Pragmatist: April 2021

Friday, 23 April 2021

Harness The Power of Dumb: Embrace Your Doom!

Fuck it. You labour night and day, learn your lessons, do your homework, get your tickets, play the game by the rules, then along comes a self-entitled prick like Boris-screw-anything-that-moves-Johnson to sweep it all away. How? By being Dumb. You failed to learn the Power of Dumb.

I'm not talking about the inability to speak, or write, or add up.

I'm talking about Wilful Stupidity.

I'm talking about knowing the right path and deliberately choosing the wrong one and selling it as the right path.

On a massive scale.

Fraud on a small scale just gets you jail. Hell, the Post Office will even frame you for its own mistakes, and the executives who do that to you will walk away free.

Don't talk to me about Bernie Madoff. He made-off with his investors' money for decades, promising them highly improbable returns and leaving them nothing. Jail was his retirement plan.

Boriskovich 'CovidBrexidiot' Johnson has pulled off the biggest electoral fraud in British history and his victims made him Prime Minister. That's all he wanted. Job done. The endless grifting is just a bonus. A free-for-all for the Dumb Club.

You might console yourself with 'It Won't End Well' etc., but you're just telling yourself what you need to get through the day playing by the rules. Low-lifes like Johnson are off to the races and they don't care a damn.

So, ask yourself: what might people really, really, really want? Dream big. Dream Enormous. A bridge to Ireland over a vast munitions dump has already been taken, as has a new UK sat nav system that probably won't work.

Once you've decided on your goal, ask yourself two sets of questions - hell, you might even write two taking opposite sides:

What would be the Right Way To Get It? The Right Things To Do? The Right Path? The Smart Path?

What would be the Wrong Way To Get It? The Bad Things To Do? The Wrong Path? The Dumb Path?

Choose the Dumb Path.

Get Elected.

Harness the Power of Dumb.

Make everyone else regret it, not you!

Sure, they'll all be angry and some will be desperate for vengeance.

But that only means you won, right?

Embrace your Doom!

Wednesday, 7 April 2021

A Strange Speech From The Governor

The Governor of the Bank of England has a key leadership role in the UK financial system, so it's important to understand his vision for Britain's new role in the wider world. Hence my interest in his strange speech on the "future of financial services".

In keeping with his political masters' devotion to nostalgic sense of entltlement he harks back to events just after the second world war and a commitment to an 'open world economy'. He points "with pride" to the fact that the Bank of England chairs two of the four main standard setting bodies of the international financial system – the Basel Committee for banks, IOSCO for markets, the IAIS for insurance, and the CPMI for payment and markets infrastructure. It is in this context that he launches a veiled attack on the EU for failing to grant equivalence to regulation in various UK financial sectors, despite the UK leaving the trade bloc. He suggests that Britain does not participate in forming global regulation to water it down, while his political masters intend exactly that. He points, ironically, to the City's "long history" of openness while failing to acknowledge that this was predicated on EU membership, and the protection that afforded London as a home for European financial markets, while only days later Amsterdam's share trading volumes exceeded London's. He whines about lack of equivalence findings from the EU, yet merely promises that "The UK’s financial markets and its financial system are therefore open for trade to all who will abide by our laws and act consistent with our public policy objectives." He then complains about the UK being a 'rule-taker'!

The very simple rejoinder to all this is that Britain is right to acknowledge that it must work with others to change the international rules before it can change its own. But it only has itself to blame for making that task harder by leaving the EU and losing influence over the shape of EU trade rules.