EUROZONE CRISIS: IGNORE THE SPIN – THE ECB IS BUYING BONDS AGAIN, & TURKEY IS ABOUT TO GO BANG

As Monti says eurocrisis is abating, banks hoover up record LTRO, ECB buys Portugal bonds, and S&P draws local contagion map. This is an abating crisis?

You may have believed all that Brussels bollocks about the ECB’s eurozone bond buying programme being at an end. Well…it isn’t. After Portugal’s 10- year bonds fell to less than half their face value, I can reveal that SuperMario dived in to stop things turning into a rout. And if necessary, the Italian Stallion will do so again.

Meanwhile, the banks described constantly by Brussels as ultra-safe stole a record 530 billion euros from SuperMario’s ECB, so great was their desire to lend to eurobusiness. The only problem being that, thus far, there’s zero evidence of so much as one centime being lent to business. Whatever can they be using this money for?

Even the ever-inventive S&P can’t answer that one, for fear of upsetting the whole apple-cart. But it has come up with an intriguing new product designed to measure the risk to those economies on the fringes of – or just outside – the eurozone. And guess what? The Slog’s much-predicted demise of Turkey seems to be very much on the cards. The Emerging Europe Sensitivity Index (EESI) gives Erdogan’s mad economy a score of 2.94 – easily the highest around – as a result of the Great Leader’s insane Sharia credit-boom thinking. Fascinatingly, the country lying second most vulnerable to eurozone hubris is luckless Hungary….currently being bullied by that very same eurozone into doing its neocon bidding.

But despite all this evidence of impending disaster on several fronts, Goldman Sachs Schutzstaffel parachutist Mario Monti of Italy says the worst is now over for the EU. Two weeks ago, Signor Monti was suggesting that one day, the bond spreads between Germany and Italy would narrow. Now he’s moving things forward (based on zero evidence) and asserting that “I don’t think it is likely spreads will widen again”. That’s a different thing entirely, but Mario is smart enough to understand that in the age of 24/7 news, this will have a confidence-boosting effect, without the downside of somebody saying, “Are you nuts or what?” But he didn’t reckon with The Slog, ha-haar.

There’s no holding Mario Monti now. Asked about Berlin’s ‘issues with’ aka ‘refusal to consider’  increasing the ezone firewall fund, Monti told reporters today, “They didn’t say they don’t want to discuss this in March; they prefer not to discuss this on the 1st of March. March has, luckily enough, 31 days.” Beware the Ides of March.

You really couldn’t make some of this stuff up. Tomorrow in the late afternoon, ISDA is very likely to call the Greek debt restructure a full-on default, and thus help to trigger a major-league CDS insurance Tsunami with which Wall Street must deal. Meanwhile, we still don’t know if the IIF is going to play ball, or indeed what any of the Hedgies think on the question of Greek debt holdout.

But apart from that, the eurocrisis is abating, and the worst is over. Excellent.

 

HACKGATE SKETCH: JAMES MURDOCH RESIGNATION NEWS RELEASE TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH

There follows a Google translation of the Newscorp press release issued by Newscorp re James Murdoch’s leprosy decision today…..

News Corporation today announced that, following his hasty departure by submarine from Babbacombe to the company’s headquarters in New York, James Murdoch, deputy chief operating officer, managed to relinquish his position as executive chairman of News International, the UK publishing unit, just minutes before Sue Akers slapped the cuffs on his wrists.

Tom Mockridge, chief executive officer of News International, said, “It was down to the wire an’ that, but Jimbo got to his pocket and shouted “I resign!” just before the Filth got the metal on ‘im”.

“We are all grateful for James’ poor eyesight and appalling memory at News International and across Europe and Asia, where he has perjured himself on my behalf like the good ol’ boy I always knew he was,” said Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief executive officer, News Corporation. “He was in every way the son I never wanted, and will continue to fulfil my faith in him as a lyin’ dingo at Star TV, Sky Deutschland, Sky Italia, and BSkyB. Now that he has moved to New York, James can feel reasonably comfortable that a large contribution to the Immigration Service’s budget in these difficult times will ensure that he doesn’t have to return to England to face a lot of trumped up charges from a police force that has shown itself many times to be completely corrupt and without principle but that’s the feckan’ Poms for yer. James will now place particular focus on important pay-TV businesses: TV businesses will get stories about Newscorp, and James will pay them not to run anything.”

“I deeply appreciate the dedication and loyal support in the dock of my many terrified colleagues at News International, who work tirelessly to intercept the public’s every phone call, and am confident about the tremendous slush-fund we have created under the leadership of my humble father and Tom Mockridge,” said James Murdoch. “With the successful launch of the SOS, and new email blagging scams in place across all titles, News International is now in a strong position to build on its failures in the future. As deputy chief operating Officer, I look forward to expanding my commitment to the truth and shafting those two bastards who turned Queens on me in Wapping, and would  like to say that I think these handcuffs are just dandy and really quite exciting. Lead the way, Sue.”

HACKGATE DAY 414 BREAKING: JAMES MURDOCH EXITS NEWSCORP

GOTCHA!

About three minutes ago, Newscorp announced that James Murdoch was ‘stepping down’ from all his roles within Newscorp.

More to follow….

 

EU UNRAVELLING: The more challenges they face, the more its leaders break the law.

Merkel, Draghi and Brussels can bend the rules as much as they like, but their behaviour isn’t playing well anywhere

Enda Kelly is giving the Irish people their vote on Fiscal Union; he’s obviously confident of a ‘Yes’. Certainly, there was no way Brussels was going to give them a say in matters: the last time but one, Ireland gave the wrong answer. Literally, it seems, a case of being politically incorrect. It’s only a matter of time before Kelly starts to get some heat on this one.

But when it comes to the EU this week, things are hotting up all round. The news that the European Investment Bank, the development lender for the 27-member bloc, is getting a similar exemption from Greek debt writedowns to the euro area’s central bank has poured more petrol on the fire lit by Mario Draghi’s blatant rule-changing to avoid losses at the ECB last week.

In Germany, the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe has made it brutally clear that Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schauble are starving Bundestag MPs of the information it insisted they must have late last year. It’s also making ominous noises about illegal firewalls.

Chancellor Merkel’s undemocratic side (never that well-hidden, except by her spin-doctors) is now coming to the fore. Her government and the court in Karlsruhe are locked in a power struggle that will soon be a constitutional crisis unless one side or the other backs off. It isn’t going to be Merkel: she already has consitutional changes planned in the pipeline which are, whatever your viewpoint, a pretty blatant attempt to slice Karlsruhe’s balls off. This is setting off alarm bells in some likely, and unlikely, places.

I spoke with The Slog’s Bankfurt Maulwurf within the last hour. He is not a happy bunny.

“Frau Merkel has now ignored the Constitutional Court twice,” he began, “and is to all intents and purposes setting off down a very dangerous road. Schauble has always been slippery, that is not news. But there is being slippery, and there is subverting the constitution. We [Frankfurt bankers] look to the Court to protect Germany from madness. So now they want to cut off its head.”

He was in turn scathing about Mario Draghi’s avoidance of a bond haircut for the ECB over Greece.

“It was a stupid thing to do, quite unacceptable,” he said, “all it does is say to the markets ‘If you buy eurozone sovereign bonds and things go wrong, the Central Bank will cheat’. This is bound to depress future demand for such debt. But above all – as I have told you all along – it simply puts the spotlight back on Germany as the guarantor. I wonder if the politicians in Berlin will ever grasp this.”

But suspicions – and hackles – are also on the rise in Paris. And some fear to go with them.

“I think the President [Sarkozy] was shocked by the Berlin demand for an EU commissioner to take over in Greece,” said a regular source with access to the pulse of the Elysees elite, “And most definitely there is now real concern about the idea of a German leader who doesn’t like votes, argues with the constitutional authorities, and sees technocrats as the answer to everything. It is Berlin out of control again.”

Last year The Slog reported Elysee gossip about Nicolas Sarkozy, screaming as he walked briskly down a corridor following a phone conference with Merkel, “That f**king German bitch is reverting to type”. The Leaden Lady is not doing herself any favours with the French, that’s for sure. And she also has Washington worried.

“It’s safe to say that Geithner is now on the ceiling about the firewall thing,” said one insider there, “and absolutely no-one can read Schauble. If the [Greek] default goes messy, what’s their plan? That’s what worries us.”

It’s worrying pretty much everyone else too – including the UK Treasury, where I’ve been told that plans to deal with an all-out Greek disaster are now set in ink. Says one informed Conservative source, “I think George [Osborne] can’t understand why Berlin keeps showing a bit of leg on boosting the EFSF, and then delaying and delaying. It’s mainly [German] political realities obviously, but the [Treasury] planners are having kittens”.

Others around the EU are simply retaining their doubts about Berlin’s real intentions. Many are still convinced that Wolfgang Schauble set up the Greek restructure to fail, and as I’ve posted in the past, it’s hard to avoid that conclusion.

However, what all the players in this drama need to understand is that the markets are not the citizens, distracted by a thousand other life concerns and generally happy to watch their rights diluted so long as there’s something good on the telly. The markets want their money. And if it looks like every time they claim the money, they get shafted….they will simply turn their backs on the eurozone, the euro, and the EU.

 

LIBOR PROBE: US JUSTICE DEPT TURNS IT INTO CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION

What started out eleven months ago as a commercial lawsuit against various European banks regarding alleged LIBOR rate manipulation has now turned into a criminal investigation by the US Justice Department. Banks thought to include Barclays Citigroup, HSBC , Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS are undergoing investigation at present.

The criminal aspect of the case was only revealed by Justice late yesterday GMT. It is part of a global investigation across  the US, Japan, Canada and the UK.

It was alleged by insiders at one institution this morning that Barclays “of all of them has been the least helpful to date”.

The suspicion has always been that traders at the banks manipulated the Libor rate to create a windfall of tens of millions of dollars each when they faced very serious liquidity problems during the 2008 credit crunch. During the 2008 financial crisis, overnight Libor spiked – a sure sign banks were having trouble borrowing money. Markets drew confidence later on, when Libor rates began to drop. The Wall Street Journal had doubts about the veracity of that drop at the time. The Slog posted in April 2011:

‘A total of sixteen banks are being investigated, and sources in the US last night confirmed to The Slog, “What started as something half-hearted is now much more focused. I guess you could say the rumour here is that they [the regulators] are onto something pretty big”….’

Back then, French Establishment paper Le Figaro claimed ‘the authorities suspect that key traders [at Barcap] used Treasury information via the main branch dealing with the UK Treasury’. At the time, the Barcap investment division was headed by the Barclays CEO today, Bob Diamond (picture above right). Barclays this morning declined to comment on their involvement or otherwise in the criminal investigation. It is, however, understood that Swiss bank UBS is playing a key role in the case because it agreed to come forward and cooperate in the inquiries. This is almost certainly because none of the current management there are incriminated by the probe.

GREEK DEAL EXCLUSIVE: ISDA “MOVING TOWARDS ‘YES’ OPINION ON CDSs TRIGGER”

Also: Draghi ‘underestimating liquidity demand’ say market sources

Sources close to the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) reported late yesterday that the organisation was tending to come down on the side of a CDS trigger decision in relation to the restructuring of Greek debt. The Slog understands that the revelation of further subordination by the EIB’s (European Investment Bank) deal has hardened attitudes there. However, although there will be a press release at 5 pm GMT today, this will be a yes or no as to whether to take the question further. A ‘no’ at this stage would leave the Greek deal in the clear as far as CDS triggers are concerned – and represent a major blow to Hedge Funds looking for profit via insurance. A ‘Yes’ is thought to be more likely, but if so ISDA’s European Determination Committee will then need further time to reach a definitive view.

It has been revealed that the EIB  is getting a similar exemption from Greek debt writedowns to the euro area’s central bank. Effectively, this is yet another EU institution simply deciding to avert any haircut.

In just under two hours time at 10.20 GMT, we will know how much money Mario Draghi has had to spend plugging the sieves formally known as the private eurobanks. A poll yesterday showed market expectations of a 500bn euro demand, but my conversations with 15 such people last week produced a diferent result: 12 of the 15 sources said they expected the uptake to be much higher.

Banks used  the 489 billion euros borrowed at the first LTRO to cover plug debt holes. Draghi says that this time he wants them to lend out the funds to help strengthen economic growth in the eurozone area, but I don’t believe for a second that is what the Italian ECB boss really thinks. To some extent, Fitch agrees with me: it said yesterday that relatively strong European banks would profit from this second splurge of money, but that it was unlikely to drive strong lending growth ‘given weak demand’. I think it’s unlikely to drive growth because barely a single bank has the slightest intention of doing anything except parking it at the ECB and/or finding the fastest route to its own bottom line.

Yes, there is weak demand – because the euro-Greece-default saga has spooked every business investment decision in the EU. If you were going to generate demand, you wouldn’t do it before the Greek thing had been settled: this is merely Draghi’s final push to sandbag as many banks as he can in the time remaining. And don’t forget – the MSM keep calling this ‘cheap money’ but it is also loss-making money for the banks. Banks don’t do loss-making deals unless they are anything from cautious to desperate.

 

At the End of the Day

Did it ever occur to you that…

It’s going to be one of my occasional streams tonight: urgent events on the continent have left many other more important things unsaid, so they’re all being tossed ino the following stew. Pour yourselves a glass of suitable wine and dig in.

We’ve just had that time of year when a lot of Brits stay up late and pretend they like American football. It is the sporting version of Mornington Crescent in my opinion, in that nobody understands it, and that’s probably the idea. Some bloke shouts a lot of numbers, zaps the ball backwards, and – as a tall black bloke behind him gets ready to throw the pill two miles forward – twenty blokes try to create a car-wreck without the cars.

I don’t get it, but then they don’t get rugger either. I don’t a lot of the time, and it’s obvious there too that a lot of rugger pro’s don’t know why the whistle’s been blown. The giveaway is that they nearly always ask the ref why he’s blown, and the official then takes several minutes to explain the astro-calculus involved. They should add on time for explanations at the end.

The problem with American football and Rugby Union is that there are far too many ‘dead ball’ situations and huddles involved. Soccer – or as we true aficianados call it, football – has hardly any, and thus the unpredictability factor is multiplied by ten. This is why watching British footie is exciting, whereas viewing American Football is like reading an instruction manual online.

I wonder how many Sloggers remember when, in another bygone age, Americans used words like ‘swell’ and ‘phony’? I think phony has dropped out of use now because almost everyone in the world is a phony, but ‘swell’ always had a wonderful innocence for me – and a degree of sophistication at the same time. ‘Swell’ was what people like Frank Sinatra said. Or more usually, sang. The other good thing about swell was you knew what it meant. I had not a clue what pickup, levee, bayou, hooker, and nickelodeon meant. But when a 1950′s American said “That’s just swell” or “He’s a swell guy”, he meant it. If you like, it wasn’t phony. It wasn’t ‘phonograph’ either – another word whose meaning eluded me for years.

The end of using phony heralded the end of the Age of Real. Now everything is ‘leveraged’ to be more than it is, and it’s this dysfunctional way of thinking that has caused the current financial and fiscal mess in which we find ourselves in the West. No doubt soon, the Super Bowl final will become the Hyper Bole final. The World Series will become the Intergalactic Saga. And so on.

What we also entered about 25 years ago was the Age of Un. Students of Orwell’s novel 1984 will know that political deviants airbrushed out of history were referred to as Unpersons. All the more ironic in many ways that Joe McCarthy chose to call his Star Chamber The House Committee on Unamerican Activities. Today we have politically incorrect; it’s the same control freak-bogey man bollocks.

But Un is everywhere. Between them, the Troika members have created an overall situation in Greece with unreal timelines, unachievable economic goals, unpopular politicians, and unstable democracy…all because the IMF was underfunded at the critical time, and the ECB allowed uncontrolled borrowing to take hold. This happened because the EU was and is one gigantically leveraged pile of hyperbolic junk that nobody wants except for the free money it offers them. Discuss.

I thought it a great shame that Frank Carson caught a Lew Grade virus – ie, he died. We used him once for a radio commercial and the bloke couldn’t stop telling jokes. His sister was his agent as well, and she told us that, basically, Frank had OCD when it came to gags. That must be a nightmare to live with for all concerned, but his delivery was unique. His jokes were simple, old-fashioned constructs that nearly always began “So there’s this bloke…” He told one about a bloke walking into a pub with a crocodile and asking the barman, “Do you serve Catholics in here?” The barman says yes we do, so the guy says, “Fine, I’ll have a pint of Guinness, and a Catholic for the crocodile”. The pinched goblins would not allow that sort of gag these days, but when Northern Ireland was tearing itself apart, Frank Carson’s infectious humour was a welcome relief for everyone there. As he said so modestly at the time, “It’s the way I tell ‘em”.

The way the Guardian tells ‘em also never varies, but the paper is about as engaging and enjoyable as gangrene these days. For this reason among many others – chiefly, I’d suggest, its altered reality – the Grauniad is losing readers bigtime….and it never had that many to lose in the first place: its 2011 circulation fell 16.3% year on year to 226,473. In old money, that’s 1 in 6 readers drifting away in a single year. All of which had my satire nose twitching in the classic Private Eye method of superimposing one news story over another. Thus the Greek default’s inevitability becomes the Guardian default.

I don’t know if the Scott Trust (which owns Little G) can afford to bailout The Guardian yet again, but I quite like the idea of editor Evangelos Rusbridopolous insisting that all he needs is just 10% readership growth for the next forty years in order to achieve the targets set by the Troika of lenders – the Socialist International Fund, the Trade Unions, and the recently reunited Labour Bundesbank under the doveish leadership of Eddie Trilliband and his more hawkish Finance Minister, Ed Schauballs. Herr Schauballs insists that his hair is short enough already thank you very much, and Trades Union firebrand Lens Weidluskey says he’ll put up no more money until Trilliband leverages something – indeed, anything. So it’s not looking good for the plucky Guardianistas, and Kremlin-watchers everywhere are wondering what the hard Left clique around Rusbridopolous, Trotskolopoly, will do next. But lurking in the background is the mysterious figure of Pollytine Latoynbee, doyenne of the Ethereal School of commercial journalism. Anything could happen next; and if it does, you can be sure that LaToynbee will home in with clinical accuracy on the wrong interpretation.

I’m exhausted now, and so off to bed. We’ve had a chum’s Labradoodle, Ruby, staying with us today – a breed of dog roughly thirty times the size of our three combined. It was all going very well until Tiggy liberated Ruby’s favourite toy and, bang on cue, the postman arrived. For a few minutes we were given a taste of what life in the Homs district must be like right now. A lovely dog Ruby, but very big indeed. Very strong, and thus (I’d imagine) a great addition to any tug-of-war team. I’ve never tried being the rope in a tug-of-war before. It was character forming.

Until tomorrow, then.

The fantasy US recovery, the flawed neocon economic ideal, and the doomed Presidential bid of Ron Paul.

In my February 4th post about the sham US ‘recovery’, I spent a few paragraphs demolishing the idea that America (or anyone else for that matter) is in ‘recovery’. More evidence has just emerged to support that idea. New orders for durable goods fell in January 2012 by 4% – the largest drop for three years. And a separate report showed US property prices falling sharply during December 2011.

The latter data set wasn’t that unexpected – to me, anyway: pre-Christmas flatlining property markets are not exactly new. But durables are always a key indicator of how happy people are to spend big bucks on big things. They’re a reflection of confidence….or lack of it.

Also down by 4% to a mere $4.6bn  were JP Morgan’s profits. While wondering how on earth they were going to manage on that going forward, my eye fell across a piece in the Journal telling how five US equity investment firm owners would be taking home a bonus of $94m each at the end of March. Bruce Willis diverting that asteroid and dying in the process…that made him worth $94m for the  job. But nobody else is worth $94m for a year’s work. Nobody. And anyone who thinks so is a sadly damaged human being.

Let me try and rationalise that apparently intolerant statement. Had anyone come to me in corporate life and said they needed $94m to stay interested in the business, I’d have expressed sympathy for their plight, and fired them. $94m isn’t a bonus, it’s a bonanza leveraged into a bazooka for a bonehead who somehow puts a value on the ownership of meaningless amounts of money. Except, of course, money brings power – and that’s what these reptiles really want. I didn’t want to employ megalomaniacs: they take up too much time and they’re inordinately expensive to run. Then they get elected to Congress or Parliament and leave your employ anyway, determined to apply those same twisted values to bankrupting the Treasury. I wanted to employ people interested in quality and standards, not in owning 94 million bad drawings of Abe Lincoln. Not even Andy Warhol was that crass.

The two reasons I’m rarely satirical about neocon economics is (a) it’s bad form, and lousy sport, to shoot ducks in a barrel; and (b) the effects of such braindead thinking are every bit as destructive as the ramblings of old Beardy Marx. This stuff can be funny – up to a point. After that point, it’s damned irritating…especially if you’re one of the poor folks. Ronald Reagan remains one of the most revered US Presidents because he cut taxes to create super-wealth which, he said, would trickle down. Well, it didn’t: it gushed upwards into f**kwitted $94m bonuses. Milt Friedman pronounced that 5% had to own at least 93% of the wealth in order to create universal social progress and happiness. I’ve known people committed to insane asylums for better ideas than that one.

Let’s take the decisive market thing. We are told two things about markets: they will always take the right decision, and they will always self-correct. Anyone spot the internal flaw in that neocon ‘logic’? Quite. It’s laughable – and yet at one and the same time, no laughing matter: the clowns running the world at the moment believe this crap. And the Left? Ha. Their answer is to return to the comfort blanket of a centralised, meddling State control that eradicates liberties even more quickly than it pauperises the people it purports to help. (The EU is its latest Frankenstein creation).

So here we are again: a species lurching from one extreme to another, and repeating experiments that failed last time. Meanwhile, the community, libertarian mutualising natural approach has succeeded far more often than either of the other two alternatives. There’s a simple reason for this: it reflects the irrefutable fact that Homo sapiens’ success is based (as with any pack animal) on a judicious mixture of cooperation and competition. Watch any ape colony anywhere in the wild, and you will see it in action.

But we are not apes any more. We grew a bigger brain to oxygenate more effectively our escape from predators when long-term African drought 840,000 years ago droves us down from the trees. We are Man. And Man is an intelligent thug.

As I keep on saying, “It’s the species, stupid”. However, recent history has shown us that Thomas Hobbes was wrong: we are not ineluctably nasty and brutish. Robert Louis Stevenson was much nearer the mark with his great work of genius, Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde: what we really are is curate’s eggs laid by a two-sided brain. But the carrot-and-stick approach can bring us back into line.

Fire a kid’s imagination while telling him or her where the lines are, and you are in with a good chance of creating a well-behaved, fulfilled social animal more than likely to make a contribution to the pack. Think up a false Utopia where everyone is either a Beast or a Robot, and you’ll get either anarchic neocon greed, or Soviet multiculturalist hypocrisy. There must be something better on offer than those two dystopias.

That gets me back again to “It’s the culture, stupid”. I will never move away from this Truth: the creation and flourishing of a civilised culture proves that, intelligent thugs or not, we can be channelled into doing good stuff. Of the people who stand any kind of realistic chance in the forthcoming US Presidential election, I couldn’t possibly vote for either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. The main reason is that I’m not American. The other one is that I’d much rather vote for Ron Paul. He stands for freedom, bravery, creativity, humanitarianism, community values…and everything good about a fairly run liberal/libertarian democracy.

Is he a Nazi? No. Is he a Communist? No. Will he be elected President? No. For people who care about the human being’s capacity for decency, that is the problem we face.

GREEK BAILOUT: WHEN WILL ENOUGH BE ENOUGH FOR THE RATINGS AGENCIES?

Moody’s…wait and see

Dan Hannan tweeted this morning to ask how long it would take for the markets to give up on the ‘comprehensive’ bailout ‘agreed’ last week. I tweeted back to say 2 out of 3 ratings agencies already have. I am also staying close to Moody’s: I think they’re waiting for the next stage of restructuring formality to make their move.

Predictably, Athens is saying they ‘expected’ the downgrades so far awarded. I’d imagine they did, but it’s funny how the D-word was never used until the raters said it. Equally funny is the defeaning silence from Brussels, Frankfurt and Berlin….where Merkel yesterday passed the Act required to enable the bailout, and then helpfully added that there was no certainty it would work. That’s Geli for you: always a foot in both camps….We Never Make Mistakes.

Here’s the key phrase from the S&P downgrade – my emphasis:

‘If enough bondholders do not accept the bond swap offer, Greece would be deemed to be in outright payment default’

So for the bondholders as a whole, it’s very soon going to be put up or shut up time. S&P declined to elaborate on the word ‘enough’ – we all need a little wriggle room – but it is pretty clear that there will be some holdout….and of course, nobody engaged in this tomfoolery has audited the Hedge Fund sentiments at all. My gut says Dalloran will deliver the IIF membership, but with Hedgies, you never know.

Even assuming the bondholder involvement is ‘enough’, there are still plenty of poison pills in there.

It will not make it to the tape.

Morgan the wannabe Peer goes down fighting.

Bright beautiful women: why do they marry odious pricks?

Here’s a link to the increasingly desperate brave face being put on by Piers Moron in the light of more catastrophic revelations about the corrupting influence of Newscorp at the Leveson Enquiry. This is a bit of history….an unpleasant pillock fighting for his freedom with the usual mix of chutzpah and bollocks:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17179642

So thick is the Romping Arse’s brass neck, he identifies closely with the Murdoch position. Mind you, so he should given that the Newscorp SOS used one of his former victims, Amanda Holden, for its relaunch yesterday.

Update: the Monday Sun is using the same story today. Amanda’s near-death experience in giving birth is, it seems, worth another 3-page spread, following yesterday’s 5-pages of lachrymose tale. Some of the great Screws journalists of the past must be turning in their graves. But then, Murdoch destroys everything. Verily, he is journalistic and social anti-matter.

Major hat-tip to Slogger Simon Jenkins for the link.

EZONE DEBT GUARANTORS: S&P’s EFSF downgrade confirms that Germany stands alone

Within the last two hours, S&P has downgraded the eurozone’s EFSF mechanism – a holding fund before the ESM goes live….if it ever does.

This isn’t massive news on the face of it; but as so often with ‘news’, get down past the first few paragraphs and the real significance is there. This extract from S&P’s release is telling….my italics:

‘We have concluded that credit enhancements sufficient to offset what we view as the reduced creditworthiness of European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) guarantors are not likely to be forthcoming….The negative outlook on the long-term rating on the EFSF mirrors the negative outlooks of France and Austria….’

There are also hints in the verdict that, purely on the basis of being sucked into contributing to further hopeless bailouts, even Germany could find itself downgraded. This is turn would downgrade the ESM…andonadnonandonandon….the vicious circle continues.

One wonders how this afternoon’s Bundestag vote might have gone in the knowledge of this damning outlook. Germany is being told by S&P that it can no longer depend on its ally France. In the context of G20 pressure for Europe to build its own Greek contagion firewall, the options for Berlin are even more constrained.

But then, the Chancellery knew that anyway.

MEMO TO LANSLEY: WANNABE MANAGEMENT IS THE NHS PROBLEM.

A clear vision, not cross-eyed compromise, is what we need

I have been writing for so long now on the subject of the NHS – and what to do with it – that I often despair of anyone with power ever seeing the various lights that are there to be seen. After years – since 1995 to be precise – of collecting data, and logging the experiences of myself and others I know, reliable stories reported in the media, my experiences with my parents in various hospitals, and other horrors, the conclusions I have reached are as follows:

1. The 1949 version of the NHS should be dumped forthwith: it is based on irrelevant principles and far too big

2. GPs have got far too much of the NHS budget, and they’ve lost the plot about what community doctors are for

3. There is still a ridiculous amount of senior management overstaffing at stupidly high salaries in hospitals

4. Both hospitals and local practices have caught all the adverse effects of managementitis, and inherited none of the advantages

5. Despite this, everyday admin staff and ‘real’ medical staff are unfailingly polite, sympathetic and well-organised, although I have no idea why: I certainly wouldn’t be.

My pocket history would be that the original Bevan concept was gobbled up first by trade unions in the 1960s, bloated by Ted Heath in 1973, flooded with Big Hair and meetings bollocks in the 1980s,  and then systematically shafted by a deadly private business in the Nineties and Noughties. Some say you cannot flog a dead horse, but I say that our National Health Service is a gothic monster with five heads, one leg and no brain. It cannot survive, and it must go.

The way for it to go is more localised, away from government, and socially mutual: but I don’t want to get into another 5,000 word essay… this is the wrong medium for it, and it isn’t the point of this post. My task today is to illustrate by example. This morning, I attended my fifth UK hospital in a year. There’s nothing really wrong with me or my wife, we’re just getting on a bit. Some of this has involved pain management, and thus requires a lot of visits to our local GP joint practice as well. There follow a few bullet points for the embattled Minister to think about. They may sound picky, but I do point out the broader ramifications.

a. Ring the GP up for an appointment at the moment, and you won’t be seen for at least a week. This has nothing to do with cuts, and everything to do with a commercial row going on there about who gets what….in the midst of which the key member of ‘management’ at the Practice has been fired, and has taken all the admin software passwords with him. He is now about to sue the Practice, and vice versa. This is what I would call an idiot’s idea of progress.

b. Turning up at Exeter hospital this morning, the most noticeable thing was a series of queues at the various pay and display machines. These have just been upgraded by senior management, and their main drawback is that one needs an IQ over 130 to use them successfully. It was a senior management decision. I can’t see the benefit in commercial terms of the additional complication. This is what I would call a cockeyed idea of what ‘investment’ means.

c. Management by Notices. “This is a Smoke-Free Zone!” proclaims the banner at the main entrance. Underneath it were various clutches of patients smoking fags. Another notice says this: “Every patient contact needs clean hands!” The hand-cleaning facilities at all entrances were invisible. Nobody took any notice of any of them. I just used the search engine on my site to reveal that I have blogged on this subject 11 times since the start of 2010. This is what I would call the senior management belief that notices solve problems, and it is a very Soviet syndrome: it has nothing to do with real management in the private sector sense of the term.

d. ‘All treatment free at the point of purchase’ was a fine principle in its time, but it was of its time. As I sat in X-Ray’s reception waiting room, I was shocked to read this notice: ‘Number of X-Ray patients who didn’t turn up for their appointments, January 2012: 185′. And that’s just one department. Six no-shows a day in one small area. Nye Bevan was a top bloke, but he didn’t foresee either credit cards….or a culture dominated by dickhead misbehaviour. Simple suggestion: make every no-shower without notice pay the market rate for their next appointment. The no-show rate will be 0% within months. This is what I would call a no-brainer.

e. Myself, my wife, and most of the folks in X-Ray were over 55. OK, a fair proportion were downmarket, but the majority were a long way from the soup-kitchen. My age group takes up an unfair slice of the medication/day-treatment budget in 2012, and as more of us survive thanks to braindead social nannying, that proportion will increase in the future. Simple suggestion: everyone with a private pension plan aged over 60 must now pay for their prescriptions. This is what I would call real fairness in action.

Mr Lansley has – in his disastrous ideas for the NHS – fallen between two stools: he has tried to appease the ‘Hands off our NHS’ Left, while at the same time slavishly trotting out potty Thatcherite drivel about everyone wanting to be the next Alan Sugar. Use The Slog’s search engine, and you will see that the prediction of failure and mayhem was first made here in June 2010…..and regularly threafter. All these expectations have been entirely fulfilled – to everyone’s cost.

Localism, mutualism, more money for hospitals, redirecting GPs to the plot, and banishing senior management’s self-indulgent bollocks: these should’ve been the Health Secretary’s guiding lights. Instead, Andrew Lansley’s narrow dilettante approach has spontaneously immolated to produce an approaching systemic breakdown in the UK’s public health provision. He should be fired, and replaced by somebody with a radical realist vision.