This blog is closed now, but I'm blogging on a whole other topic - my plan to escape from Big Banking - over here:  http://workweaning.posterous.com

This magnificent bit of brass playing really captures the atmosphere at meltdown central, and signs me off with a fitting sense of dignity and drama.  Enjoy !
http://tinyurl.com/d2asvu

PS in case you didn't figure it out yet, this is A JOKE

from equinox to equinox - six months now since the Monday morning when, groggy from lack of sleep after a 72-hour shift on a project go-live, I wandered past 25 Bank Street and noticed that hundreds of people were standing around holding cardboard boxes and being filmed and recorded by the world's press.  Lehman Brothers had just gone bankrupt, and tremors of shock were only just beginning to ripple out through what, back then, we didn't know would soon be meltdown central.  Two weeks later, while on holiday deep in the mountains of Shikoku island in Japan, we turned on NHK news and listened in horrid fascination to the roll call of financial institutions either gone, or soon to disappear.
It seemed an era was coming to an end.

Now the days are getting longer again, and looking around, it doesn't look as if much has really changed.  25 Bank Street is emptier than it was, the value of new-build apartments has collapsed, a lot fewer of us still have jobs, but the wave front of the economic tsunami has rolled on and is now tearing a trail of destruction through the developing world, leaving just debris and an uneasy stillness here at the place where the banks set it in motion.  Mont Blanc is still here.  Even Massage Express is still here.  The caviar and champagne bar has gone but the Steak and Oyster bar is still doing a roaring trade.  And I'm still here, having chickened out on my promise to myself to retire at 60.  At times like these, who can afford to retire ?

What I do feel strongly now is that the time to blog about life at meltdown central has passed.   Nobody wants to hear about bankers any more.  Last week our manager took a group of us out for drinks to celebrate a team success (in itself a surprise - it's been a long, long time since the bank would allow this).   As he was only given a budget of £150 for food and drinks for 10 people, we thought it would be both practical and the right thing to do, to take our money to a nice local pub off the Canary Wharf Estate, the North Pole, which we did, but we didn't stay long.  The landlord didn't actually throw us out but he did the next best thing - refusing our credit cards, saying there was no food (though we could see other people being served), and kicking our bags around the floor on the grounds that we were in his way.  We took the hint and left after one drink.   We think of ourselves as nice, likeable people, but to the landlord of the North Pole we are just an expensive waste of space.
So, this is my last blog from meltdown central.  Who knows what the next six months will bring ?  If it actually does, as some commentators claim, bring the end of global capitalism as we know it, I will be back on here to let you know.  That would really change the world.  But I won't be holding my breath.   

London is a famously rude place.  By which I mean, among other things, that commuting to work in London is a lot like entering a war zone where it's every man for himself and devil take the hindmost.  A pregnant woman who uses the Tube during the rush hour has as much chance of decent and considerate treatment as a rabbit in the middle of the M25, and as for taking small children on the commute, you'd have to be mad.  But all of this rudeness and door-slamming and elbowing looks like the essence of dignified politeness compared to the way people here at meltdown central behave at the gym.

Gyms were suffering a bit in the pre-bonus period as a result of people looking around for ways to cut their spending, but they're bouncing back now with a vengeance following a series of aggressive discounting campaigns.  Then there's the fact that spring really does seem to be around the corner, and all those grim-faced thirty-somethings are out there desperately trying to whip their already frighteningly taut bodies into utmost shape for the day, not too distant, when they have to start uncovering bits they consider unshapely.   The rudeness rules at the gym are so rigidly enforced, it's almost comical to watch.  The first and most noticeable is the rule of No Eye Contact.  This is essential if you are to behave as if you are the only person on the planet, which seems to be necessary while you pound the treadmill or pump unfeasibly large amounts of iron.  (Except for eye contact with your Personal Trainer, in which case you will have loud conversation too, to draw attention to the fact that you've got one).  The second is the rule of No Physical Contact, which is tricky to maintain while stuffing your underwear into tiny little lockers centimeters away from the other people making No Eye Contact.  The third rule is definitely No Smiling or Laughing.  Try giving a chuckle as you fail to stand on one leg in a Pilates class and you will draw looks that could turn Medusa to stone. The fourth rule is Stay Out of my Space.  In the pool this means ploughing up and down like a mad whale, sighing loudly and overtaking slower swimmers while splashing them in the face, but making a formal complaint to the lifeguard if someone has the temerity not to swim laps clockwise; everywhere else it means shouldering others aside to get at the shower/sauna/steam room/mirrors and looking daggers at anyone who gets between you and your locker.   And for women at least (I can't comment on what goes on in the men's changing rooms) the last rule is definitely Do Not Be Ugly. This means spending at least as much time as you did exercising, walking around in your thong, brushing your hair and gazing adoringly at yourself in mirrors.  If you happen to be Old, like me, and have to spend most of your lap time in the pool avoiding being knocked unconscious by triathloners wearing metal gloves,  it is particularly trying to have to run the gauntlet of pitying glances as you scoot into your clothes.  

Finally, at the end of this ordeal of selfishness, you must leave as you arrived, grim-faced, ignoring the cheery farewells of the sweet-faced kids on the reception desk, returning to the benevolent world of the London Tube or bus, where people are at least allowed to acknowledge each other's existence.  The Masters of the Universe haven't gone away.  They've just been to the gym.

Once again I have Gemma to thank for today's picture, which illustrates the dangers of swallowing bubble gum while exercising.

Ah, spring - season of melting snow if not actually meltdown.
Giving a brisk new interpretation of both are these hard-core ascetic Buddhist monks walking through flames, holding a prayer board, during the Nagatoro Fire Festival, a fire-walking ritual, at Choshozan Fudoji temple in Nagatoro town, northwest of Tokyo. The annual event is held in March to celebrate the coming of spring. 
Bracing, what ?  (shit, my feet are melting  )

Suddenly, everybody's talking about POTS.  Specifically, the infamous Pension Pot of the fortunate Sir Fred.
But there seems to be a lot of confusion about who or what owns the Pot and how it works.
A member of the House of Lords and ex-banker was asked on Saturday by a BBC interviewer if he thought Sir Fred's pension was too big.
In fruity tones he explained, as if talking to an idiot, that when someone's  Pension Pot has eighteen million smackers in it, and he retires at 50,  then £690,000 per year is what automatically comes out of it.
To put this in a bit of perspective, an adult male aged 65 retiring today with £100,000 in his Pot would get a not-so-hearty £7,000 a year based on current actuarial rates.  And if you're a healthy woman of the same age, you'd get even less, given that your life expectancy would be so annoyingly long.
His Lordship's point is that the size of the pension was an inevitable consequence of the size of the Pot and therefore nobody should find it surprising; and what's more as far as His Lordship was concerned, a man's Pot is his Castle, or something of that nature.
A few short years ago as middle-aged panic began to set in, my employer ( another bank) advertised a seminar on pension planning for the over 50s, which I attended.  I was hoping to get some useful tips such as how to avoid having my own tiny little Pot disappear in a puff of green smoke (precisely what it has, unfortunately, now done).  Instead I found myself sitting in a room of embarrassed-looking people being told how to cope with the difficulties of having more than a million pounds in your Pot.   The government had imposed a Lifetime Pension Cap of 1.8 million pounds and some of the people in the room with me were being inconvenienced by this.  I sat there for a while wishing I had their problems and then left before depression set in.
But I would be pleased if someone could explain to me how Sir Fred comes to have eighteen million smackers in his pot.  Does he have  a magical exemption from the Lifetime Pension Cap, or what ?

• Harold Macmillan, British Prime Minister (on what kept him awake at nights);  "Events, dear boy - events !"
• The Japanese Emperor (explaining that the nation would surrender to avoid more atomic bombings): "The war has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage".
• Mrs Hewlett-Ola (daughter of Mr Stanford's accountant, on hearing that Mr Stanford is a swindler on a global scale): "All of this has come as a complete surprise".

Lack of Transparency is not, as you might think, the problem you get when you can no longer afford to pay someone to clean  your windows, but a way to apportion blame to people who tell lies, without actually accusing them of lying.  You might say that the successful operations of people like Messrs Stanford and Madoff depend on a Lack of Transparency.  (Although the gullibility of people willing to swallow the Black-Swan excuse was probably very helpful to them in their work).

You can find a Black Swan, distinguished for its Lack of Transparency (well the windows anyway) in Stratford-upon-Avon, but it's better known as the Dirty Duck.

Remember Tomorrow's World ?
Halcyon days, when the idea of the future was exciting and we thought it very likely that things were going to get better.
How long ago that seems !
The change in our thinking about the future was really brought home by two things that happened yesterday.  One of them was that a colleague got herself an IRobot Scooba floor washing robot.  She said it was so that it could wash the floor while she works seven days a week, and I know she isn't exaggerating because we work together a lot and often communicate early on a Saturday or Sunday morning.  But the excitement of getting her new robot was really infectious, and everyone gathered round to see pictures of the cute little sucker (she's calling it 'Isaac' - I-suck - geddit ?)  And she told me:  'Trust me.  This is the future'.  
Weren't robots the future way, way back in the Fifties ?  and haven't we heard of 'I Robot' somewhere before ?  Oh yes, that was in the Fifties too.
Secondly, I watched a BBC Horizon program, presented by the appallingly childlike and cute Professor Brian Cox - does his mother know he's out ? - called 'Can we make a star on earth ?'  It was all about nuclear fusion, and the punchline was that everybody interviewed is confident that we will actually have viable, economical energy from fusion by 2050 - some thought as early as the 2020s.  That's only 11 years in the future !  I might not even be dead by then !  The end of the program featured this announcement:    'The energy crisis is over, If you want it'.  And I remembered what it was like to feel optimistic about the future.
Nostalgically for my generation, the program even featured the observation that we are (literally) stardust.  Sometimes I think back to the day Neil Armstrong took his one small step, and wonder how on earth we got here from there. So bogged down in money - the getting and losing of it - that we can't see beyond it.  Or is that just how it looks to us, here at meltdown central ?  
Meanwhile, in Japan, the Haru no Ichiban wind, (translatable as either 'The first of spring' or 'the best of spring' ), has already started to blow. That means it's only one month to go until the cherry blossom season.  The future does exist.  Really.

(download)

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12-02-09_1743.avi (2.13 MB)

from the Book of Bonus Malus, Chapter 11.

1. And so it came to pass that the day arrived, when loud Rumour spoke with many tongues throughout the Bank;
2.  And the Manager's Manager was seen walking in with a huge pile of envelopes.
3.  Then those that had toiled all year in the trenches, and worked 5 weekends in an row, and recorded 100 hour work weeks, said unto one another:
4.  Verily, the day of our reward hath arrived.
5.  But how shall this be, knowing that the Evil One hath Madoff with several billion dollars worth of the Customer's money ? 
6.  And the Profits, although huge, are still down from last year.
7.  And there was wailing and gnashing of teeth.
8.  Thus it came to pass that one by one, the Permanent Employees were summoned into the Inner Room.
10.  Where the manager read out to them from a script which he had been given:
11.  The gist of which was that the guys at the top were very very sorry, especially because they had already sacked a third of the workforce, and everyone else was having to work twice as hard as before; but they were very very grateful for your efforts in the Toughest of Markets, and in Unprecedented Times.
12.  And then they gave everybody the Letter of Bonus Malus.
13.  And as they came out from the Inner Room, each person tried very hard to hide their feelings;
14.  Even as do the farmers, who say the harvest is rotten every year, although we all know they are lying most of the time or they wouldn't still be farmers.
15.  And the truth perhaps was that all got much less than they hoped, yet not as little as they feared.
16.  But the one thing they could not do was discuss it with each other, because there is a gagging clause in everyone's work contract forbidding this on pain of death (or sacking, which is worse).
17.  And the Prime Minister was made aware of all of this, and he waxed exceedingly wroth, although to be honest in our case it has nothing to do with him at all.
18.  But he could not actually do Thing One about it.
19.  And the band played on.

Remember the elephant ?  Recently, the entire British political establishment and media have noticed that elephant and are falling over themselves to condemn him and announce that he really should be extinct by now.  But the more they do this, the more certain banks are pretending that he isn't there, and maintaining a continuing silence while the executives decide what, if anything, they can get away with.  And so it is with us...
Last night on the BBC I heard it suggested that Mr Brown is hoping that bank executives will be 'shamed' into refusing their bonusses, even if they are offered.  What planet is he living on ?  If the people in question were capable of feeling shame, they would not be working for organisations whose main function is to gamble with other people's money and take a share, win or lose.  
But the most convincing riposte to this wishful thinking comes from Google.  If you type in bankers;bonus;shame, the first suggestion Google makes is:
Did you mean: bankers;bonus;scheme  ?