SLOG LAUNCHES NATIONAL ‘GUESS THE SUNDAY SUN HEADLINE’ COMPETITION.

APB TO SLOGGERS: EU-linked and funded charities.

 

Those of you old enough to remember Broderick Crawford in Highway Patrol will know that an APB is an All Points Bulletin – ie, general notification/appeal for assistance. This sort of banter goes along with stuff like “10-4″, but let’s not go there.

I’m working on an interesting story about charity funding, specifically any charities based in the UK partly or wholly funded by the EU.

If you are involved in that sector – or know others who are – please let me know. This may be a big story or it may be nothing, but you can reach me as always, in the strictest confidence, at jawslog@gmail.com.

Thanks

JW

UK MEDIA CORTEX IN ABSENCE OF LIFE HORROR

This isn’t news, it’s an amusement arcade.

While not wishing to bring the multi-warhead wrath of Erika the Red down on my head, I confess to finding the deportation thing involving Christopher Tappin both odd and amusing. We are back in the land of 1950s  faulty wiring here, in that Mr Tappin stands accused of selling the Iranians batteries for their missiles sorry, sorry, nuclear crockery project. If a couple of Duracells are the only things standing between Ahmadinnejhad and the irradiation of Israel, no wonder Benjamin Netanyahu is worried. But it really doesn’t make sense, does it?

First things first: all this talk of Britain rolling over to the US on extradition matters  kind of appeals to my dislike of a special relationship that isn’t special at all…..but it’s also bunk. They are far better at extraditing to us than vice versa. We turn down over half of theirs, and they fulfil over 80% of ours. And as the EU Court of Humans taking Liberties is happy to let him go, then Mr Tappin really must be a danger to humanity.

It’s just the batteries thing. I once sold a bicycle pump to an Iraqi: does this mean I should make good my escape with all speed? It can’t, surely, be all that hard for the Iranians to make their own batteries – even a specialist battery for the warhead on an intercontinental medical imaging sensor. I mean, there’s a plus, a minus, and some powdery stuff inbetween. It’s not rocket science is it, hah-hah-hah.

And of course it isn’t rocket science because the Iranians are not making rockets are they? Nooooo no no no, they’re renewing Tehran’s street-lighting and only making them underground at disguised sites because they don’t want the Americans to steal their secret humanitarian ideas. And in the highly unlikely event of it turning out that they were making weaponry down there a mile below the surface, then why shouldn’t they defend themselves against all those missiles being lobbed at them by Satanic Israel? Quite so.

It’s just that, um, having been brought to the negotiating table by America’s 500 megaton currency attacks, the Iranians got a bit shirty last Thursday when a UN inspectorate turned up and wanted to look inside the facility, how very dare they. So the inpectors went away, and the next day the UN stumbled upon aerial evidence of yet another nuclear DVD machine factory.

The thing is, if the Iranians really can’t make their own batteries, then don’t the words ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’ come to mind? Would you want Iran owning nuclear weapons when it’s clear they’d have trouble turning a torch on?

The UK media at the moment really are the genuine article when it comes to weapons of mass distraction. While the newshounds at the BBC are hunting for giant clams in Rochdale, even sillier things are occurring elsewhere. I do think at times the Left’s somewhat wooden slagging off of the Dacre Mail gets very tedious indeed, but the paper is rapidly becoming a caricature of itself….or Paul Dacre, I’m never entirely sure. This headline from the website today:

‘Who is this vile thug? Shocking CCTV images show the moment crazed commuter shoves woman, 23, onto Tube tracks’

You know, I’d be willing to bet that as her bonce hit the rails, the last thing on the young lady’s mind was her age. Why do we bloody care how many years she has on the clock? Anyway, the four baseless assumptions in the header are (1) he’s vile (2) he’s a thug (3) he’s crazed and (4) he’s a commuter. That’s quite good for the Mail: the number is often in double-figures. He could be a crazed vile commuting thug, or he could be an escapee from the KGB getting rid of his tail. Either way, there is actually a fifth assumption in the line, ‘shocking’. Nobody is shocked by this sort of thing any more in 2012, largely because the Mail runs something like it every day of the week.

But this next Mail effort is a classic. It’s the line that has everything for a story about nothing:

‘Australian who claims colleagues racially abused him by greeted him with ‘G’day sport’ takes case to European courts’

He’s an Aussie, so are they really so tough after all? Australia has a Labour Government, so just see how their spines are turning to jelly under the Ghastly Gillard! And look….he’s going to the time-wasting EU Court of Human Rights!! Oh, and the subed is illiterate.

Now you see, somebody with an iota of wit would’ve shoe-horned ‘Kangaroo Court’ in there somewhere, but such is beyond Dacre’s Dirty Dozen. And that’s odd, as the Mail’s shock-revelation-probe to show what a humbug Geoff Stevens, 49, is goes thuswise: the bloke has a Skippy the Kangaroo picture on his wall. 

The devious bastard. He does too: you can see it on the wall in this picture. It’s another triumph for the Dacreian College of Investigative Journalism.

Mr Stevens does look and sound like a pretty major-league plonker. He said that fellow colleagues constantly greeted him with ‘G’day Sport’, ‘Is your girlfriend called Sheila?’ and asked him to ‘Throw another shrimp on the barbie’, which – while it shows little in the way of invention – is hardly what I’d call racial abuse. And let’s face it, yes, Julia Gillard is an unfunny version of Dame Edna and the Aussies these days are even more pathetically Health & Safety obssessed than we are. But is this news?

Forty years ago, a story like that wouldn’t have made it into the Daily Sketch. But don’t let yourself be fooled into thinking that the de-braining of Britain ends at the tabloid divide: the Gallagher run Daily Telegraph gets more like the Sun every week. Nothing too unusual about that – Mr Gallagher used to be a keen hacker of Investigative Scoopfinder General in Dacreland – but it’s sad to see all the same. Today, in the Torygraph’s education section, God help us, is this toe-curling feature: Top Ten Haunted Universities.

Worse still, it’s a photo-feature. No big words for affirmatively-actioned students to struggle with, roight? It is the end.

BREAKING: S&P JOINS FITCH, CREDIT SUISSE IN SEEING GREEK BAILOUT AS DEFAULT

The Slog just got a press release from ratings agency S&P. This is the gist:

‘…holders of CAC-affected GGBs [Greek government bonds] will likely be effectively subordinated to the ECB in terms of payment….Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services has written that effective subordination is a credit negative for peripheral eurozone sovereigns….The ECB’s swap has established a new precedent by adding another class of superior creditor to the existing group comprised of the ESM, the IMF, and other multilateral development banks. We believe that this development could further weaken the prospects of peripheral eurozone sovereigns currently receiving official funding to regain the ability to access the capital markets and could raise borrowing rates of those sovereigns still accessing the primary markets……additional ECB bond buying will inevitably lead to further subordination of investors’ positions….We have not taken rating actions on eurozone sovereign issuers following the ECB’s debt swap. We believe that the swap has, at least in this instance, changed the ECB’s status from implicit super-senior creditor to an explicit one.‘

Unless I’m reading something very, very awry here, this strikes me as S&P’s convoluted way of saying that it too will call default one second after the swap takes place. And interestingly, this is the first ratings agency verdict that has called out Mario Draghi’s separate ECB bond-swap deal as an obvious case for default.

So….the Greek bailout is further derailed…or the built-to-fail bailout is on track – depending on your viewpoint.

Earlier on this topic: Further sensational details of US-run Greek default plot revealed

Asian paedophile trials: police seek giant clam, says BBC

Much as the BBC finds it hard to accuse an ethnic minority group of anything, I did think this was a bit wacky even for them:

Rochdale takeaway disturbances: Police call for clam

(BBC News website this afternoon)

Sometimes, I wonder if such literals are the result of a Fifth Columnist inside the Beeb. For the cops and lawyers have indeed imposed a clam on all reporting of this case.

But for once, they had a good reason.

Loyal Sloggers will recognise this story as the breakout from a gagging order pertaining to the trial of an Islamic ‘grooming ring’ for kids desired by paedophiles at Liverpool Crown Court. As I said at the time, the ban on reporting was there for a purpose beyond seamy cover-up. The reason was the police fear of exactly this kind of backlash: the real story is about calm, not clams. The appeal made by Plod followed a violent attack upon Asian premises in Rochdale. The fear is that the defendants’ smart-assed briefs will scream ‘mistrial’ if such demonstrations of crude racism get overt media coverage.

As it’s out there now, I don’t see any harm in posting about it. But please – be responsible about hyping this case: all genuinely British citizens of all backgrounds should want to see Justice done in this matter.

And in the meantime, police have warned that if you see the clam, do not approach it.

Hat-tip to Peter Reece and his Eye mates for the original tip re this one. It probably saved me from being arrested by Scouseplod.

GREEK DEBT EXCLUSIVE: DEFAULT PLANNERS ‘FALLING OUT OVER FIREWALL’ – Sources

Key players…Lagarde, Bernanke, Draghi, Geithner

More pieces of timetable jigsaw falling into place

Astonishing details of a Greek default plot hatched by Wall Street and the White House (with the knowledge of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton) have been backed up by growing evidence of an undercover US Fed ‘swap’ deal to bankroll Mario Draghi’s eurobank liquidity programme . As a quid pro quo for this disguised loan, the US demanded a ‘leper’ default for Greece – with a much bigger European-funded contagion firewall than currently exists. But the plans may be derailed by intransigence in Berlin.

US President Barack Obama spent last Martin Luther King Day with wife Michelle and daughter Malia. They joined fellow volunteers at Browne Education Center in Washington. During his brief remarks, on arrival, the President said there was no better way to honour King “than to do something on behalf of others”.

MLKD is a public holiday in the US. On that day this year – January 16th – Presidential staff and Fed advisers were in a conveniently empty office block with a dozen or more top Wall Street bankers. The meeting was called to brief a select band on the White House and Geithner approved operation to amputate the eurozone’s obviously gangrenous Greek leg.

Just 24 hours later, a remarkable undercover bailout slush fund was set up for the use of the ECB under Mario Draghi. On that day, the financial website Wealth Wire posted a piece suggesting the Fed was ‘up to something mysterious’ , and Jonathon Trugman of the New York Post’s financial desk wrote this: ‘Essentially, we just bailed out Europe’s banking system with the full faith and credit of the United States’.

Subsequently, a former Fed official told the Wall Street Journal that the Reserve was indeed bailing out Europe by operating in the shadows – aka a loan masquerading as a currency swap.

Former Vice President of the Federal Reserve bank of Dallas, Gerald O’Driscoll told the Journal:

“The Fed is using what is termed a “temporary U.S. dollar liquidity swap arrangement” with the European Central Bank (ECB).  Simply put, the Fed trades or “swaps” dollars for euros. The Fed is compensated by payment of an interest rate (currently 50 basis points, or one-half of 1%) above the overnight index swap rate. The ECB, which guarantees to return the dollars at an exchange rate fixed at the time the original swap is made, then lends the dollars to European banks of its choosing.

The two central banks [ECB and US] are engaging in this roundabout procedure because each needs a fig leaf. The Fed was embarrassed by the revelations of its prior largess with foreign banks. It does not want the debt of foreign banks on its books. A currency swap with the ECB is not technically a loan.”

Well, swap or loan, it all went into the eurobank prop-up operation initiated by Mario Draghi. During the period following that transfer, the ECB lent $483bn in various amounts to just over 500 banks in the eurozone. Says a eurozone insider:

“Mario then leveraged the amount he’d been given as collateral. Given his position and influence, it wasn’t hard. Without pulling this scam  [to avoid the amount appearing on the ECB's market intervention charts or in its books] the Central Bank couldn’t have splashed out the liquidity it did.”

I am told that the operation is continuing – and will be used to fund the next round of voracious private eurobank appetite for liquidity.

But what nobody has yet reported in the MSM is that the operation was part of a pre-agreed quid pro quo.

That deal was outlined to the key Wall St players on January 16th. In a nutshell, it was “We bale out the eurobanks for Mario, and in return they [the EU States] build a firewall around Greece”. It was the start of what became known as ‘amputate and cauterise’. And I can confirm that Goldman Sachs played a pivotal role in the session.

The American view is this: Greece must default outside the euro, and become a leper. Secretary Geithner thinks the Europeans don’t have the money to make the banks ultra-safe…and that means an immediate contagion blowback to the US, with disastrous consequences. So we, the US, must covertly help the ECB render the eurobanks safe – and in return, they need to step up to the plate by leveraging whatever firepower they need to ensure the whole mess stops at Greece.

Astonishingly – The Slog has learned – the key players at this point were Timothy Geithner, Goldman Sachs, a tight group of White House Obamites, Ben Bernanke (at “a safe distance”), Mario Draghi, IMF boss Christine Lagarde….and an influential group of German bankers based alongside Draghi in Frankfurt. Both the President and Hillary Clinton are aware of the arrangement and its goals. As far as I can ascertain, it now looks likely that Merkel and Schauble were not involved at all; but whether they’ve become party to it since is unclear. I do know there was a major diplomatic flap on in Berlin last Tuesday (21st February) about the potential leak of papers somehow incriminating the German Chancellor and her Finance Minister…but that has never developed, or been confirmed by any source of which I’m aware.

As a consequence, from this point onwards Christine Lagarde began to play serious hardball about the need for a massive firewall investment by EU member States. Concurrently, Secretary Clinton applied every ounce of available pressure to the Sino-Japanese credit line as a potential further source of bricks in the wall. As we have seen in the last week, unlike the Three Stooges Regler, van Rompuy and Barroso, Clinton’s State Department seems to have had some degree of success. Less so Lagarde: she has come up hard against Berlin’s refusal to expose Germany further. I am told:

“The view in the Fed and Washington is that the Europeans are welching on the deal. This strikes me as kind of dumb, in that I don’t think they ever had Berlin on board in the first place. And while Draghi is a genius, not even he can pull that one round on his own. Just how up to speed Berlin is, I don’t know. I assume they know roughly what the deal was, and I assume that Bankfurt has been applying pressure on the basis of that. I suspect the problem is that Schauble thinks, first off, there’s a lot more in this for the US than there is for Germany…and second, privately he thinks the amputation analogy is unrealistic. He’s more of a pop-corn guy. But some of that is guesswork.”

The pop-corn reference is based on an influential term used by former Bush staffer Edward Lazear. He suggested that Greek debt is really a cooking piece of pop-corn in a pan…once it pops, you can’t stop the other seeds from doing the same. It’s a view shared by The Slog: the leveraging and insurance fire-storm that could potentially follow default is impossible to calculate, because the arrangements of individual banking firms remain a closely-guarded secret.

But on the other hand, it beats the Brussels strategy of writing Japanese poetry and making false promises about action. And in the meantime, the behaviour of some players continues to support the deal’s existence:

* The Greek consitutional change demanded by the Troika (to hierachise debt before other expenditure) will not be possible by the Greek bailout closure date. And they knew that all along.

*European creditor countries are demanding 38 specific changes in Greek tax, spending and wage policies by the end of this month and have laid out extra reforms that amount to micromanaging the country’s government for two years, according to documents obtained by the Financial Times. There is no way the Greeks will stand for that either. Says Mujtaba Rahman, Europe analyst at the Eurasia Group risk consultancy, “The programme is being set up to fail, as many of these conditions will be impossible to achieve”.

*In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Mario Draghi’s support for the deal remains understated bordering on tepid: he suggested that the sceptical market response to Tuesday’s rescue deal suggested many doubted Athens would follow through on a promised austerity cure. “It’s hard to say if the crisis is over,” he warned.

*Commerzbank AG Chief Executive Martin Blessing yesterday said of the Brussels deal, “The participation in the haircut is as voluntary as a confession during the Spanish Inquisition”. For the Bankfurt pro-default team, this is bang on message.

Nor are these people making it up: the bondholders must give more than 50% approval before the swap – and they need to deliver that on a two-thirds quorum. Hedge Funds in particular remain tight-lipped.

As I keep saying: this deal will not make it to the tape. It was set up to fail: but even that plot may now unravel if the firewall doesn’t materialise at a level satisfactory to the Americans.

This piece was compiled and written based on confidential interviews with New York, Washington, German and Brussels sources

At the End of the Day

Button eyes and cute incomprehension can go a long way

Walking round our house at the moment is like a cross between River Safari and a reclamation yard. This is all down to maturing Norfolk  puppy Coco, whose desire to play with everything and pee everywhere has created our New Look. I’m thinking of getting the Sunday Times Home supplement in to record the result as a sign of major social change: the middle classes are keeping chickens in the garden…but at the same time, we bourgeois doggie folks are in the vanguard of reaction to interior minimalism. A vanguard of reaction may seem to you something of an oxymoron, but when one has witnessed thirty years of progressive madness syndrome, it becomes ever easier to argue that oxymorons are exactly what our civilisation needs.

We will never again acquire a puppy in winter. Winter is for closed doors, but closed doors produce interior wee-pools. As the puppy gets bigger, the pools turn into the sort of lakes for which the EU is infamous. To encourage the lakes to migrate into the garden, one needs permanently open doors. But as long as winter endures, this is a battle between hypothermia and soggy kitchen roll as to which might be the lesser of two evils. The First World War battle of the Somme was, I imagine, very similar.

Very few things do better reclamation than a terrier puppy, if only because everything left lying around is seen as something to be reclaimed in pursuit of a new purpose. During any average day, Coco will come across – and drag away for disciplinary action – shoes, glasses, coal, kindling, TV listings, socks, toys, cardboard, and any other objects deemed likely to give good chewing. What she is absolutely crap at is tidying any of it away. What she is even crapper at is discerning the intentionally supplied toy from that heat patch designed to alleviate Dad’s back pain. While I was leaning forward to type on the sofa last night, Coco went to investigate the builder’s cleavage thus created, and liberated my Deep Heat patch. By the time I realised that the patch had gone missing, the puppy was engaged in thrashing it to within an inch of its life against our carefully distressed oak living room doors.

Coco’s abiding obsession involves keeping her dentistry in good order. This is a good thing, in that our oldest Norfolk Foxie’s teeth are the result of her greed in sucking all food directly into her stomach -  a process during which she perceived teeth to be something in the way. The downside is that when Coco’s owner is lying on his back on the floor (with legs on the sofa to repair repetitive blogging injury) she views my head, ears and fingers as more raw material for varietal chewing.

The most engaging action she performs is the four legs off the ground bouncing and growling thing. She does this better than any electronic cuddly toy I’ve yet encountered – and with such determined vigour that middle-terrier Tiggy is clearly impressed to the point of being terrified. Tiggy began by seeing Coco as a toy whose squeak needed to be extinguished, but she has learned otherwise over the last three months. I doubt very much if even Syrian water-cannon weapons could extinguish this latest addition to our menagerie.

When we return to France in two months time, the problem will rapidly cure itself: for there, little bottoms can be gently encouraged outside by human feet to dispose of waste materials via open doors to the outside…..there to chew upon real rodents and rabbits, rather than crucially important investment and probate documents.

Ever since I married Jan eighteen years ago, I have been an incurable dog-watcher. I still stick to my theory that wolves are the stupid buggers who couldn’t grasp how easily animals can manipulate humans into providing all their needs – in return for a bit of obedience and ritual rat-slaying. Many years ago, the Kennomeat dogfood brand ran an advertising campaign casting dogs as owners, and vice versa. In one memorable commercial, a canine ‘Human Owner’ observes, “Y’know, sometimes I think he understands everything I say”. I think that got the real relationship about right.

The faulty wiring of the publicity-seeking pointy-head

Faulty wire 1, Einstein Deniers 0

I know it’s a cheap shot and all that, but there is something sphincter-smashingly funny about CERN scientists announcing that they’ve refuted Einstein’s law about the speed of Light….and then returning to say, mamma mia, it was only a wiring problem after all. Big fat boffin bollocks gets a kick in the teeth again, hurrah.

Last November, The Slog had an outrageously off-message and incorrect take on why the Italians hadn’t noticed any radiation being given off by the Cern neutrino experiments. But even I was not so crass as to imagine that a faulty wire was behind it.

I lay emphasis on this phrase for a very good reason. When I was a kid, my Dad had Practical Householder delivered every month. The colours, illustrations and articles were pure, unadulterated independent ironmonger in nature: all brown overalls, cut-away diagrams, and late deco typefaces. And – just as with Cosmopolitian and the female orgasm thirty years later – the one thing you could always be certain of was an article about faulty wires. ‘Tackling that faulty wire in the scullery’ was a particular favourite, as was ‘Why every family man should beware that faulty wire to the immersion heater’.

Immersion heaters were the forerunner to central heating. I wouldn’t say that every house should have one, but back then every house did. Like some kind of hangover from wartime rationing, they allowed for up to one family member to have a weekly ankle-deep bath. So while on the one hand it is nothing short of a miracle that we have gone from such Da Vinci contraptions to Cern colliders in just over sixty years, it is (for me anyway) profoundly comforting to know that faulty wires still f**k things up.

A similar emotion, one suspects, drives a lot of James Delingpole’s Daily Telegraph blog columns. Although I find his blanket rejection of climate change impossible to justify, we are on the same wavelength in understanding that the task of every ego-driven Bigbrain is to establish that he or she has ‘settled’ the debate. This partly explains who so many medical researchers rush to the nearest Science Correspondent in order to ‘show’ that beetroot causes chilblains or butter is good for you after all: like any form of marketing, if you get into the media first and full-on, you will be the one in the history books and on the way to that Nobel Prize. Science’s self-publicists differ only from hype-marketed brands in the degree of onanism involved in the process.

The faulty wire is closely akin to the hatpin in the sheath factory: with just one, tiny metal prick in the wrong place, it can make any prick anywhere supremely over-confident. Just as the drive for a wireless, paperless office has produced more reams of paper and miles of wire than at any time in history, so too the search for that elusive Higgs bosun particle has been thwarted, thus far, by…a faulty wire.

Doncha love it?

If you enjoyed this piece, you will probably also enjoy A survey of blended metaphors.

CLOAKS, DAGGERS & DISINFORMATION: HOW THE POWERFUL ARE FIGHTING TO GET THE GREEK RESULT THEY CRAVE

The Slog analyses why he still thinks the Greek debt deal will never fly

This last week represented one hell of a learning curve for me. Some days, it’s been like having a minor walk-on role in a Le Carre novel where nobody knows the ending. I’m only now beginning to make some kind of sense out of it…but at times, it’s still like lassoing ether. Indeed, one of the major differences between blogging and grown-up Establishment journalism is that the former are more likely to share what my Dad used to call their “workings out”. It does seem to me that it is all-important in the MSM to be seen as an all-knowing, ultra-reliable source of information….no matter how often that inside-track is shown to be wrong. Whereas we upstart pro-ams – having little to lose – present the four-dimensional long-division for inspection. (We are, after all, expected to be off-the-wall).

Two things are reasonably clear. First, when geopolitical forces loosely cooperate to get a result, for loose cooperation read hidden back-stabbing and sabotage of even the most well-meaning of promises – by person or persons largely unknown. And second, when unimaginable amounts of money and power are at stake, the absolute need to win the propaganda battle – as a form of self-fulfilling or denying prophecy – creates a battlefield where the weapons are nastier than anything you’d find in a physical war. We talk of nuclear wars, cyber wars and currency wars, but media wars outstrip anything thus far created. That is a sobering realisation…at least, it has been for me. And I speak as one who studied Nazi propaganda as a special topic at University some 44 years ago.

The range and depth of disinformation is staggering, but there are patterns of it. For example, the range of figures I’ve been given for the size of Hedge Fund Greek bond exposure ranges from $10bn to $60bn. Even allowing for the fact that Hedge Funds make the Mafia look blabber-mouthed by comparison, it surely can’t be hard for the IIF and the ECB to tot up what they hold, ask the Greeks how much they issued – and then assume the missing bit is down among the Hedgerows. (Most banks will have kept a record of what they sold to the Funds anyway).

But the fact is, it is in the Eurocrats’ interest to portray the Hedge Funds as a hugely powerful and psychopathic wolf-pack destroying all their best-laid plans; and it is in the Hedgies’ interest to suggest that their power is overstated by the media. A Hedge Fund’s primary strategy is stealth, and their end-games usually involve the element of surprise.

“Nobody has paid much attention to the Hedge Fund bondholders, because they tend not to engage,” said one senior European wealth manager yesterday, “but the professionals like Monti and Draghi will be worried. Here we are about to do a deal, and a huge portion of the creditor base hasn’t even said it might cooperate on the haircut issue. It’s a no-brainer that if you hold out and claim the insurance, then it clearly isn’t voluntary PSI, and so it’s obviously a default”.

“We think no more than 10 billion [euros of Greek debt] is owned by Hedge Funds,” said a leading UK sector spokesperson yesterday, “bear in mind, the total under Hedge Fund control worldwide is only the same as the capitalisation of  medium-sized bank.”

I’ve no idea what medium-sized bank that person had in mind, but it’s not one I know of. Fine, the sector has reduced from its 2008 peak of $4trillion, but both the sector reports delivered since mid 2010 show a total under management of around $2 trillion. There is also an important qualitative element here: hedge funds have become more ‘legit’ than they were. In 2008, only 44% of their backers were institutional; today, that figure is 61%. These folks are under pressure here: they’re not just going to walk away having calmly made a whopping loss.

At the time of the October deal, the Bankfurt Maulwurf said categorically that the IIF would not be able to deliver its members to sign the agreement. He was right then, and he thinks Dalloran’s tepid approval for the deal is a preface to failure again. Once you start to tot it up, friends, the number of insitutions with the potential not to take a voluntary haircut is pretty terrifying.

Then there are the endless conspiracy theories. On Tuesday and Wednesday I was given information suggesting that my sources concerning an alleged ‘default timetable’ were wrong: that the ratings agencies had been nobbled (that’s why Draghi felt safe doing the separate ECB bond-swap) that Schauble had been blackmailed into shutting up, and that this would be the Brave New World of State debt: ‘there is no such thing as a default unless we say so…and we are never going to say so’.

It’s a theory, but it doesn’t stack up: if that view was recognised, every sovereign bondholder in the eurozone would clamour for the exit. I have no doubt that some information sources are in denial about Greece being in default, but that’s because they have no choice (eg Evangelos Venizelos) or because they are stupid (eg Jose Barroso). By lunchtime yesterday, Fitch had blown a large hole in the theory by declaring a technical default, and Moody’s confirmed to The Slog that it too was mulling ‘a development’ of its view on the D-word.

More credible (but still uncertain) is that the ECB’s boss Mario Draghi has decided to tough out the ratings agency verdicts: ‘it’s an opinion, and we have a different opinion’. He, after all, doesn’t care much about big US insurers catching a cold – that’s their problem. So the hedge funds get a result, so what? It’s not his money: taking this view merely solves a capital debt problem for the Italian…and passes it on to a reluctant Wall Street.

However, that potentially leaves The Slog with holes in its own version of what’s going to happen between now and, roughly, the end of March. If, for instance, there is a ‘plan’ for Greece to default, why does Brussels still occasionally go into overdrive about the catastrophic consequences of default?

I think there are two reasons for that: first, the other ClubMeds have to sign up to the belief system. Make it OK to default, and they’ll all do it. (This is, I think, the flaw in the ‘Draghi doesn’t care about the ratings’ view: sooner or later, chicken licken’s sky will be seen not to have fallen in, and all cooperation with the ESM and IMF could cease immediately.)

The second reason splits into two parts as I see them. The first comprises useful idiots like the newly-unelected Herman van Rompuy who simply aren’t in the loop. They’re there to have their windey mechanisms renewed, and potter about the place saying doom-end of world-children in slavery. The second reflects the fact that not everyone is on board with ‘the plan’. There’s a very good chance that such players include – to quote an abnormally large exception – Angela Merkel the Chancellor of Germany…although there is clear evidence that she is bending on the issue of default in Athens.

It’s very likely that the French President in turn isn’t a signee, because he perhaps still has at least one bank to worry about. But he might be: I simply don’t know for sure – and I doubt if he’d tell me. However, I rather fancy that Mario Draghi’s bold card-playing suggests that the major eurobanks have been sorted. Ultimately, I doubt if anyone knows that for sure: but I do find it funny to hear Brussels Sprouts saying ‘default is not a problem’ one day, and ‘default is the HNR51 virus reborn’ the next. In a world of 24/7 ‘news’, you don’t need to worry about the veracity of your soundbite: half an hour later twenty new ones will have erased it from the popular memory.

Geopolitical plans are by definition based on false hubris. They very rarely come to fruition, and events change both the aim and the game along the way. I think this ‘default plan’ will fail, because you can’t ‘amputate and cauterise’ a fissile substance – and because things in the pipeline will render its aims irrelevent. (See yesterdays Slogpost on the subject).

For now, I’m sticking with my view of what the plan is or was: an attempt at, if you like, at constructing  a planned firewall. It is designed to protect the US, help Obama get reelected, and shelter Germany from interim debt liability prior to FiskalUnion.

Far from being ‘a consipracy theory’, the corroborated allegations still stand, and the actions of the players fully support them: Christine Lagarde is reversing away from involvement like an Italian tank, the German track record of seemingly senseless hurdles to unseat the Greeks is blatantly obvious, the ratings agencies probably haven’t been bought off, and all the poison pills remain.

This deal will not make it to the tape. On verra.

Related: When a deal is not a deal

                   Good game, Mario – but you can’t win

At the End of the Day

At the top of every bottom line, there’s a pot of rainbows

Standing at the bar of a pub the other day, I overheard two blokes of roughly my age discussing mates who had shuffled off the mortal coil.

“I tell you,” said one them, “They’re falling off the perch like flies”.

Now you and I both know that flies don’t have perches. And only very rarely do they fall off any upon which they might land. We are in the land of metaphor blending here. It is an inexhaustible seam of humour, and much of it originates in pubs.

A mate who had worked on the old TV series Minder told me how the show’s star George Cole was in well-known watering hole with his son one day, when he heard one bloke say to another, “Listen son, get this right and the world will be your lobster”. He asked the writers to incorporate it in an episode, and they did.

Although there is a certain cruelty to mixed metaphor gags, as so many come from political rhetoric, I find them irresistible. Many sources attribute this one to George W Bush, but it was actually Al Gore who said, “A leopard can’t change his stripes”. Barack Obama began a speech in 2008, “As we consider the road that unfolds before us…”.  Tory novelist and chancer Jeffrey Archer once accused a Labour MP of “biting the hand that rocks the cradle”, while Rush Limbaugh invited his listeners to “button your safety belts”. And 1950s Commie-bashing Congressman Joe McCarthy told a witness at one of his enquiry committees, “I can’t imagine myself sitting in your shoes”.

Quite a few of them start life as the over-excited pronouncements of news anchors and sports commentators. An American football commentator described majorettes before a game as “drop down gorgeous”. Another said one team “isn’t taking any wooden indians”. One UK soccer manager said in an interview that his job was like “beating life with a dead stick”. He also described one of his defenders as “not the sharpest marble in the drawer”. “You can almost hear the writing on the wall,” said Alan Parkes while commentating a game between Arsenal and Derby County. Defending a bad refereeing decision, Alan Shearer said, “To be fair to the bloke, he didn’t have two minutes to rub together”.

Walking a thin cliff, drowning in a field of opportunity, stepping up to the plate and grabbing the bull by the horns, at the spur of the hat, a storm of protest nipped in the bud, hitting the nail right between the eyes: they’ve all been said by public figures who later cringed in embarrassment. There is even a US website dedicated to offering at least one example a day of metaphorical confusion. Recent ones include ‘It’s not over until the fat lady comes home to roost’, ‘I’m going to sleep like a baby’s bottom’, and ‘There’s no use crying over fish in the sea’. I’m giggling away here as I write.

One sadness of the EU is that its top pillocks don’t misuse metepahors, because they speak that Euro-English which comes from not speaking English well enough to know about metaphors in the first place. But it’s nice to dream. How good it would be, for example, to hear Nicolas Sarkozy say, “You think we French know f**k-nothing, but you are wrong – we know f**k-all”. Or Jose Barroso to pronounce that the Greek debt accord in Athens “Has shown to the markets that the glass houses of Brussels will gather no moss”.

I shall, however, take great pleasure in replaying to Sloggers a notice I saw in the painfully English part of the Dordogne. It said, “Trespasssers will be violated”.

Anecdotage

Books, covers, etc

When I joined the JWT ad agency in London during the Autumn of 1971, one of the first accounts I was asked to cut my teeth on was the South African Wine Farmers Association (SAWFA). This presented me with a moral dilemma. Being Left-Wing and clueless, it didn’t occur to me to investigate the details about SAWFA: it was South African, and ergo sum it must be Bad. No way was I doing anything to support Apartheid.

My Kennedy Democrat boss Judie Lannon was a little distressed at this impasse, and tried to explain how SAWFA was a model employer. But I wasn’t having any of it. I knew it all, didn’t I? I was a Politics graduate for crying out loud.

But there was another, much older woman in the Creative Research Unit. She was in charge of consumer recruitment for research samples, and her name was Patricia Chiswell. Pat was – like most people in JWT at the time – more cut-glass than Waterford Crystal. I suppose I saw her as an haute bourgeoise who must be 97 at least. She was probably a fraction over 50: I thought she was smashing, but I also thought she hadn’t a clue about politics, right, wrong, race or indeed any of the subjects in which my own wisdom was of course universal.

One morning, Pat pitched up at my desk around noon and said c’mon, we’re going to lunch. This was clearly an order not an invite, and so I said fine, let’s go. At the time, JWT had an expenses code number, ‘H47′. To a few privileged employees, it was a licence to become morbidly obese at the company’s expense, as its official designation was ‘Staff Motivation’. Anyway, off we went to a long-since deceased eaterie called Serafinos.

As we played with bread sticks and ordered the usual pre-lunch G&T – the past is another country – I learned that far from being a product of Roedean, Pat Chiswell was South African. The story that unfolded taught me never to prejudge…and was also quite amazing.

Patricia Chiswell had founded a chain of ultra-upmarket fashion shops – particularly renowned for its hats – in 1950s Johannesburg. She was married to a nationally-known radio personality called Peter Chiswell. His catch-phrase – “Be-Beep” – was an integral part of a weekly Saturday show for kids on the main State channel. (In those days, the Nationalist Party kept TV away from the populace as a dangerous foreign influence).

Pete Chiswell was a distinguished Second World War fighter pilot. Oxbridge educated in the 1930s, he wasn’t a Communist – but he was virulently anti-Fascist. Before South Africa even bothered to get its conscription act together in 1939, Peter stowed away on a ship to England, and immediately joined the RAF.

Twenty years later, Peter and Patricia lived a life of unimaginable privilege right at the top of the social scale among the South African white minority. Together, they nurtured an image as the perfect conformist couple. They seemed about as political as Donald Duck. They lived in a massive house in Joburg’s best area, and their society parties were legendary.

But in fact, the couple were working hard for the ANC. Peter was slotting code-words and phrases into his radio broadcasts to inform black activists about this or that development or danger. Patricia meanwhile was funnelling untaxed cash from her rich clientele’s purchases into foreign ANC bank accounts.

During the summer of 1961, things turned very, very nasty in Nationalist South Africa. The ANC formed a military wing in May of that year, and the Chiswells wondered whether they could continue to support terrorist violence. Their ruminations became somewhat academic when, shortly afterwards, Peter received a phone call from a sympathiser. The voice used an immediately recognisable code: get out now. Chiswell rang his wife, telling her to grab their passports and meet him at Joburg airport. They left everything behind, and caught a flight to London that afternoon.

During that 1971 lunch a decade later, Patricia patiently explained to me how SAWFA was not only a model employer, but also a Liberal Party supporter under constant BOSS surveillance. But after she’d finished – in a most matter-of-fact way – telling me about their lives in South Africa, I really did feel something of an inadeqate prick. The bravest thing I’d ever done was throw eggs at Harold Wilson on his arrival at Lime Street station in 1968.

“In 1959,” Pat told me, “I asked my cook ‘You won’t kill me after the revolution will you?’ And she said, ‘Oh no ma’am, I’m going to kill the people next door – they’re coming round here to kill you’. She then giggled, but I was never entirely sure how much was gallows, and how much humour, in that response”.

A great deal of life is about learning to be humble about some stuff. I didn’t feel humiliated by Pat – she was the kindest of people – but I was humbled by her account. And I went to work with gusto on the SAWFA account.

SLOG PREDICTION VINDICATED AS FITCH DOWNGRADES GREECE, TO CALL DEFAULT ON BOND SWAP

Moody’s admits it is monitoring ‘development’ of rating

Papademos rumoured to be mulling further election postponement

I have never known the major ratings agencies so tight-lipped as they have been over the last three days, but it looks like Fitch has now broken cover. Following its downgrade of Greek bonds this lunchtime, a few sources and insider tongues have loosened a little.

The AP report times the downgrade at 6.50 am EST, and Reuters has since added that ‘Fitch said it was downgrading Greece to “C” from “CCC,” and would follow up with further downgrade to a “restricted default” when the bond swap is completed.’ Fitch’s Peter Fitzpatrick had earlier today declined to comment on The Slog’s information about an impending default judgement, but American sources have since clarified things slightly.

“The main bond swap is scheduled for March 10,” a Washington insider told me within the last hour, “and at that point, they [Fitch] will name the event as a technical default. So now everyone wants to know what the ramifications are for insurance. That’ll depend on what deal, say, Hedge Funds have signed with specific insurers. But you could certainly speculate that some insurance will be triggered.”

The downgrade is an early blow for those who put the Brussels accord together just 36 hours ago….and quite possibly a victory for others who always wanted it to fail.

And within the last hour (since first posting this piece), a Moody’s spokesperson told me,  “Greece is currently rated Ca with a Developing Outlook. Moody’s is assessing the credit implications of the Greek bailout and will comment in due course.”

Meanwhile, following the Greek Environment minister’s suggestion that the elections in Greece be further postponed, there is widespread speculation in Athens that Goldman Sachs implant Prime Minister Lucas Papademos is under pressure to announce this formally.