The Slog continues to believe that between Bankerboursing and capitalism bashing, there is a better place.

As Libya pushed other issues off the front pages today, it got some of the credit for the Dow moving up to rebound from last week’s mauling at the hands of investors. If you ever wanted evidence of the profound insanity of the Bourse system of capital financing, this was it. As it happens, earlier today I posted about the humungous double-standards of all those free marketeer Masters of the Universe who spit on you and me and Government, but demand our help when they screw up. My reward was an extremely unpleasant email demanding to know when if ever Bank of America had taken public money and why I was such an unmitigated Communist.

It’s a long, long time since I was Left wing, but I do realise on a daily basis – given the behaviour of globalist banks and other multinationals these days – why I was. I turned away from the Left because they were disorganised, humourless, commercially incompetent and wrong. But Big Business didn’t get any nicer in the interim. At the Wall St Journal today, for instance, is clear evidence of those cuddly oil guys screwing the motorist again: while crude-oil futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange are down 38%, ending last week at $82.26 a barrel, the average price of gas at the pump in America is down just 9% over the same period. (In my own home town on the UK’s Jurassic Coast, a common sight is enormous oil tankers lurking on the horizon, waiting for the price to rise before they land their cargo).

However, my correspondent is quite mistaken as to my political bent: I am not nor have I ever been a Communist. I went through Checkpoint Charlie in 1965 to spend a few utterly depressing days in East Berlin, and that was enough for me. Especially when one considers that compared to the rest of East Germany, the capital was considered to be quite lively. Watching that wonderful feature film about the Stasi –  The Lives of Others  – in 2007, I felt entirely vindicated…and desperately sorry for every East German.

I voted Conservative once, in 1979. I never went to any Tory meetings, because it seemed to me highly likely I’d dislike everyone there: I imagine them to be like characters out of a Harry Enfield sketch. I voted that way because I thought Margaret Thatcher and the sovereignty of Parliament to be rather more important than the TUC and its undemocratic voting system. I still regard the vote as a mark of shame, however daft others think that to be – guilt is rarely if ever rational.

I joined the SDP on Day One, and went to a few of their meetings. I had nothing in common with any of them beyond working in advertising. I suspect that, much later, these folks defected back to Labour, and helped Blair get elected.

What the *ankers and top plc bods never quite grasp is that their poisonous nature can be measured very simply by totting up the number of Right wing people who loathe them and every one of their values. And as for people like me – unaligned purely because I’m unconvinced by any of the buggers – well, I’m a statistics man….and a bit of a ferret for those damnably irritating fact thingies so despised by the Friedman and Marx Schools of economic drivel.

In 2006, BankofAmerica was the FC Barcelona of finance, leading the 10 biggest U.S. banks and brokerage firms in that year with $104 billion in profits. But like Northern Wobbly in the UK, their ‘business model’ (a badly made pipe-rack) worked on the basis that interest rates would never change. Two years later, Bank of America needed $91.4 billion of taxpayers’ money to stop them going under: quite a transformation in fortunes, but more importantly – on the issue of shutting up my bile-spitting emailer – pretty undeniable evidence of taking the money. These numbers – obtained by Bloomberg under the US FoI Act – have never been seen (as far as I know) in the UK before. Yes, it’s another World Exclusive Scoop for The Slog. Except of course you’re reading this thanks to the persistence of Bloomberg.

Under The Slog’s Irony Act, I can tell you that America’s finest took the Feds for $1.2 trillion in 2008 – which is exactly what US citizen homeowners owe these bottom-feeders today. Except that the mortgagees will lose their homes, and all the money they put into them: no tax Dollars to save them. The list of beneficiaries reads like a Who’s Who of Corporate America – but equally surprising is that almost a third of all the money went to foreign banks headquartered elsewhere….for example, France’s SocGen, once again felt by many to be on the verge of default.

You don’t have to be a Hairy Leftie to discern that these people are taking the piss. First they take the ordinary person’s money to enable them to exist at all. Then they lend their own money to them at high rates, and throw them out of those homes…before asking for more money from the again, so they can go back to…..lending them their own money back to etc etc etc.

I would like to see all home ownership lending remutualised. This makes me a Luddite, but it doesn’t make me wrong.