Bankers, the lot of them

By Graham Carter, 2008
Hands up everybody else who's felt like a dunce during the last week.

You can't turn on the telly anymore without hearing about hedge funds, derivatives and sub-prime mortgages.

And all this financial talk has left me feeling a couple of pennies short of a shilling.

When we were kids, nobody ever mentioned the markets unless they were talking about Shepherd's Bush or Billingsgate or the one in town where you used to be able to get really cool boiled sweets.

What's it all about?

If you'd told me about the Lehman Brothers a couple of weeks ago, I'd have guessed they were a firm of tailors. Then there's HBOS (glue manufacturers), Morgan Stanley (knife makers) and Dow Jones (one of The Monkees).

And the latest buzzword is 'short selling'.

There was so much talk about short selling last week that I thought I'd better make the effort to find out what it was all about.

I won't say I've grasped it completely, but I now understand enough to have experienced a kind of revelation.

'Short selling' is something to do with dealers getting hold of something that's about to drop in value and somehow - don't ask me how - using this situation to make a killing.

It's sort of like the opposite of insider dealing, except the outcome with that is exactly the same: somebody makes a killing.

It seems to me that no matter how bad the markets appear to be, there's always somebody making a killing in the short term - and for those people who are dull enough and devious enough to dabble in such things, what goes around comes around.

Even if they came a cropper during last week's dodgy dealing, they'll probably get it back in next week's dodgy deal. After all, that's probably where they got it in the first place.

Just because there's been blanket coverage of this seedy soap opera in the last couple of weeks, it doesn't mean that it's anything new.

No doubt these things have been going on since dosh was first invented.

And I have a feeling that the only long-term banker - if you'll forgive me the pun - is that it's the have-nots who are the ones who have to pay for all this in the long run.

That's us.

At least we can enjoy a rare spot of grovelling at the moment.

You are not going to believe this, but I have a friend whose bank phoned him up last week - not to tell him he has to cough up half a day's pay for going overdrawn by seven pence or because he used a cash machine to take out some of his own money.

No, this time they actually phoned him up to... wait for it... ask him whether he was happy with the service he was getting.

All we need now is to work out a way to make the energy companies squirm in the same way.

Then we'll really be cooking on gas.

This was my weekly column in the Swindon Advertiser on September 23, 2008. It was published in the midst of a 'financial crisis' that saw several UK and US institutions run into major problems. The Americans' response was to bail out their banks to the tune of $700billion.
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