Thursday 15 January 2009

Antilogisms

Years ago the witty chaps in The Times’ PHS column coined a new term, "antilogism", for a word or expression that means the opposite of what you’d expect. Not quite the same as an oxymoron, but more like a thumping great one or two word porky.

The term never caught on, and you won’t find it in the dictionary, but the financial crisis has brought the concept back out of the closet. We need that word again.

How else would you describe the following?

A security = something that is spectacularly insecure

Wealth management = the destruction of your savings

Investment management = the incompetent and spendthrift loss of your investment

Savings product = structured theft

Managed risk = unmanaged risk

Financial planning advice = guesswork on fees

Typical 10 year return = the same number with a negative sign in front of it

Personal pension provision = throwing your own savings away

Private sector occupational pension scheme = conspiring with your employer to throw your and their savings away

Defined benefit scheme = undefined benefit scheme

Public sector pensions provision = a charge on current tax payers, an increasing number of whom are private sector pensioners

Financial Service Authority = a body that isn’t an authority on either finance or service

Department of Work and Pensions = a group of civil servants overseeing the annihilation of both

Royal Bank of Scotland = an institution that is neither Royal nor Scottish

Bradford & Bingley = Whitehall & Madrid

Equitable Life = unfairness whichever way you look at it.

But the crisis is throwing up some terms that have a ring of truth: vulture funds do prey on the weak, and as more and more of our finance houses are nationalised the Bank of England is becoming exactly that.

Thursday 8 January 2009

A solution for your problem

Grumpy Old Man does not aim to provide advice on remedies for personal complaints or conditions.

However we have had drawn to our attention a new and unique product which we believe will meet the needs of many of our readers.

Monday 5 January 2009

Another roll of the dice

If we were to throw a die to forecast our future we might, like Luke Rheinhart’s Dice Man, load the odds so that one face predicts rapid recovery, four faces offer progressively increasing degrees of gloom ranging from a one-year recession to four-year deflation, and the sixth face suggests something very more radically threatening.

It is probably not too pessimistic to suggest that within a year or so the sixth face of the economic die will give us a scenario in which our bankrupt liberal democratic (and as it happens, capitalist) nation states will have no choice but to accept bail-outs from countries whose politics we abhor.

In this scenario our economic survival becomes dependent on Saudi Arabia, China or Russia and its old ’Stans. None of these are remotely liberal or democratic by our standards, nor are they strictly capitalist in our terms, in the sense of a diversified, decentralised economy.

Will this dependency come without demands? I suspect not.

For decades "our" IMF has bailed out third world countries only so long as they promise to adopt developed world capitalist economic management principles. I think we can be reasonably certain that financial support from the purveyors of sovereign wealth such as China will carry similar or more stringent obligations.

What is therefore at risk is not just our economic viability but the very freedom we have fought for over centuries to run our societies as we wish.

The supposed destructive threat of Al Qaeda will have materialised, but it will have been delivered not from Islam but by the free market capitalist fundamentalists that have infested our economy, out-manoeuvred our regulators and seduced their political masters.

The axis of evil will have triumphed but that axis will emerge to be not the barbarian at the gate but the enemy within.