What great gifts Christmas brings us, ahh...Bisto and the Great British Oligarchs enjoy.
"Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics",....dont I love it when they're exposed!
I move randomly across the chapters and parallels I've witnessed. I hope to complete this by May 2021 so buy the book, its easier than working out what I'm trying to say!
Bob Wylie's book is excellent as it dismantles the myths and explains why capitalism in this country, as around the world, continues to ensure, the trickle up of cash, from the workers to the management. It strikes a chord with me as I saw first hand the deregulation of the city. I sat, jaw open, as the futile fight between Scargill and Thatcher took place. I screamed for Mick McGahey to bullet Scargill. I called out her fight to my Economics tutor as he defended her right to batter the unions by creating high unemployment. He was NE Fife Liberal, Stuart something....but not Menzies!
My Dad and I have often discussed Coase and his economic theories. During the 90's I watched the chocolate marketing & financiers eating themselves. There seemed so much moving of goalposts there was none being made. My Economics tutorials from 1980-82 were still haunting me as manufacturing and output gave way to counting empty boxes as the dotcom paradigm grew.
Thatcher had a plan of high unemployment to batter unions, I disagreed, in those days you were allowed to offer an alternative, unlike 50 years earlier, before the mines were privatised.
It's not quite as brazen as the old mine owners who used to issue tokens for their shop but there are no punches pulled by Bob, as he describes the blatant theft of those allegedly enhancing shareholder value. The vicious circle that requires more financial analysts to identify which managers are helping a business grow and which blatantly exploit clarify how difficult it is to find an honest broker or more relevantly, auditor...
This book resonates so much with me as I had a board room seat watching some of these chancers, I mean, characters. As a trustee of a pension fund I knew I was working with a good employer who wanted to fix the problem not hide from it, postponing it for the never never. I knew I was lucky.Trustees in other firms told me terrible stories where they knew they had to resign but couldn't risk becoming blacklisted. In the financial services nobody knew how big the blacklist was but they knew honesty wasn't rewarded. Bob brings the buildings blacklist to the fore, and highlights the full extent of the horror, a UK disgrace.
It manifests itself today in our efforts to combat Covid. People are asked to be considerate and 80% are but if you have 3 kids and you take them out sledging then, "look pal, I've got these 3 to manage so could you take your 88 year old pop's out of my way" is the disdainful look given. The slow erosion of values such as helpfulness, trust etc, inevitably lead to an easy society to corrupt.
The corruption that leads all staff to park their morals at the door is endemic in the UK and it grows with each passing day. Its hard to fight against when your leaders lean into you and you watch those patsies push past you for promotion. Its hard to stamp your feet when you see sharp practice whether it be pension poverty, PFI pilfering or the current cladding on building, When someone working in your home suggests cash will get you 20% of a job is it any wonder 80% will pay cash. Bob's description of Grant Thornton's Sacha Romanovitch removal had me googling to read more of her story, but more of that later.
There are huge benefits when a good culture is endemic, but as we know, the word is rarely used in a positive way. The deep roots associated with something that is endemic is that cutting the head off is pointless. I use allotment analogies all the time but whether it sexism at Westminster, racism in the Met or the greed of the banks, cutting off the head or even the top tier cant change the culture, its in their nature, its in the unwritten procedures manual.
I've ranted before about Blair's babes being largely ignored. If you cant take advice on how to change the House of Commons working practices, flexible hours, what chance you could understand even simple things such as maternity leave in any other workplace. So men who have no homes to go to and just want to network in the bar dictate pointlessly long hours of business. Let's hope a few have learned their value during lockdown. I do blame Tony as he took the photo opportunity but did nothing.
I've also ranted about the Met producing statistics that suggest crime has a size, shape and colour to it. Never have they stopped and searched Gove and their targeting begets the statistics, which then reinforces all the believe required by the serving officers. If a Police Officer is trained to believe that criminals 'look like this', then they will naturally aim their suspicions and efforts at their previous arrest records. Certain offences are easy to prosecute and so with limited resources its safer to harass a small percentage of the London population rather than apply the law fairly across all, never mind the really labour intensive stuff like Bankers or even more difficult like modern slavery.
Limited resources in Lockdown will doubtless lead to more targets being hit as the law is applied and interpreted arbitrarily throughout the land, depending on whether the chief constable is target driven or maintenance of order. Laws are there for disputes, when we aren't able to do the right thing. Prosecuting the law another thing altogether. If someone walking the west highland way gets prosecuted for having a nip from a hip flask, we'll all be outraged, but if 10 people having 24 tins each in the meadows get lifted we'll say, quite right. The point of the alcohol ban is to help reduce the spread of the virus, but I've slipped off message.
Bob's book commences on the construction collapse of Carillion but with great assistance he's tackled many of the glaring anomalies, shining lights on how corporate luck is as likely a reason for rising shareholder value just as corporate collapse can be calculated on a lack of foresight, but blamed on markets. Its the smooth slogans that let bankers blank their bad judgement and blame the over exuberance of bond markets. The light shined on everyone's inability to do due diligence is quite simply illuminating. I find it amazing that after Michael Lewis' Liars Poker and The Big Short, after Enron's collapse, Maxwell and the rest, we still find ourselves surprised that the crooks are still 3 steps ahead.
Shout it from the roof tops, they still make up the rules. Regulators are still not wanting to catch those opportunistic corporate oligarchs. I was once told by one, our new Chairman at the time, that he'd made more millionaires than he'd made millions, as if to appeal to the Socialist in me who wanted all the staff to participate. The same guy took his brusque optimism out the door 12 months later having ruined our business as he listened to shareholders instead of the management. Management had been split over accelerating growth from 60% year on year to the 200% demanded by shareholders. Meek noises about management wanting sustainable growth were confronted with maximising shareholder value. Corporate brokers knew there was a window for them to make £5m before the bubble burst. The company was only worth £30m at best but they could sell us for £120m if we just went along with their ideas. We didn't, as the bubble burst before we even got a chance to disagree. The staff were let down as a large chunk went out the door, but thankfully there was enough money left to pay 6 times the basic entitlement and almost all volunteered to take a bung to move on to pastures new. A profit of £1.2m turned into breakeven, but that was luck, not judgement. If we'd taken three steps further down the road, someone would've lost £100m, everyone would've lost their jobs and there'd have been no redundancy money in the pot. I cant help thinking how many people's savings our chairman had taken in his unsuccessful launches. When it works it's usually asset stripping. Enhancing shareholder value does ultimately lead to asset stripping and that does include stripping the rights of the employees. Even when a company goes bust, its always the management who take the gamble, in my case encouraged by shareholders prepared to risk all as they have a diversified portfolio.
I remember emptying myself on the basis that management should've done better. I also remember being told a few years later that I'd never work in the city again as I was too honest. "You're a rogue, you're too honest, if you saw us overcharging a client you'd want to pay them back and also check to see how long we'd been thieving. That's not how it works now. If the client hasn't spotted it, then its ours. I mean who's going to advise the board? Are you seriously asking me to say we've a wee black hole and we need £1.4m to pay back to a client we forgot to credit over the last few years., when they and their haven't even spotted it."
Everyone's got a 'take' on corporate failures and for every successful business there will be others that fail. Like football clubs, they cant all win the league, but it would be better if we only had one winner and one relegated! It would also be better if winners were a bit more spread around. Covid has produced winners and losers, online wins and local economies destroyed. We may be heading for a feudal economy where bread really is valued. In football, there's currently only one loser, the season ticket buying fans. If truth be told, these fans have just bought shares in an 'unsponsored rights issues'. Football clubs have not gone to the capital markets, not when the season ticket holders have 'got behind their teams'. Many football clubs are well run and have respect for their fans. It is a two way street, but let's not blind ourselves to the others who represent corporate greed as prosaically as a Carillion board member. Those football supporters who have paid good money and yet none of it is being viewed as a 'cash for equity' swap. Instead its viewed as a 'cash for sentiment' swap. Great wealth does not make you smarter and these supporters aren't stupid, but back to Carillion.
What I love about Bob's analogies are they hit the mark. The one about a bricklayer on £2000 a week is beautiful as it binds us to the construction theme while also pointing out how we genuinely have a shortage of brickies in this country, just as the Germans did in the time of Auf Wiedersein pet. £2000 a week sounds great but brickies dont get pay offs like the Carillion Chairman got at two of his previous jobs. One for failing and one for succeeding, both times owing to the background market conditions. That is the beauty of turnng up at a casino, where the house always pays to anyone, wearing a cravat. Knowing the rules, is the caveat, to the path of great riches.
One place where Bob does seem to pull punches relates to Kiltearn's Carillion holdings. In praising the wisdom of Standard Life's investment techniques that had them out of the stock before 2017, one would've thought Kiltearn would be damned for still holding a stock that declared high dividends but increased pension shortfalls and a diminishing cash balance. I'm not professionally trained portfolio manager and look after a small personal pension, but my experience as a Trustee ensures I look at companies cash positions and pension shortfalls as part of my basics before I look any further. A new start wont have much cash, but they wont have pension issues either.
It still frustrates me, that decades after Maxwell, far from resolving the pension issues we still have regular failures. For the rank'n'file of most organisations the pension as part of their annual compensation, aka pay, is suitably ignored. I felt when DB schemes were abandoned the compensation to move to a different scheme deserved Government intervention and not just a Labour chancellor taking away the tax credits. When Thatcher was busy selling the family silver, the bricks and mortar of our Council estates, while decimating the manufacturing infrastructure of our country, its a sad fact that New Labour's plan was to sell off the gold and tax our pensioners pots. It is no surprise to me to see the rise in support for the SNP as Blair & Brown's Labour did not work out well for Scotland and having witnessed the ravaging of the country under Thatcher, voters only had one roll of the dice.
As we head off into 2021, the corporate collapses that will befall the average voter after covid are quite scary. The parallels with the 'elephant in the room' analysis of Carillion are there for all to see.
When Bob articulates that the contracts they were signing up to were less than the costs required to fufill them you knew Carillion the Charity had arrived. The fact that the government used contracts to provide a quasi nationalisation of the company, was like the Cabinet office's official seal, Carillion had been given charitable status. It reminded me of times when we'd been under pressure as a business and potential 'partners' would use those magic phrases. We like to have a Partnership, we think of it as a marriage. I'd look across the table at these idiots and think, yes I understand your idea of marriage vows. No matter how desperate we were for revenue I'd stonewall them and say no we cant do it at the price.
My fellow board members couldn't understand why I'd repeatedly turn down '£1.5m worth of business', or '£15m over 3 years' or '£1m in the first year alone'. SAGA were the first to try to break us. They wanted to know what our Marginal costs were and wanted a deal based on that. I explained we worked on Average costs and we could give them a discount on the average but could never go to Marginal costs as that would necessitate them giving us guaranteed volumes which they couldn't do and us telling the staff no pay rises for the length of the contract which we wouldn't do. I asked if they wanted MC, who would pay for the set up of the service, the costs associated with us even sitting around the table. The price of having such a good partner was that they would be able to sell their services cheaper than we could to our other customers. This meant we would be in a race to the bottom when what we offered was viewed a superior product.
Not everyone on my side could add up so they were easily distracted by revenue and had no appreciation of cost. Costs could be controlled, they thought. Costs we hear, can always be eradicated and there are always cost overruns so they just need controlled. Its not like you can put a condom on them I'd reply to the all male negotiation table. Costs are real and I'd use analogies. I'd say this hole is a par 4 because it takes 2 shots to reach the green. Its 440 yards long and I dont hit it that far in 1 shot. They'd argue back that with practice we could. I'd explain its like the Opera house. There are only 3000 seats so we cant fit 30,000 in for one performance on Christmas Eve and 3000 the rest of the year.
What astounds me still looking back is this was indemic in our society. Football fans watched their teams being controlled by aspiring oligarchs and every time a mistake was made by the chasing pack they'd be lambasted into administration. All the time, the big fish moving the money around would get away with another trophy and the wee teams would lose points and fans. When The Glazers reversed into Man Utd it was time for intervention, this free market has to stop thought those in red.
Standard Life were another 'partner' who we sent packing as they searched for the finer pencil partnership. I laboured the point that we wanted to provide a service at a certain level, we were not fine dining, but we weren't flipping burgers. They hammered home their desire for a bespoke service with specific enhancements for their clients and once we had created their platform for free we could have a 3% profit above those Marginal costs. You dont need a degree in Economics to know that in a volatile market that's suicidal and when you look at the detail of the MoD servicing contracts Carillion signed up for you can feel the holes in their pockets widening. The clarity at the same time as Bob beautifully puts it of the pension taking the brunt while the board brush any residual crumbs off the table into their pots. I cant wait to see who gets the wine cellar!
I've often wondered what happens at the allotment if your watering can has a hole in it and the tap is 50 yards from your plot. I think that's what happened to a lot of these pension funds. By the time the weeds on the path had been watered there was very little for the trustees. Cue, losing the plot or pension pot to piss in anecdotes.
I realised when I was working that my instinct was to be an auditor, a regulator, to find the problem and let the local management know. I did it as part of my nature and helped out many of my colleagues, especially when they had a problem about 11am that I could solve over a coffee. I applied for a job with the FCA and they never replied. With my track record of finding and solving problems, I wondered why. I never got any answer apart from, integrity doesn't work.
One of the attractions about the book, is the way Bob gently goes back, repeating some of the key themes. £29m in the bank and £7bn worth of debt. During this period probably 200,000 people handed back the keys to their house and declared themselves bust with debts of £40,000-£100,000 and annual wages of £20,000. These numbers are what drives the mental health of our nation and sleepless nights for years stealing from Pete to pay Pauli.
What is truly disgusting is yet again seeing a company created the way Hitler did the third Reich. Its so frustrating that we truly dont seem to be able to learn. We dont spot these things and as individuals we are so compliant we allow them to happen.
As I know a bit more about EAGA I will explain why I held no Carillion at the collapse. As I say I am not the wisest investor in town. I sold out a lot of my pension in August 2006 and did not put anything in the pension pot during 2007 as I said thee was going to be a crash owing to the credit bubble in USA. At the end of 2007 I'd missed out on the biggest year yet. I reminded myself I was not a professional adviser and in January 2008 I started contributions again while mumbling about 'how could these companies write of £50bn in bad debts so easily'. I didn't get the new paradigm in 2000 and I didn't get the bad debts handling.
My single ambition when I was working was to pay £1m in tax. Whenever I assess companies to invest ethically in I look at how much tax they pay. I have unethical investments too though investment trusts I have, but I like a company who pays tax or declares a loss. As Sir Tom Jones used to sing "its not unusual" f Carillion paid 50 times out to shareholders what they'd pay in corporation tax.
I liked the analysis of the subbies and in particular the couple who lost their business, 20 years in the making. I would imagine that they paid more in tax than Carillion and I'd love to know the answer.
The subbies experience clarifies how difficult it can be to ensure capital in society flows properly when there are so many randoms assessing risk. Clearly banks and auditors are not the best judges of who to trust with cash.
Bob's account of the post 2008 crash rings too many bells for me. The great art heist in Philadelphia when the Barnes foundation got ripped out from under the great benefactor in less than 50 years after his death is right up there with them but as the Labour MP Clive Lewis put it the Banks plundeing post crash deserves a mention as
"The largest theft anywhere ever"
A lovely expression to lay before parliament and yet one that would just keep going and going. This relates to the banks who were rescued and being tasked to prime the economy with quantitative easing (QE), keep small businesses going, decided on their own backs to do the complete opposite. The bankers closed so many businesses by putting them into the "Special needs classification". Loans for beauticians of £5000 or aspiring property tycoons of £1m, it didn't matter. If there's more money to be made from calling in the loan than lending, you know the bank will maximise profit. It shocked me how I became a business angel' during that period helping someone out for a small amount of money. It seemed normal as it was earning me no interest and the individual concerned seemed to be paying over 9%. The extrapolation using the rise of credit unions, tells you all you need to know about our banking regulators. Borrowing has become a complicated act and best you have a friend to read the small print, or just hold a tape recorder! Its no surprise that crowdfunding has become so successful. Its over a year ago I mentioned the change in the capital markets for smaller businesses. People are much happier either giving their money to a start up or receiving vouchers and systems for raising cash cheaply are becoming simpler and more effective. The less you promise in return the less the need for regulation and the more trust creeps out of the woodwork as a way to transact.
Like any good accountant, there's a shadow ledger. With Bob, as you read, its hard to keep up as he's created so many shadow ledgers in your mind. I'll concentrate on one for a moment as it goes hand in hand with the Black lives Matter movement. It's always made me chuckle how Parliament could vote for work place drug tests and exempt themselves from them. In the book the pursuit of crime as Anthony Stansfield would have it is tuned from the fraudsters, well to whatever ticks the boxes.
I've gone to the bog for a piss so please accept my apologies.
When this message is deleted you'll know, I have returned.
I may be some time.
Its my prostate.
I'll put my notes down here and will assimilate later
I'm back cutting and pasting my paragraphs
On banking, since 2009 and the QE its been well documented how these banks were tasked with pump priming the economy. What frustrated everyone was how they ignored that role and instead set about bankrupting small businesses as if they were performing diligent house keeping that previous regimes had ignored. They weren't, because what was endemic in the bank, as articulated by Bob, was that the primary obligation lay in achieving independence, to make shareholder value grow.
I worked for banks on numerous occasions and their management rarely related to good practice as I saw it. In 1988 I was sent down to London to help out on a securities backlog in the firm that had just bought us. The combined business traded on our name while my job was to help tidy up the wee backlog in a firm that had only been trading for a year. I joined the team of 40 working on the backlog and it was chaos. Within a week I asked my boss to give 38 of them back to the daily work and me and 2 others would do it. It really was a real case of too many cooks.
The following week I mentioned in the meeting that the backlog was actually £600m, money which we were losing interest on. I was told '
it wasn't real money and that it related to counter party risk requirements'.
I laughed and said, "You're right it does relate to the CRR, but it is real cash. What the CRR report highlights is you've paid clients £312 million for stock that you haven't delivered to the market yet. Sold stock that you call your sales backlog. There is also £287 million of bought stock here you have paid the market counter party for the shares but given it to your client without being paid. If you want to be in stockbroking settlements you should get the money back whenever you pay for something. If you dont the CRR sensibly lets you know that you are short and in danger of going bankrupt. Luckily for you, your parent, NatWest bank, dont understand it either and have wired money into your account, over £600 million in the last year. There was another £32 million in the last 2 weeks.
Silence, then a very angry 'how did you find that?'
I was uncontrollable in my laughter asking 'surely your internal auditors or annual auditors brought it up. I mean, with interests rate at 12% equivalents overnight its costing a fortune.'
'No its not as the money is in our account, its just for CRR!' said a purple faced director.
'Eh no' I laughed, 'I got back £17million this morning after delivering an ICI deal from 4 months ago. We had the stock but couldn't find the docket and Geoff didn't know how to regenerate one so he just waited for it to magically appear. We paid the client £17m, not today when we got paid, but 4 months ago. The market maker has been borrowing this stock for 4 months. Its not rocket science but this one deal has cost the bank roughly £600,000 in lost interest. I'm not going to add it all up for you but every receipt from the bank has been diligently registered in the GL and its balance is now over £600m'.
I was astounded how incompetent the whole enterprise was and it brought out an autism in me that just delivered the truth with hysterical giggles. We didn't know that Nick Leeson would bning down Barings but hen he did many in that room weren't surprised. I did lie in the meeting as I had done a rough calculation based on when the money arrived on the GL from the parent bank. I reckoned it had been between £30-£40million just lost in interest and face saving was the only reason it went on so long. Local management had blamed it on products that a team of 'rocket scientists' had produced but it wasn't that at all. It was just the simple business of buying and selling gone bad. Paying and never receiving.
I showed my boss the ledger and his eyes popped. I was not long in the job and the only clerk who understood the recently launched CRR reports. When I explained them to him, I found it so incredulous that the regulators had brought them in without guiding senior management why they were useful. I paraphrased one of Harry Enfield's characters "Loadsamoney" to explain it.
"Fing is Guv, if your subbies ask you for extra dosh every day for materials, you know they're using your gear on a homer."
"How come the bank keep paying the money?" he asked
"That is what I find so funny. I'm on £15,000 a year and I'm asking you for 5% which gets knocked back. They keep asking for tens of millions of pounds and their bosses in the bank are just paying it. It makes me wonder if they're all part of Chigwell 942!"
"Stop it!" He laughed, he was a hibby too!
Seriously though, as I read Bob's account of Carillion's collapse and corporate UK's rewards for failure it all reminds me of how compliant they all were with what they were told. They are complicit but it goes further than that. As I've said before, it stretches back further than Scargill v Thatcher. This idiotic faith placed in leaders comes at a great cost to society when those leaders go rogue. The Tories quietly loved Thatcher doing the dirty stuff and couldn't wait to despatch her with their priest. No fishing analogy works but I liked the thought. They didn't want to stick their head above the parapet but Thatch did her spitting image best and was effortlessly guided by their greed. With union power diminished they could bin her.
The people in Nat West gave a subsidiary (who only made £20m a year ) £600m because over 13 months in operation it continually had cash flow problems. It wasn't like a pay day loan here money went back each week. This was one way. It was endemic. "How much do you need for your CRR today?" The anser was always £millions. A good day was when it was only £3m. I never met anyone from Nat West who understood what they were funding or what it was costing. For the avoidance of doubt, this wasn't an increase in an overdraft. This was physical cash (electronically transferred) moving from Nat West to its subsidiary investment bank arm.
So the regulator had brought in something that was very valuable as it raised red flags everywhere. Unfortunately, if incompetent management want to distance themselves from the action then quite simply, red was the new green!
You might wonder how we sorted this with 3 people and its quite simple, its what anybody would do. I got the reports and we sorted by value. We had £200m back in a month and thereafter it got very tough. When we finally finished the work we'd spent a year and the last transaction turned out to be the 'new backlog', from the 'we are on top of the' daily stuff!
In the greatest of ironies the local management got their on back on us when they closed the Edinburgh office and moved the work to London. Everyone loves a bit of Ian Hunter but no hint of 'once bitten twice shy' there! I got emptied and it after another we sojourn down to London to show them how to do the work I moved on with a redundancy cheque.
Before I left I had the great pleasure of handing in the Hands of Hibs petition to Downing Street with Brian and Tony who would set up London Hibs later that week. Later that day Nelson Mandela arrived in Downing Street, about an hour us, to my shame, we'd gone off for a pint or 6. I had a gig with Rich at the Barbican tube station, a tiny wee pub called the Sutton Arms I think. We did a great version of platfom 99, which had become about the millenium bug. "Soon you'll all hear about this slimy slug, they've named it already this millenium bug, they say jump aboard early you will be fine, get yourself a ticket at platform 99...." Certainly an improvement on the 1985 version 5 years earlier.
Not long after I'd been emptied, I found myself at the Bank of Scotland savings schemes adding things up.
I liked numbers and once I'd reconciled the accounts I'd been given and another 4 they hadn't asked for I said ;
'There's about £30,000 to claim from people we paid in error.'
No we cant do that as they've already been written off.'
'Eh, No, sorry about that, but you wrote off £1700 but it was actually £32,000 you were owed and you owe £30,000 to members of the scheme. I've bought them the units they were entitled to but someone will have to write the letter apologising for not investing the money when we got it, some gave us as many as 11 monthly amounts and we bought nothing for them. I've done a list of all the scheme members where; you've over invested, bought after they stopped contributing or paid twice when they left. Luckily one of them hadn't cashed the 2nd cheque so I've cancelled it, hence its only about £30k
'You cant do that, you're not authorised.' I was told
'No, I didn't buy the units, I let the folks know which clients needed what done to them, they made sure your scheme members who had paid money into the scheme got their units, as I'm not authorised. I'll get my coat..' I laughed, it as 5pm, but why would a supervisor and another junior member of the local management team chastise me for fixing something, I was in Edinburgh, not London right?
'Its already been written off' rang in my ears again as I left. I really didn't get people who were lovely sociable people acting as if their incompetence had made the money the bank's. The money belonged to those who had entrusted it to them. If they had messed up with other scheme members they couldn't just use their money. It was a massive mistake as the profit margins on these schemes were small and big losses through incompetence endangered their jobs, but frankly, they were shit trustees of others money. I was offered a full time job after temping for 2 months but the salary offered suggested they were happy if I just left and took my honesty with me.
It's when I realised how endemic our problems were across society and how much of a sheltered world I lived in. I honestly thought we were better in Edinburgh, that honesty and integrity were not just soundly expected but never applauded because it was the norm. If you found a problem you shouted it out like a miner would if the canary died. Finding a problem is good, it means you can learn. Its the start of a new enlightenment. Oops, that was 1990 and Nick Leeson was just getting going!
Analysing behaviour. Good, bad and the rise of the opportunists
Studying behaviour has been a pet habit of mine. I've been a watcher, when we did Deadbeat, I was shit at reviewing a sound, preferring to review how people reacted. It was the same with the lyrics in the band. My favourites from the band days are "Fall from Grace", "Watch you Grow" or going back to the "Penny Drops" era I liked "On Your Own" and "People at their Best." When playing live the lyrics always moved ith the venue, the people, the journey to the gig, the news of the day. If Hibs had scored a goal the goalscorer would suddenly find himself replacing "Hiawatha", or "Move your feet" would be 'to the Scotland beat' after a 1-0 defeat against Costa Rica. I've forgotten where this is going. Oh yes, back to the book, we need to waken up.
I was lucky enough to do a transfer in 2nd year at uni swapping maths to study Psychology with the Economics. I had to do a crash course 1st year while doing the 2nd year course and I loved it. There were a few things I learned about Behaviour that made me want to do Behavioural Economics but the Uni didn't like transfers from Science faculty to Arts. Science didn't do Economics & Psychology, I was also largely a jakey, so I took my ordinary, eventually. The learning was just beginning and why do I feel I'm answering questions about myself that nobody asked or better still wants to hear the answer. Did someone just drop £20 though the door with a book and say read and discuss the relevance in your own shabby existence.
Ah, good point, but I'll just answer that. Eh, no £20, just the book, no questions, just Christmas wrapping paper with trees on it to remind me how many came down to wrap this book.
Lies, damned lies and Statistics, saw me look bizarrely at a sunday newspaper as it wrote "Given what might be politely called the NHS's history of struggling with logistics" I just exploded, but luckily I wont give them any more time.
Sustainable and equitable growth. I thought that was the buzzwords we lived by but only during our bleeding edge of technology web days did we get to do it. We only had a fleeting time until an institutional shareholder during the 1999 dot com bubble insisted our 60-70% year on year growth was missing the market. Our Chairman insisted operations always moaned when the marketing guys succeeded and it seemed explaining that the marketing guys were bringing in chocolate fireguards somehow had us missing the point. It was not opeationally important whether the chocolate fireguards worked, just whether we could sell them.
Other notes of worth. Grant Thornton are currently accused of not checking the cash in the business added up, see patisseie valerie or AssetCo. Whether they are a better version or not, or whether they've gone back to the lazy audit way to secure business remains the subject of others. All I know is many people are still lamenting their involvement in the film industry tax dodge. This was legitimate tax avoidance for two years until the government realised their mistake, restrospectively changed the law, and it became tax evasion. The accountants all had autonomy and yet it was their tax dodging clients that got done. Strange but true, the accountants all got to walkaway. One guy got jail for organising it on an industrial level, yet utility companies or Universities with large housing stocks continue to abuse loopholes to maximise their profits.
