Placing the Blame for the Financial Crash

At last the BBC has found the real cause of the Crash, and the resultant travails in the world economy. It wasn't the bankers, and it wasn't the politicians. It was in fact the mathematicians.

I've always suspected the mathematicians. While the Chemists were slaving in the Dantean conditions of the Dyson-Perrins lab, and the future Prime Ministers were playing tennis or trashing restaurants, the mathematicians would simply not bother getting up till tea-time, slop around in cable-knit sweaters, then get drunk and set fire to themselves on electric bar-fires. They were clearly unable to accept responsibility, and would sit around until the early hours plotting, as it turned out, revolution.

We shouldn't underestimate the power of mathematicians. Jealous of the ability of Physicists to attract the oppostie sex; without the ambitious intensity of a PPE student; not being in a subject that had the potential for explosive catastrophe like Chemistry, or smirking at the fate of the Younger Despenser - what wry amusements did mathematicians enjoy?

Well, it turns out that all along they were planning the downfall of the economic system. As time went by, the complexity of trading systems were such that computers were used, rather than the gut-feel trading that we see in documentaries such as "Trading Places".  The basic foodstuffs on which the whole world depends were made dependent upon futures options, derivatives, options on derivatives - the real world where farmers grow wheat, which people buy and make bread from, was submerged under increasing depths of ever more complex financial models. Yet the computers that crunched the numbers that underpinned the models had the ability to decide who had grain and who had not; who lived and who starved.

And everyone was forced, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their forehead,  so that no one could buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or his number.

Oh... sorry, I seem to have gone all apocalyptic there. Now, I'm not saying that mathematicians were in the power of the Dark One. But it does seem to me that somehow, like a thousand geeky Sorceror's Apprentices, the mathematicians set upon the world something which the capitalists thought that they could use, but which they couldn't control. If computers are able to manage who owns the food supply, they are literally able to decide - in their blind, uncomprehending way - who lives and who dies.

It is an irony perhaps that a world that started through a Word could be brought to ruin by a Number. I don't really know what to do about it, though - unless perhaps we all get allotments?

Economics

Why was Young Keith downloading a book on Advanced Economics in Command Economies to his Kindle? Surely not his sort of thing.

Careers advice

People often ask me how it is that someone so erudite, attractive and well-balanced became an Accountant.
And I must admit, Dear Reader, that I am a little embarrassed about the truth. So often times I will mumble something about a desire for the facts, for truth, and the excitement of being in a chicken farm, trying to count the assets.
But I must confess. When the form came round in our Careers class I assumed it was a multiple choice test. Not knowing what the right or wrong answer was I panicked and ticked box "A".
If I had ticked box "B" instead, I would have become an acrobat. And who knows how things might have turned out?
Now if you will excuse me. I know it's early, but all those packs of doilies aren't going to count themselves.

Tax 'n' spend

Still on economic subjects, I've been considering the eternal question of where to get income for the country from. The Left says "tax the bankers", while the bankers respond, quite naturally, that if that happens they'll leave the country. That may not be playing the game - that may be taking their ball home with them. But then it's their ball. Even if we paid for it for them.

Clearly the answer to this dilemma is to tax heavily the people who couldn't make a living anywhere else doing that job. So my proposal is that we should levy super-taxes on the following:

• Radio 1 DJs
• People who sell "Oxford University" shirts in London
• Jonathan Ross
• Lollipop Men and Women
• Pearly Kings & Queens (bit borderline, this - they could probably get jobs in Japan)
• English Football Managers
• Clowns
• John Bercow
• People handing out leaflets for English language schools
• Evangelists who shout at you on street corners
• Celebrity gardeners
• Anyone in a managerial capacity in a council. Especially the people who designed the Wellingborough town centre "improvements".
• Media Studies Lecturers at ex-Polytechnics

People may say that this approach to taxation is unfair. And I would have to say, yes it is. But I'd like to argue that it's efficient. And of the two, efficient probably wins at the moment.  However, when we've soaked every pony, guinea, arfer dollar and tanna out of the Pearly Kings, we won't be wanting the shirts off their backs. After all, what would we wear them with?

Tuberous Macro-Economics

I've just been reading the Telegraphs's "shape of things to come" report on the IMF's gloomy predictions for the Western economies.

Now I'm no economist. But as far as I can see, what the IMF's basically doing is the equivalent of Private Fraser muttering "we're dooooomed" while Lance-Corporal Jones, thinly disguised as a chubby-cheeked Old Etonian, runs around shouting "don't panic". But on the whole, it looks like next spring may be a good time to plant plenty of potatoes.