Financially driven capitalism is a great system. It reduces Greece to economic rubble, and creates a fiscal nuclear pancake….after which, just one investment firm makes a $150m clear profit on a completely venal bonds investment they made less than a year ago. So it is that Third Point, run by billionaire Dan Loeb, claimed its bumper blood money windfall as the Greek buy-back deal went through last Monday. As they say in neocon circles, you should never reward failure…but getting a reward from failure works just fine.

Doing God’s work is good if that’s what you think you’re at, but God moves in mysterious ways. Following in the wake of Comet, more major national and regional retail chains are on the brink of bankruptcy here in the UK, while thousands of smaller operators are also in danger of going under. Charities are doing particularly badly from the severe lack of any wealth trickling their way. And as ever, the SME sector is starved of money and balancing on a hand-to-mouth knife-edge, which can be very dangerous if you’re trying to eat as well. So deeply does the Government care for the SME sector, in fact, that the last data it has on the topic are from….Q4 2011. That’s a national disgrace…or perhaps something that somebody somewhere at some time with some desire to keep certain realities off the agenda somehow decided to not bother to measure, as such. Who knows?

However, ’tis the season of goodwill, and few people are showing this less than Wolfgang Schäuble, the best living example of the fact that quite a lot of disabled people are not very nice at all. Wolfie is the only europol I know who can contradict himself five times per paragraph, and yet somehow have this go completely unnoticed. He also holds the world record for number of foreign  governments he has offended and threatened. Over the last week, it’s been Blighty’s turn: at the weekend, he told his audience of media disciples that the EU was far too strong to worry about little and useless Great Britain, but we just better not try and blackmail him – or else. This is like putting a gun to a three-legged cat, and growling “Gimme the negatives!”

And there wasn’t much goodwill around at Morrisons either, which – in the true tradition of the donkey, the stable, and poor folks with no room at the inn – vented its fury at the Government for failing to allow them still more Christmas opening hours during which Christmas revellers could overshop for food even more than they had already. “The Government hasn’t been able to adapt on this Sunday. I worry that if they can’t adjust on something small like that, how on earth are they going to be able to adapt on the big stuff?” raged Morrisons chief Dalton Phillips.

I found myself both smiling and shuddering at Dalt’s reference to “the big stuff” there. What did he have in mind, I wonder – slavery, the abolition of weekends, all holiday allowances taken at the till, or all of them?

There are so many issues surrounding longer trading hours that I could be here all day writing about it. Suffice to say that only  a complete idiot leaves all the Christmas provisioning until the last two days….and if work pressures somehow don’t permit any other way of doing it, then there’s this marvellous new invention called the fridge-freezer that can help in so many ways. But in an allegedly Christian country that is hopelessly obese and concerned only with material things – and where family life is under more than enough pressure as it is – you can always rely on some f**kwitted multiple retailer to call for longer hours still. It gives away the accountant’s warped view that humans serve business, rather than the other way round. These people are ill. Don’t ever forget that.

But in the end, my eyes turned towards the Middle East, where of course all this men on camels and baby in a manger nonsense started in the first place. Surely, I mused, there must be the usual Peace on Earth rumblings coming from there? Well, Christianity faces being wiped out of the “biblical heartlands” in the Middle East because of mounting persecution of worshippers, a new report suggests. Think tank Civitas produced this document (which I must say comes as no surprise at all to me) noting equally obviously that the most common threat to Christians abroad is militant Islam. I suppose if you think in a tank it must be very hard thinking outside the box at the same time; but obvious or not, like so many glaring facts it simply isn’t on any UK politician’s radar – and the reason is simple: fear of offending Islamics here. I’ll mark that one down as another benefit of multiculturalism.

And lo, in Syria came there some peace talks. One senses that the best outcome still available to Bashar Assad is that he gets out with his neck intact. Well, he asked for it – that’s all I can say: an Alhawite outnumbered from day one, Bashar fought off the rebels, tried to invade Turkey, committed ghastly acts of atrocity, and had chemical weapons of unimaginable power just waiting on the launch-pad to annihilate Anaheim California, set off the San Andreas fault, and collapse the entire western Unites States into the sea. The fact that this is all rumour and innuendo hasn’t stopped the Allies from backing the Muslim Brotherhood all the way, and it is good to see the Special Relationship working so well at this season of the year. As I go to press, the latest from the peace talks is نائب وزير الخارجية الروسي: بعد زيارته إلى دمشق الإبراهيمي قد يأتي إلى موسكو لمناقشة آفاق التسوية السورية

You have to start at the end and work backwards on that one, because Arabic runs from right to left. Should Syria ever join the European Union of course, they’d have to change to the other way round. And so to raise a smile and our spirits, let’s take one final look at the eurozone’s march backwards into history in 2012.

2012 will almost certainly go down in the Big Book as having been a crock of sh*t from start to finish, but if it is remembered for anything by financial historians, it will be as the year when the European Central Bank (ECB) finally gave up the pretence and said aw to hell with it, yes, the buck stops with us. It was always going to be that way, because the EU lacks a great many things – a back door, the ability to devalue, a halfway respectable currency, democracy, the rule of law and so forth – but nothing more than a Sovereign body. Tony Blair would like to be it, but nobody asked him so he still waits in the wings. I’d like Tony Blair to be a body as well, which does go to show that the Christmas spirit even works within me.

Mario Draghi having at last clarified the situation after years of Tricky Trichet’s dodge and weave strategy, he is now faced with sorting out how he and he alone is going to bail out Greece (again), Spain, Portugal, and Italy. If he achieves that miracle while retaining the euro’s already low credibility on the world stage, then he really will deserve credit for something. After that miracle, however, it’s impossible to imagine how anybody or anything could stop the French banking system from making 9/11 look like a near miss.

In that hopeful context, as I wrote earlier, it’s good to see the Special Relationship still working exactly the way it was meant to. Yesterday, Obama warned the UK that, if it left the EU, its stature on the world stage would be greatly diminished. Or put another way, we would be a far more threatening global competitor for Obamaland. The relationship is special in much the same way that the bond between a nerd and his terrapins is special. If only somebody could explain that to William Hague.

Earlier at The Slog: why more Bercow bollocks deconstruction should stiffen Sally’s delightful spine