calls for British drivers to boycott the race. Must be particularely irksome for people who are at the cutting edge of their industry to listen to drivel cxoming from someone who has never done anything of note in his adult life.

Can you write with your eyes shut?

Former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has  admitted that he signed off the decision to capture  Abdel Hakim Belhadj  and hand him to Colonel Gaddafi, but only after Foreign Office officials showed Mr Straw evidence his signature authorising them to arrange the abduction  in 2004.

Mr Belhadj claims he was jailed and tortured in a Libyan prison after his ‘extraordinary rendition’, and is suing the UK Government for £1million in compensation.

Last year Mr Straw denied any knowledge of the operation, saying: ‘The position of successive foreign secretaries, including me, is that we were opposed to unlawful rendition, opposed to torture or similar methods, and not only did we not agree with it, we were not complicit in it, nor did we turn a blind eye to it.’

Blind eye or not, he obviously did not see what he was signing. Writing with your eyes shut; now that's a real talent.

Give me a break

There seems to be a lot of hot air in the media about tax relief for charitable donations, notably a letter to the Telegraph with 40 signatories. But take a closer look and you will find that most of them are self-proclaimed philanthropists acting on behalf of their own family trusts. I have no doubt that they are all generous and well intentioned but they don't seem to fit the general description of charity donors. To explain: imagine a charity donor earning more than the average, perhaps £40,000 a year but with little other liquid assets. This donor deciodes to give donations of £2,000 a year to various charities, and this genuinely reduces the amount of disposable income that he has to live on. It doesn't seem unreasonable to reduce the amount of ioncome on which he is assessed by £2,000. Now consider the situation of a very wealthy family that owns perhaps £100 million of income producing assets quite apart from the assets that they rely on to live (houses, cars, grouse moors i.e. the basic necessities). At the beginning of the year, the family invests its £100 million and gets a measly return for the year of £5 million, which it decides to donate to a charity, namely its own family trust. Now, there are many ways that you can look at this, but it seems to me just as reasonable to treat that donation of £5 million as being made out of the family's accumulated wealth of [£100m + £5m] than just out of the £5m income, so why should anyone expect it to qualify for tax relief in full against income? In summary, since every one is guaranteed 100% relief for charitable donations up to £50,000, tapering down to 25% relief at the first £200,000 and 25% thereafter, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me for the government to treat donations above £50,000 as being paid out of capital not income.

Shysters (part 3)

Tony Blair says he has no memory of the 2004 rendition case involving Abdel Hakim Belhaj. The former prime minister said Britain had always opposed rendition and "absolutely adhered to that position".

OK, as I said before that sounds like a lie and a guilty verdict.If he and Straw were adamant with their opposition, then he would hardly forget it if he was told about any extraordinary rendition, and if Straw was opposed to it, he would hardly have kept quiet about it.

Mr Blair told the BBC that the security services did an "important, dangerous job" and generally deserved the full support of the country. Which we all iknow already and we don't need to hear it from him. An what we really want to know was which Secretary of State authorised the extraordinary rendition of Mr Belhaj.

Shysters (part 2)

Belhadj was rightly miffed that the UK government had a hand in his kidnap and torture, and did what any sensible person would do and sued.  Such is the watertight case of UK plc that MI6 has allegedly offered a million spondoolees (of your money, dear tax payer) to get Mr Belhadj to forget the whole affair.  Fortunately he is more principled and greedy than that and is looking forward to his day in court.

It now gets more interesting, because according to press reports, the Met is going to take a look into the affair, and may be about to question Straw or even Blair.  The latter shouldn't be hard to find because you dear tax payer are still paying for three of the Met's finest to keep him out of trouble 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

No doubt there will be the usual bluster and fobbing off, but things do not look to good for either Blair or Straw, because our legal department have been hard at work and ferreted out that under The Intelligence Services Act of 1994, ‘authorisation of acts outside the British Isles’ can only be signed off as a result of ‘authorisation given by the Secretary of State’. No chance of blaming a lowly Home Office minister then, although some authorities think that "the Secretary of State" could also include the Prime Minister, although I find it hard to agree with it on the facts, although equally I don't see that stopping Blair.

Let's look forward to some doubletalk from Straw about "always being opposed to extraordinary rendition" (even when he or the Prime Minister authorised it), and the same from Blair along the lines of "well, I may have authorised it (or some play on words to that effect), but I am not the Secretary of State so I am not responsible".

Last year, Richard Dearlove, formerly head of MI6, told us it was a political decision to hand over opponents of the Libyan government, and a few years ago David Miliband told Parliament that Diego Garcia had been used by rendition flights on two occasions in 2002.

Join the dots to get the full picture

Always knew Jack Straw was a lying shyster

The evidence against Straw and Blair about the rendition and torture of Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who was taken off a plane while in transit in Bangkok and flown to Libya, probably via Diego Garcia after a friend of Mr Belhaj had gone to the British Embassy in Malaysia and sounded out his chances of political asylim in the UK. MI6 tipped off other agencies and the CIA nabbed him. Damningly for MI6 and the government of the day, the MI6 agent running the show, Sir Mark Allen wrote a letter to Musa Kusa, Gaddhaffi's chief of intelligence, not only congratulating the Libyans on the "safe arrival" of the "air cargo", but asking that any intelligence received form the interrogation should be passed to the British and not through the Americans.

Of course, Sir Mark Allen never thought this letter would come to light, but it has, and there is a prima facie case for prosecution, although the likelihood of that is minimal.

Jack Straw was the Labour Foreign Secretary in 2004 when the rendition took place. In an interview on BBC Radio 4 last year he said: "We were opposed to unlawful rendition. We were opposed to any use of torture or similar methods. Not only did we not agree with it, we were not complicit in it and nor did we turn a blind eye to it."  You can tell he was lying because his lips were moving.

Of course it wouldn't be so bad if this supposed terrorist, on which we have been able to pin nothing apart from having been in Afghanistan when bin Laden was on "our" side, wasn't now head of the Tripoli Military Council in the new Libya, and thus the head of the faction that the West had been supporting for many months.  Politicians can twist and spin as much as they like, but in the end the dishonest are caught out by the facts.

How Robert Rubin and Bill Clinton screwed the middle classes

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to our third episode about the powerful players in high places who rewrote the rules of American politics and the economy. You can read all about it in this book: Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class.

If you missed the first two programs, you can see them on our new website, BillMoyers.com. The first is with Winner-Take-All authors Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson; the second with David Stockman and Gretchen Morgenson on “crony capitalism.”

In this edition, we’ll look at a seminal moment when Wall Street and Washington stacked the deck against the rest of us.

Remember, this is the political equivalent of a crime story, a mystery. How is it that our economy stopped working for the broad majority of Americans? How did our political and financial class shift the benefits of the economy to the very top, while saddling us with greater debt and tearing new holes in the safety net? In other words, how did politics create a winner-take-all economy?

Well it didn’t happen by accident. This was an inside job, politically engineered by Wall Street and Washington working hand-in-hand, sticky fingers with sticky fingers, to turn the legend of Robin Hood on its head: giving to the rich and taking from everybody else. It’s all on the record.

The richest of the rich was Citigroup, at one time the world’s largest financial institution. When the 2008 meltdown hit, the bank cut more than 50 thousand jobs, and taxpayers shelled out more than $45 billion to save it. So how are Citigroup executives doing these days?

Nicely, thank you. Last year, its CEO, Vikram Pandit, took home almost two million dollars in salary, almost four million dollars in deferred stock, stock options that may be worth as much as six and a half million dollars, and a $16 million retention bonus. And yet just a few days ago, Citigroup failed the latest stress test by the Federal Reserve. It may not the means, in order words, to survive another financial fiasco.

There’s no clearer example of the collusion between government and finance than the deal that created Citigroup in the first place.

At a standing room only press conference in April 1998, Sandy Weill, head of the investment bank and insurance company Travelers group, and John Reed, the longtime CEO of the commercial bank Citicorp, announced a gigantic, $140 billion merger.

Just one problem: the merger flew in the face of this law.

You’re looking at the Banking Act of 1933, also known as Glass-Steagall. Glass-Steagal was enacted during the Great Depression to prevent investment banks from ever again gambling with people’s life savings, as they had before the market crash of 1929. Glass-Steagall protected us against a repeat of that calamity for seventy years. It’s a little bitty thing -- just 37 pages -- for the big job it did for us.

Glass-Steagall was still in force when Travelers and Citicorp went ahead with their merger. So what made them think they could get away with it? They had friends in high places. That's how. Friends who helped them exploit a loophole giving them two years to get rid of the Glass-Steagall Act.

Among those friends, the laissez-faire, libertarian chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan; the right-wing Republican Senator from Texas, Phil Gramm, who once called Wall Street “a holy place,” and later would become a high priest at the global banking giant, UBS; and the democratic Secretary of the Treasury, Robert Rubin, former co-chair of Goldman Sachs and tireless advocate of taking down Glass-Steagall. In the weeks before its repeal Rubin left government to join, are you ready for this, Citigroup’s board, the very financial giant made possible by Glass-Steagall’s elimination.

And so it was – the fix was in, the path cleared all the way to the top.

JOHN REED: Sandy called his friend the President last night and invited me to join in on the conversation and we had a good talk. So the President was in fact told last evening about what was going to happen.

BILL MOYERS: You got that, I’m sure. Wall Street was telling the President of the United States what was going to happen.

Within two years, Glass-Steagall was deader than a doornail. With the stroke of a pen, President Bill Clinton signed legislation that eliminated its protections and gave Citigroup the green light.

John Reed retired from Citigroup a year later, after losing out in a power struggle with Sandy Weill. He went on to serve as interim CEO of the New York Stock Exchange and now chairs the board at MIT. As Wall Street collapsed in 2008, Reed watched in disbelief, and began to have second thoughts about it all including the wisdom of repealing Glass-Steagall.

You were a key player when Traveler’s and Citicorp merged. How big was this to you at that time?

JOHN REED: It was not that big. You know, it clearly was an important transaction from our point of view. And it was hopefully -- it turned incorrectly -- but it was hopefully going to transform sort of the opportunity space in which the bank operated from a business point of view.

Our customers were saying, "Hey, we don't want to come to you for loans. They're too expensive. We can sell our paper into the capital markets more cheaply. We can finance ourselves more cheaply."

BILL MOYERS: Your customers being?

JOHN REED: Being large companies. And these customers were saying, "We want you to intermediate the capital markets.” Now that is the traditional business of what we then called investment banks. And Glass-Steagall had separated out those who were principally engaged, which is a very important phrase, in the capital markets, which were then the investment banks and the brokers and so forth, from the commercial banks.

BILL MOYERS: Glass-Steagall was the act passed during the New Deal back in the 1930s that was designed to put a firewall between the investment firm and the traditional banking firm. So you couldn't take my deposits or grandma's deposit and take risk with it, right?

JOHN REED: Well, that and even more importantly, or equally importantly, since the FDIC came into existence at approximately a similar time where the government was guaranteeing deposits so that people didn't lose if a bank got into trouble-- people didn't lose their lifetime savings. My father lost his lifetime savings during the Depression. And it was quite a family event. And if he had ever known I worked in a bank he would have died yet again.

But not only did they want to keep the banks from the business for reasons of not risking the money. They didn't want them to use the guarantee that the government provided for those deposits to leverage their position. Because, you know, if you have a deposit base that's guaranteed by the government, it sure puts you at a great advantage in terms of going into the market and playing around.

BILL MOYERS: The government's going to pick up your losses, right?

JOHN REED: Yeah. And you don't have a funding problem.

BILL MOYERS: That was what the FDI--

JOHN REED: Because you have guaranteed deposits.

BILL MOYERS: That was Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was designed to protect my --

JOHN REED: That's right.

BILL MOYERS: My deposit in your bank.

JOHN REED: That's right. And they wanted to make sure that it was used for that purpose and not as a basis for doing other things in the capital markets.

BILL MOYERS: So this is why the financial community wanted to repeal or eliminate the Glass-Steagall Act. They wanted to get rid of this firewall?

JOHN REED: Yes. And the reason was our customers increasingly said, "Look, we can't use you banks for finance because there are opportunities in the capital market that are much cheaper. And if you can't help us go there then we're going to go to the investment banks. And so all of a sudden we saw our customers migrating out towards the investment banking community to do the business that we would have preferred to have done. So from Citibank's point of view, our point of view, this merger gave us access to the capital markets. And so we were in a position to offer our customers the services that they wanted.

NEWS REPORT: They plan to attract new customers with one stop shopping: Stocks, bonds property and life insurance and banking. Federal Regulators must approve the deal. Most banks are now prohibited from selling stocks and insurance.

JOHN REED: When Sandy approached me on the merger I knew that it was right on the forefront of the legal thing. But there’s a technicality Citibank could not have bought Travelers because that was out and out illegal. Travelers on the other hand could buy Citi because they were buying a bank and they had two years in which to correct for the deviation from the law. And what we basically were told was, "If you all want to do this within the two years we'll get the law changed."

BILL MOYERS: Because if in that two-year period as I understand it, Glass-Steagall had not been changed, this merger -- which had already taken place -- would have been illegal.

JOHN REED: We would have to take it apart. And we took steps to make sure that was possible.

BILL MOYERS: But you got the blessing in this two-year period of President Clinton, of the Fed, of--

JOHN REED: We had that blessing prior to. In other words—

BILL MOYERS: What? They assured you that this—

JOHN REED: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: Glass-Steagall would be--

JOHN REED: Yes. In other words, I went with Sandy to call on Chairman Greenspan. We told him we were contemplating this merger. But that it would required that the Fed would be prepared to grant us permission. And we were assured that they would.

We went and saw the Chairman of the House Banking Committee, the Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. And we said we're talking about this merger but it could not take place if we were not assured that it would be approved at the Congressional level. We talked to the Secretary of the Treasury, I don't recall--

BILL MOYERS: Robert Rubin? He was the Secretary of the Treasury at the time.

JOHN REED: Yeah, we would've spoken to him, I'm sure. And had Bob Rubin said, "No, the Treasury feels this is wrong," we would've been careful. Because obviously, the Treasury recommends to the President on an issue of this sort. And there was no argument. No one said, “We’ll have to think about it.” And so a consensus built up. I don’t think it started in the Fed. I would guess it started in the industry, it certainly got into the Congress.

SENATOR TIM JOHNSON: By eliminating the Glass-Steagall restrictions we free our financial services industry to maintain its place as the world leader…

SENATOR PHIL GRAMM: We dominate the world financial market, and we’ve done it with one hand tied behind us because we have the greatest economic system in the history of the world. But we can untie that hand that we have had tied behind us. And we do it in this bill by repealing Glass-Steagall.

JOHN REED: Lawmakers inevitably learn as lobbyists tell them things. It’s sort of like a doctor being sold new medicines, they can’t stay on the forefront of the pharmaceutical technology, they rely on being educated to some extent.

SENATOR CHARLES SCHUMER: This bill is vital for the future of our country. If we didn’t pass this bill, we could find London or Frankfurt or years down the road, Shanghai, becoming the financial capital of the world.

JOHN REED: There was no one in the press who said, “Oh no, that’s wrong.” There was a celebration. And the industry, including myself, didn't recognize the danger.

BILL MOYERS: The danger being?

JOHN REED: That we could make a mistake that would then be transmitted in a much more drastic way throughout the system.

BILL MOYERS: Which happened later.

JOHN REED: Which happened, yeah. I mean if you had asked me under oath, what probability I would have given that you would have gotten the whole group of Wall Street participants to get it wrong so to speak, I would have said zero.

SENATOR BYRON DORGAN: We are with this piece of legislation moving towards greater risk. We are almost certainly moving towards substantial new concentration and mergers in the financial services industry, that is almost certainly not in the interest of consumers, and we are deliberately…

BILL MOYERS: A handful of politicians who tried to sound the alarm. Among them was Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota.

SENATOR BYRON DORGAN: What does it mean if we have all this concentration and merger activity? Well, the bigger they are, the less likely this government can allow them to fail.

BILL MOYERS: Were you aware of the few senators who raised real concerns about removing Glass-Steagall, about what would happen?

JOHN REED: No one that I’m aware of it saw it clearly. You point out to some Senators and Congressmen who did, but somehow we described them as being peripheral. And I simply said, “They’re wrong.” Turned out they weren’t.

SENATOR BYRON DORGAN: I think we will in ten years’ time look back and say, “We should not have done that, because we forgot the lessons of the past.”

BILL MOYERS: Senator Dorgan predicted disaster. Disaster's what we got in 2008.

JOHN REED: Yeah, no, they -- and disaster-- it wasn't solely Glass-Steagall, because much of the disaster of 2008 would've occurred independently of it, I believe. But certainly the propagation of the problem throughout the economy was greatly aided by the absence of Glass-Steagall. You know, we would've hit the iceberg anyway, I believe.

But the ship would've had compartments which would've been flooded. And question is, would the whole ship have gone down? Because had it been compartmentalized, we still would’ve had a disaster. It still would've involved very important institutions. But it might not have spread throughout the whole ship. That's the real issue.

BILL MOYERS: What do you think they saw that Wall Street didn't see?

JOHN REED: They simply didn't participate in the exuberance. But I do think that, you know, this setting up the deck of cards so that we could produce what we currently are trying to withdraw from. Turns out to have been something that the word disaster is maybe not strong enough.

BILL MOYERS: Well, some people now say the deck was stacked, that the game was rigged against the broad interest of the public.

JOHN REED: No, I definitely agree. And, I mean, the proof is there. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that we'd been wrong.

BILL MOYERS: But it takes somebody principled to admit that, "I was wrong."

JOHN REED: No, no. It's not something you'd like to end your career with. That is for sure. No, look. We got carried away. It wasn't any small group, it was a consensus that reached the press, it reached the political world. It certainly had reached the intellectual world. I'm now, as you know, at MIT, and I say to some of my academic friends that the intellectual underpinnings of this was created at MIT and places like that, I mean—

BILL MOYERS: With the technology of the computers?

JOHN REED: Well, no. It's the mathematics. It's all of this mathematics of finance and the presumption in much of this mathematics that you can capture risk by looking at historical volatility and so forth and so on. As soon as you say something appears not to be risky, you get an over investment in it, because the capital requirements are less. And then if something does go wrong, the hurt is all the more because you don't have the capital to take the risks. And you know, if somebody says, "Walk across that sheet of ice, there's no danger whatsoever you're going to fall in," you know, you're fine. As long as you don't fall in.

BILL MOYERS: Are you saying, suggesting that -- the chairman of the board of MIT's suggesting --that human intelligence no longer runs our financial system?

JOHN REED: Well, it's a little wisdom balance that judgment wouldn't hurt.

BILL MOYERS: So how, when you look back on it, how did so many people, including yourself, get it wrong?

JOHN REED: We were carried away by the enthusiasm. And like everything else, you know, once you start you probably go a little further than you should have.

We started out lending mortgages to customers and putting them on our balance sheet. Then in the '90s, when the mortgage-backed securities came in to being, we found that you couldn't economically do that, so we would package our mortgages and we'd sell them to a Wall Street firm, who would then pass them on to their customers. Pretty soon, we were in the business ourselves, after the merger.

And so all of a sudden, these mortgage-backed securities could be distributed throughout our own company. And pretty soon people said, "Well, why only package the securities that your customers create? Why don't we go out to mortgage brokers and start buying some of their securities? And we'll package those and we'll sell them."

And then, I was retired at the time, but you read in the press and you may even have seen on television, no doc and low doc. Now, no doc/low doc means no documentation or low documentation. Low meaning less than the regulators would require of you.

BILL MOYERS: You didn't ask the person, the homeowner who was buying the house, "Show me proof of your wages. Show me proof of your savings."

JOHN REED: That's right. But can you imagine that you publicly acknowledge that you were creating products and selling them into the market that had no documentation or less than normal required documentation? And this was -- it's sort of like taking a product and putting a skull and crossbones on it and saying, "This might be poison," and putting it on the supermarket shelves.

BILL MOYERS: You know, I hear you talk. And I think, "Well, human beings certainly can go insane. So can systems, right?"

JOHN REED: Yeah, and so can groups of human beings. In the 90s, the investors took over. And they basically said to management, "We don't care what you do. We don't care how many private jets, houses, golf courses, swimming pools, whatever you have, as long as you keep the share price going up. If share price goes down, we're going to get rid of you even if you're good.”

And managers started being scared of their stockholders and this idea of shareholder value came into being. I never heard the word "shareholder value" until the '90s. It was customers, customers, customers. How are the customers? Are we doing well? Are we losing place with the customers? But all of a sudden -- and Sandy was a total proponent.

BILL MOYERS: Sandy Weill?

JOHN REED: Sandy Weill. I mean, his whole life was to accumulate money. And he said, "John, we could be so rich." Being rich never crossed my mind as an objective value. I almost was embarrassed that somebody would say out loud. It might be happening but you wouldn't want to say it.

But you know, the biggest bonus I had ever received when I was at Citi was three million dollars. The first year I worked with Sandy it was 15. I said to the board, "I'm the same guy doing the same job, same company. There are two of us. The company's bigger but there're two of us. What's going on?" "Oh, you don't understand." And it was just totally different culture. And see, Wall Street developed that culture.

BILL MOYERS: That's what happened, isn't it, in the --

JOHN REED: Yeah. No, and it happened. It happened in Wall Street and there's a subset of the world, that self-selects, for whom money is an overriding value. And being personally rich somehow is something they aspire to. And you know, it's a minority of the population. Bill Gates certainly did not start Microsoft to become rich. Nor do I think Steve Jobs went back to Apple because he wanted to be rich.

These were byproducts. They became rich, but as a byproduct. But there is a subset of the population that self-selects and they go to Wall Street because that's where it's somewhat legitimate. You could do the same thing illegally. And there are people who do that. I mean, there is a drug cartel and so forth and so on. But the thing that has amazed me is, A, it's fairly large and, two, it's sort of been accepted.

BILL MOYERS: Is this an accurate thumbnail sketch of what happened over this period of time? Banks took too many risks, right?

JOHN REED: Yes, they did. But there are worse things, but they certainly did.

BILL MOYERS: What were the worse things?

JOHN REED: Well, they originated and sold into the marketplace things that should never have been originated.

BILL MOYERS: Derivatives, unregulated derivatives?

JOHN REED: Well, it was the excess mortgages, the no-doc, low-doc mortgages. And then the derivatives were a byproduct. Once you had those, then you could chop 'em up and so forth. And of course they had changed their mindset. They were in the business to make money, period.

BILL MOYERS: The exuberance, you said, took over. Isn't it, isn't democracy supposed to be a brake, B-R-A-K-E, on greed and power in the private sector? To keep the balance-- to keep the exuberance from going too far, as it did in this case?

JOHN REED: It should. But you're a better historian than I am. I don't know, but I would guess the democratic systems tend to go back and forth.

BILL MOYERS: Like a seesaw.

JOHN REED: Like a seesaw.

BILL MOYERS: But when you take the watchdog off the beat, as happened in the 1990s, when you lift Glass-Steagall and throw it on-- into the dustbin of history, you're removing any check in behalf of the public on the exuberance of the private sector.

JOHN REED: You're-- I mean, a consensus developed. The fact that we took it out was a byproduct of this mistaken belief in this modern financial system that was, quote, "more efficient," was very lucrative for the United States and the U.S. economy in global terms.

And which was supposed to handle risk better. In fact, it handled risk worse. I mean, this is what the facts are because there was a much greater concentration of risk created. And so we got it wrong.

But the restraint of the government and it's agencies disappeared in the enthusiasm.

And so it was this combination of the participants getting carried away, the normal checks and balances that should exist against participants.

And the thing that is astounding, frankly, and there's a lesson here that we probably haven't yet learned, is that the system can get it so wrong. It wasn't--

BILL MOYERS: So wrong?

JOHN REED: Wrong. It wasn't that there was one or two or institutions that, you know, got carried away and did stupid things. It was, we all did. And then the whole system came down. You know, it became illiquid, the government stepped in. Had the government not stepped in, it really would have come to an end.

BILL MOYERS: Should the government have spent billions of dollars of taxpayer money in bailing out the banks?

JOHN REED: I think they had no choice. I think they had to do it, yes.

BILL MOYERS: Why?

JOHN REED: The alternative was worse. Letting the banks all collapse, which would have spread across the world, because banks lend to banks. So the interconnections were such that they just couldn't allow a meltdown of that scale. And we see in the Lehman bankruptcy that we're -- I don't know how many years since but it must be three or four. And they're still unraveling the bits and pieces.

And had it been the whole system, it simply would have been a calamity that from a societal point of view would have been worse. So I think they had no choice. They did have to bail them out. And they did do it. And it did succeed.

BILL MOYERS: But they left in place the very people who had driven the ship into the iceberg.

JOHN REED: I'm quite surprised at that. It clearly has not been a clean sweep. In other words, those of us who made mistakes, and so forth and so on, are still floating around the system. And--

BILL MOYERS: Floating it? You're running it.

JOHN REED: Well, I am not, but --

BILL MOYERS: You're not running it, they're running it.

JOHN REED: But there are many who are. I wasn't involved, obviously. I had retired in the year 2000. We're now talking 2008. So I was a knowledgeable spectator, but certainly not a participant. I was quite surprised because, frankly, the worst thing that can happen to a businessman is to go bankrupt. That's the sign of ultimate failure. You ran a business and it was unable to succeed under the terms and conditions of private capital. Namely, you went bankrupt.

It's not a crime. But it certainly is a mistake. And these companies, even though they didn't have to file for bankruptcy, de facto went bankrupt. And so the managements and the boards and the regulators should have, in my mind stepped aside.

BILL MOYERS: How hard was it for you to go before Congress in 2010 and say, "I was wrong. I made a mistake." In fact, you said, "We created a monster."

JOHN REED: No, we -- look. You don't like saying this. The hard part probably preceded my testimony by two or three years, where I came to recognize and feel, and I still feel bad. And I feel bad for the people at CitiBank who lost jobs and so forth and so on. Not to mention our stockholders. But I am a realist. I try very hard to be honest with myself, and honest in what I, you know, say. And facts are facts. I've seen Sandy a couple times. Not --

BILL MOYERS: Sandy Weil.

JOHN REED: Yeah, Sandy Weil. And I sort of say, "Sandy, you know, we didn't do very well." And he's not comfortable with that conversation at all. I think he would still defend that it was a good merger, it just went off the tracks afterwards. I --

BILL MOYERS: When it went off the tracks, John, you know, millions of people lost their jobs. Millions of people lost their homes. Millions of people saw their savings --

JOHN REED: If you look at the lost product in the United States, in other words, the difference between our current economic trajectory and the potential economic trajectory, you're talking about trillions of dollars. And those dollars are jobs and output and so forth and on so. I mean we over leveraged. And that was because we were creating mortgages so as to sell them into the market. And we're creating them from customers who probably should not have been borrowing. They didn't know what they were originating, didn't know who was buying it, and they didn't care. They were getting paid commissions along the way.

And that's a fundamentally flawed system. If you say to a businessman, "What is your objective?" and he says, "My objective is to make money," there are no boundaries on that. I mean, it's only the law as to what you do in the middle. It would be better if you said, "I'm in business to serve my customers,” or “to create a product like an iPad or what have you." But something that has intrinsic value. And all of a sudden, we changed to, "Hey, I'm not totally sure what we're doing here. Maybe it's not right. But you know what, I'm getting paid my commission." And that mindset took over. And a lot of that money did flow into the political coffers. There's no question--

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?

JOHN REED: Donations. You know, if you're rolling in money in a business, it's very easy for you to have a PAC and to contribute to campaigns and so forth and so on. And we went through a period of time when there was an immense amount of money. I don’t mean small. I mean, we took-- this is the biggest economy in the world. And we went from 15 to 25 percent of the economy.

BILL MOYERS: The financial community did?

JOHN REED: The financial--

BILL MOYERS: Industry.

JOHN REED: The financial sector, yeah. But the point is our government is designed fundamentally to be dumb but to listen. In other words, no one is elected to the government because of their personal expertise in the various issues that they're going to have to deal with. We have a system that is designed to listen.

BILL MOYERS: But if money gets you greater access--

JOHN REED: But unfortunately the talk of what you're listening to gets distorted by the money issue. They're not randomly listening to the population at large. They're listening to people who have a strong voice, because they're strong contributors and so forth and so on.

BILL MOYERS: I think you've taken us to a very fundamental issues that's roiling the country at the moment. And it is that this is an-- democracy is no longer a level playing field or even approximately a level playing field. The big institutions have so much money that they can flood into the system. There's one study I saw just the other day that reports the number of people lobbying today on behalf of the financial industry to try to weaken Dodd-Frank, the bill passed after the disaster, outnumbers consumer, union, and other groups by a ratio of 25 to one. The financial industry outspending everybody else 25 to one to try to weaken Dodd-Frank.

JOHN REED: I'm quite surprised that the political establishment would listen to groups that have been so discredited.

BILL MOYERS: You're saying despite what happened in 2008, Wall Street still has too much power?

JOHN REED: They have too much voice. They certainly are being listened to. I find it incredible. I would have guessed that society, at large, would have said, "Hey, we made a mistake. Let's get some rules." You know? I used to tell my kids, "Why do you think a car has brakes?" And they all would say, "To stop." And I'd say, "No, a car has brakes so that you can drive fast. If you got into a car that had no brakes and you knew it, how fast do you think you would drive? You wouldn't drive very fast at all." And that's the same reason we have rules. You want the private sector to be free to be creative and exuberant and whatever, within a framework.

BILL MOYERS: You testified in front of the Senate Banking Committee, you came out in support of what we call the Volcker Rule. For the layman, what is the Volcker Rule and why do you support it?

JOHN REED: The rule simply says, "If you have a customer who wants to issue a bond, you could help him. But you can't trade in the bond market for your own account."

And so what the rule does is it basically puts the banks back into the customer business and allows the Wall Street community to be in the pure trading and the business of speculation and hedge funds and so forth. And it separates those.

BILL MOYERS: Sounds to me like you're calling the Glass-Steagall Act back from the grave.

JOHN REED: I think I am.

BILL MOYERS: Because?

JOHN REED: I just think it’s better that we have that barrier than not. It makes sure that the FDIC guarantee doesn't provide a funding base for proprietary trading activities. Remember, the government guarantees your savings account and mine in the local bank. And, correctly, we don’t want the government's guarantee for those accounts to act as a funding base for somebody who's speculating in the market. And so it’s that kind of separation.

It's a prudent barrier. And I'm astounded that anybody would be against it. And mind you, I'm a private sector guy. I'm not suggesting over government intervention. But you need rules. I would never let you or a friend or my kids drive a car without brakes.

BILL MOYERS But when the financial community can buy the rules they want --

JOHN REED: Then you've got an unstable situation. That's an intolerable situation. I mean, obviously.

BILL MOYERS: So do you have any sympathy for Occupy Wall Street?

JOHN REED: Yeah, no, I definitely do. I mean, I think it's symptomatic of the disconnect that exists in our discourse now. Where you have a set of folks who seem not to understand fully what went on and the implications of it. And a political establishment that doesn't seem to respond very well. They know a lot about the concerns, but they seem not to be able to do anything about them.

And the folks in the financial system are not listening. They're not saying, you know what, there's some correctness in these views. And so I think these people are giving voice to a frustration. And I am quite understanding of it. I hope the political establishment has some ears. I understand the political divisions. But they've got to start understanding that at some point you have got to come together

BILL MOYERS: John, thank you very much.

JOHN REED: Thank you. I’ve enjoyed it.

Breaching your privacy

There is a lot of fuss in the media about the new measures proposed by the government to monitor telephone calls and web access, and quite right too. But there is nothing new about this.  Until now the UK has been quite happy to record similar information outside the UK where they were able to get hold of it.  No UK laws against that.  And they were fairly passive about the US listening in to the calls of UK citizens, in the hope/expectation that the US would share the juicier bits with the UK (and vice versa).

So now the UK is simply trying to do to its own people what the US and others may have been doing for some time.  I am not an expert in what actually happens, but several years ago I met regularly on business with people from a state that has not been on the friendliest terms with most western countries.  i was dealing with very substantial businessmen in that country, with very close ties to the leadership, met with senior employees of state companies and on a few occasions had meetings with ministers.

And this is what I was advised by someone who was very knowledgeable about the surveillance undertaken at the time:  Throw away your mobile phone, or don't let anyone you meet know your mobile phone number.  If any surveillance target calls you, you will go on a suspect list, likewise if you call them back. Don't take your mobile phone to meetings even if you don't use it because your position and the position of the "target" can be matched by time and place.  Do it once and it might be a coincidence. Do it twice and the link is obvious. At the time you wouldn't be dealing with the UK authorities, but your entry into the US might have become difficult.

Worth remembering if this law goes through.