Wealth Creators

Nothing will now surprise me about the behaviour of British banks. I fully expect to discover that Bob Diamond and the entire Barclays Board subsist only on fresh human blood, harvested from a giant facility stocked with nubile virgins located in the wilds of East Anglia. (Keeping it secret is a lot easier than keeping it fully stocked with chaste maidens in that region).

What will it take for our politicians and the commentariat to understand that Diamond and his parasite breed are not, repeat not, wealth creators.  You have to run the counter case, imagine all of this turbo finance never happened, what would the national balance sheet look like then? The answer is that nearly everyone would be better off, except bankers. No £1.2 trillion liabilities for the Treasury, house prices in the South East might bear some vague relationship with rationality, clever and intelligent people might have been encouraged to use their talents for the  common good, rather than inventing ingenious ways to rip off everyone else. Modern banking subtracts value from the wider economy, simples.

I'll give you an example of true wealth creation and how back to front our value system really is. Rockstar Games is a UK based software company who rose to global fame with the game Grand Theft Auto. You may remember how morons with column inches lambasted them for encouraging violence and generally debasing the youth. Of course they couldn't present any evidence, they just asserted that if you watched the something on a screen most people couldn't help copying what they saw like psychotic suggestible sheep, with guns. In fairness, right after watching Gladiator  I did stab two swords into a waiter's chest when he brought me the wrong starter, so maybe they have point. 

I should mention that the two chief games developers went my school and have featured on Time's most influential people of the century. So what is my point, other than I'm never going to be able to top that. Why does it take a US magazine to celebrate British entrepreneurial and creative success? And why do we continue to brownose talentless, grasping thieves from the financial industry who have got away with the greatest fraud in human history, rather than praise our software sector which creates wealth without landing the general public with vast debts, so colossal you need a scientific calculator to type in all the zeroes?

Repeat after me, modern bankers are wealth extractors not creators. They are to free enterprise what Tony Soprano is to the construction industry. And once the British public finally wakes up to the scale of the scam, I would strongly advise that Diamond and his ilk leave this country, perhaps for some ghastly rich ghetto like Monaco. 

The wonderful thing is we would all be better off. Except of course bankers.

Hey, you, wanna buy a CDS?