Oh buggery and bollocks

[blamebrampton]

This was not the weekend I was hoping for. I cut back and weeded the garden out the front with minimal damage to self, but did not make any impact on the side garden, which must be revived before we can build the cat run we plan. None of my invoices had been paid, so I am completely out of ready cash. Which is all bad enough, but when I sat down to do my Italian homework, I found that the Cookie cat had chewed through the cord of my much-loved BOSE iPod headphones, rendering them useless.

On top of that, I am still coughing. And Lehman transferred £4.4bn from their London office to New York just hours before they collapsed, with the result that the American staff have assets for salaries and pensions, while the London staff can't even afford to pay secretaries. It's just outrageously poor behaviour. Worse, the cockheads in New York who cause all this disaster are in line for big bonuses and ludicrous salaries with the Barclays buyout. I despair.

I know that a lot of people are more bored with finance than they are with politics, but at the moment I think you need to work through your boredom and read the financial pages. Do you know what shortselling is? A hedge fund? Can you tell with certainty who owns your mortgage? Do you know exactly who owns the company that you may one day wish to sue? More importantly, does anyone know exactly who owns it, or is it part of the elaborate shell-game that has been high-end finance over the last 15 years? Like the environment, these are not questions that laypeople should leave for 'the experts' to worry about.

Anyway, in happier news,
HAPPY BIRTHDAY to jamie2109 , mabonwitch  and mistful 
If the three of you had been running Lehman or HBOS, I think we'd probably still be heading for a global recession, but it all would have been done ethically, and with wit, and people wouldn't mind half so much!

Comments

[violetage.livejournal.com]

Have just made my first but probably not last political post. *g*

I don't know what any of that stuff is but I do know how to look it up, at least some of it. I have known for a while that finance had become a shell game. I remember being alarmed a few years ago when I read something, somewhere (I know, how precise of me) about how much land in New York City is actually owned by off shore companies. That sort of thing still alarms me but I admit the sheer size of the problem with some of these things tends to make my brain break. It's not boredom, it's the inability to see the forest well enough to figure out where to start cutting down trees. I imagine I am not the only one who feels this way.

I think it is horrid for Lehman to have behaved that way. Bleh

Oh dear, poor you. I constantly can't find my headphones as I am the epitome of absent-minded. So many things to think about, so little time to cover it all. I would hate to have spent the cash for bose ones to find them now useless.

And ugh, ebil flu. *makes you some tea*

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

*Sob* you're right, they weren't cheap!

I like your post and will be off to comment in a minute. What disturbs me most is that the whole issue is portrayed in parts of American politics as a special interest issue, rather than the basic human rights issue it is. And exactly the same flawed arguments that were trotted out against desegregation and women's rights are being recycled. Gah!