Song, by Toad

Mrs. Toad is back from touring God Bless America with her Shiny Shiny Job and she has characterised the mood amongst the financial people she met there as being pretty much like so: “AAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh! The world is fucking ending, run everyone run. Fuck the women and children, save yourselves!”

I am slowly but surely starting to find this sort of shit deeply fucking irritating. It is exactly this hysterical herd mentality that got us into this sort of shit in the first place. These fuckwits don’t perform ‘analysis’ as they like to boast, they basically act like a school of fish and cluelessly swim in vaguely the same direction as their neighbours, all the while pretending it is part of some sort of complicated strategy.

Whenever I ask how exactly it is that these bovine cretins make quite so much wedge I hear the idiotic bleat ‘oh yes, but you must understand, I have the responsibility of handling millions of pounds of other people’s money’. As if handling other people’s money was in some way the same as handling other people’s money responsibly and effectively.

The Bank of Scotland just sent me a letter telling me that they were increasing the limit on my credit card by a thousand pounds. A thousand pounds which I never asked for and which one would assume they could not fucking afford. Oh but wait, the government has just handed the banks billions of pounds of, erm, my money, which they have generously packaged up and sold back to me, presumably adding a big fat commission to their personal champagne fund in the process. The worst of it is that keeping the money markets liquid was absolutely essential, and there weren’t a lot of obviously better ways to do it, but watching the same old same old come around again as soon as these buffoons get their melodramatic caterwauling under control is far from amusing.

How do things like boom and bust happen then? Basically everybody in the financial sector gets massively over-excited about something. Then the fucking herd mentality sets in, because all these morons’ pals are getting excited about the same damn thing, and there commences an incoherent, animalistic frenzy based on no more than human beings’ pathetic herd mentality. Then the value gets so ridiculously over-inflated by all this idiotic screaming, until someone finally notices that no amount of squealing and snorting at the great trough of fiscal hyperbole actually makes a fucking Kinder Egg worth fifty million pounds. At which point everyone panics and runs away as fast they can, whilst making equally stupid pronouncements along the lines that no-one will ever eat a Kinder fucking Egg ever again and that it was all our fault for finding them tasty in the first place.

All of which is fine, of course, because finance is difficult and people, generally, are not very bright. Except, of course, for the smug, self-satisfied nature of the chiselling avarice of these fucking whores. You are no better than fucking bin men you useless cunts, irrespective of how expensively you dress, so you can stop pretending to be anything other than vacuous fucking sheep. All this pretence of strategy and deep understanding of something so subtle and so complicated that it is clearly, clearly beyond the grasp of us mere mortals was irritating enough to begin with, but given that it has now been exposed for the extremely fucking obvious fraud that it was, it is even worse. I am not listening to any more pompous puffery from people who clearly have no better idea what they are doing than a flock of fucking pigeons.

If the financial services were more populated by the competent, rather than fat-tongued Yahs who manage to render the disadvantage of spectacular mental dullness irrelevant by having cunningly been sent to the right school, then I might find this whole pig’s ear less depressing. As it is, when the response to a disaster caused by years of their own gloriously frantic me-too flailing is this sort of nonsense, then I get annoyed: that there will never be such a thing as growth ever again; that this is worse than the Great Depression. Anyone who actually had to live through the Great Depression will be either laughing their arses off or crying into their beer.

Sorry, there were no coherent arguments there, just a depressed desire for all this wailing and gnashing of teeth to fucking stop, and for people to get their shit together, calm themselves down and get back to doing their jobs. Sadly, that will have to mean doing them as badly as they did them before, but it would at least be better than watching them all soiling their plus-fours and acting like spoiled children. This inability to dredge up even a splinter of mature reflection and use your brains is not only making things much worse just in itself, but is exactly the reason we are in this mess to begin with. Stop crying, you fucking babies, and get back to fucking work.

King Creosote – You’ve No Clue Do You?
Bob Dylan – Idiot Wind

P.S. Mrs. Toad is not a financial type, she just manages them, so I am not having a go at her, before anyone says anything (or she threatens me with castration).