Roll up….all the fun of the Unfair

Those who invested £750 in the new game Bribery by Mail have made £448 at the last count. That’s a tidy haul in percentage terms, but still just a three-figure sum. Rounding things up, I’d say it represents on average about 5% of what already hard-pushed Co-Op Bank depositors, sorry, bondholders will lose if the country’s first bailin goes ahead. As nobody outside the blogosphere and the Mail’s money pages seems to GAF about it, I think we can assume the crewcut of the wrinklies will go ahead.

When (not if) the first UK bank goes tits-up (probably RBS, but keep your eye on Lloyds, and your money out of TSB) many account holders will lose considerably more. In the remote likelihood of that not happening for a long time, Greek newspaper HEMPHΣIA reports that the Sprouts are considering a 10% levy on every bank account in the EU. It’s a story I can’t confirm to be honest, but nothing would surprise me about Brussels: with every month they look more and more like a cross between Fred Karno’s Circus and the Capone Mob.

One approach to staving off The Big One (pioneered I think by Germany) is the concept of the ‘bad bank’. As a keen student of euphemistic cobblers, I love this term….for a variety of reasons, not least the assumption by the inventor that there might be such a thing as a good bank.

For some reason, it puts me in mind of a dog. “Down boy! Down boy…..bad bank! bad bank!” If I thought there might be any chance of the management being put down, I’d go for this interpretation in a big way of business: but there will be no putting down…only some setting aside when the bad bank lives up to its name.

More obviously, however, the parallel is I think meant to be a sort of epidemiological one: this is a bank with a very  nasty wasting disease, and so it must be sent away to a remote colony. There, its unfortunate fiat paper inhabitants will be left untreated and forgotten, to rot away as all incurable lepers must. They sat at the table, gambled unwisely, and then threw their hands in. Sorry, tasteless joke in any context…except this one.

The socio-mathematical trick upon which Friedmanite financial capitalism is based works very simply. Small people with no influence are easily tempted by making five hundred quid – which to them borders on life-changing money. But when the Wallstreet family’s dog Badbank poos all over the world to the tune of £8 trillion, the amount is meaningless to them….and is soon forgotten just like the estimate of stars in our Milky Way. Should amounts in between be required to save Westminster backsides lubricated by bribery, those with no influence are not really ignored, more unheard. They fade quietly into poverty.

And they call it “freedom from regulation”. Put your ear closely to George Orwell’s grave: is that the sound of turning, or teeth-gnashing?

Earlier at The Slog: Fukushima Fukuppy goes image-changing (on ice)