On the seafront in Fuerengirola there is a restaurant that offers a dinner with a Flamenco floor show.
As you eat the singing and dancing swirl around you and the waiters carry the plates of food and glasses of wine to your table without spilling a drop.
Breathtaking entertainment.
With the Mediterranean as the back drop.
I imagine that the singers and dancers and musicians are well paid.
The Restaurant charges an inclusive price and you can settle back and enjoy the show.
Reading about Mervyn King's comments about bankers made me think about how banks have changed over the years.
No longer the secure, risk averse institutions that they were, it seems that the old lady of Threadneedle Street has kicked off her pin stripes and shiny shoes and begun to behave in a decidedly racy fashion.
She has thrown caution to the wind, broken the rules and declared herself too big to fail so the Government has bailed her out.
Now Mr King is calling for a new banking model, the failed model needs to be restructured, he says.
Banks have according to Mr King operated with double standards, lecturing people on living within their means and then demanding to be bailed out by public money when their speculative plans and deals failed.
The narrative that has been maintained by the con-dem coalition since the last election continues to use the refrain, 'the financial mess left by Labour'.
Like a song with a nagging chorus it refuses to go away.
But it is starting to wear a bit thin.
Unemployment continues to rise.
Mortgages remain difficult to find.
The promised reductions in the deficit have not happened.
The economy remains on the cusp of recession.
And the perfectly sensible proposals put forward by Labour's Ed Balls to help assist with rebooting the economy continue to fall on deaf ears.
At last, however, the Governor of the Bank of England calls attention to the public anger over the bank's very real failures which led to the financial crisis and which he describes as understandable.
Perhaps refocusing on the banks contribution to the 'financial mess' means that a new narrative can be developed.
John Steinbeck in Grapes of Wrath characterised the irresponsible and untimely intervention of the banks in the lives of the dust bowl families and their communities.
The bank manager who was a neighbour and doubtless a member of the church and social community, tells the farmer whose farm he is repossessing, it's the bank, the impersonal and distant, unfeeling monolith, thereby denying any responsibility for his own actions.
It is galling for any business man to be in a situation where effectively a bank takes over the running of his company, charging huge fees for it's intervention, which they simply add to the debt burden he is carrying, whilst demonstrating that in practice they lack the expertise to run the company whilst he has to ask their permission to pay his staff each and every month.
It is even more galling then to discover that not only can they not run your business, they cannot run their own but unlike you, they can then hold the treasury to ransom because they are too big to fail.
But this is a situation that has arisen again and again.
Banks promote debt, lend money with or without security encourage speculation and then run back to their political masters when their strategies fail.
Part of me is delighted to hear Mr King's views on his banking colleagues but part of me is suspicious. What is the real music behind the words? What else is being done and said? How much is this simply a diversion? Will anything really change?
As you eat the singing and dancing swirl around you and the waiters carry the plates of food and glasses of wine to your table without spilling a drop.
Breathtaking entertainment.
With the Mediterranean as the back drop.
I imagine that the singers and dancers and musicians are well paid.
The Restaurant charges an inclusive price and you can settle back and enjoy the show.
Reading about Mervyn King's comments about bankers made me think about how banks have changed over the years.
No longer the secure, risk averse institutions that they were, it seems that the old lady of Threadneedle Street has kicked off her pin stripes and shiny shoes and begun to behave in a decidedly racy fashion.
She has thrown caution to the wind, broken the rules and declared herself too big to fail so the Government has bailed her out.
Now Mr King is calling for a new banking model, the failed model needs to be restructured, he says.
Banks have according to Mr King operated with double standards, lecturing people on living within their means and then demanding to be bailed out by public money when their speculative plans and deals failed.
The narrative that has been maintained by the con-dem coalition since the last election continues to use the refrain, 'the financial mess left by Labour'.
Like a song with a nagging chorus it refuses to go away.
But it is starting to wear a bit thin.
Unemployment continues to rise.
Mortgages remain difficult to find.
The promised reductions in the deficit have not happened.
The economy remains on the cusp of recession.
And the perfectly sensible proposals put forward by Labour's Ed Balls to help assist with rebooting the economy continue to fall on deaf ears.
At last, however, the Governor of the Bank of England calls attention to the public anger over the bank's very real failures which led to the financial crisis and which he describes as understandable.
Perhaps refocusing on the banks contribution to the 'financial mess' means that a new narrative can be developed.
John Steinbeck in Grapes of Wrath characterised the irresponsible and untimely intervention of the banks in the lives of the dust bowl families and their communities.
The bank manager who was a neighbour and doubtless a member of the church and social community, tells the farmer whose farm he is repossessing, it's the bank, the impersonal and distant, unfeeling monolith, thereby denying any responsibility for his own actions.
It is galling for any business man to be in a situation where effectively a bank takes over the running of his company, charging huge fees for it's intervention, which they simply add to the debt burden he is carrying, whilst demonstrating that in practice they lack the expertise to run the company whilst he has to ask their permission to pay his staff each and every month.
It is even more galling then to discover that not only can they not run your business, they cannot run their own but unlike you, they can then hold the treasury to ransom because they are too big to fail.
But this is a situation that has arisen again and again.
Banks promote debt, lend money with or without security encourage speculation and then run back to their political masters when their strategies fail.
Part of me is delighted to hear Mr King's views on his banking colleagues but part of me is suspicious. What is the real music behind the words? What else is being done and said? How much is this simply a diversion? Will anything really change?
No comments:
Post a Comment