The Borrowers

As human beans, we are being slowly put into the bean counter to maximise our worth to a profligate government that sees borrowing as a means to an end. Paying back is someone else's business. Gordon Brown may as well be a tiny person living under my floor boards. He appears to have tiny minds living under loads of floor boards, all over the country, popping out to borrow stuff from us human beans.

We now live in a country where most of the top corporations are crazed in their devotion to "driving down costs" and "reducing prices". We have banks that are so big that they have the government to ranson. They have become like an emboldened Oliver Twist, completely assured that they will get some more. Mr. Bumble the Beadle has buzzed off! Angela Knight, ex-Tory minister and persuasive moral blackmailer of the British Banking Association - she continously stresses that if banks don't get what they want, they will buzz off to Switzerland or the Cayman Islands or somewhere - is unperturbed by criticism. And we have a workforce wondering if their jobs are safe.

So on the one hand we have a situation where the tax take is diminishing and on the other where the borrowing is being stratispherically increased. Is there an accountant out there who knows how to join the dots up?

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Rock of the North!

Northern Rock is a bank that was once a building society. As a bank they can borrow large sums of money to bolster their liquidity. But just now, there is a problem in world banking. Some American banks have been flashing their cash in front of the noses of the less fortunate. All of a sudden the so-called Sub-prime Market has imploded in parts. Now banks don't want to lend to other banks.

Thankfully, the Bank of England has seen fit to assist Northern Rock. As the Chancellor of the Exchequor, Alastair Darling says, Northern Rock is a sound business that got caught up in the problems of the global banking industry. Pity, though, that this only applies to banks with a problem and not the rest of us!

A little curiosity in all this. Apparently these banks, having been used to taking in each others laundry, so to speak, have suddenly got a pile of dirty washing that they can't identify! I find it amazing that they can lend all this money in a cobweb of transactions, a few bad apples are thrown up, and they have to go back trying to find the lending routes.

Now if I told my bank, that I lent money to someone, that they lent it to someone else but that I didn't know who or where, would they give me a second chance to pay THEM back?

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