THIS is reply to Richard North’s post: Why Gordon Brown’s Rescue Package Is Not Going To Work, by Chenier… It’s crap. Sorry, not you FSBFP, the stuff about the accountancy rules. They already changed them, and I wrote a piece about it at the time; it did f*ck all to improve matters. John M Berry is being somewhat disingenuous in not mentioning in his article that the SEC had already issued a statement allowing people to take a much more cheery view of their Troubled Assets, but perhaps he just overlooked it in all the excitement. (Image: Beau Bo D’Or) Equally, John M Berry pointedly ignores a little local difficulty called Enron, which I suppose is unsurprising given that the fraud there involved taking a view of their Troubled Assets so cheery that people ended up doing jail time. Ironically, he even cites the Sovereign Debt fiasco of the early 80’s, which I have written about, as an excellent example of what a good idea it is to pretend that banks are not insolvent when they are insolvent. I have written about it as an excellent example of how stupid the bankers were in the first place to lend vast sums of money to countries which did not have a hope in hell of servicing the debt, much less repaying the principal. Voodoo accounting is almost as attractive as voodoo tax breaks to people who want to believe that there really isn’t anything wrong with laisser faire financial markets as exemplified over the last quarter of a centu ...
Anytime
THIS is reply to Richard North’s post: Why Gordon Brown’s Rescue Package Is Not Going To Work, by Chenier… It’s crap. Sorry, not you FSBFP, the stuff about the accountancy rules. They already changed them, and I wrote a piece about it at the time; it did f*ck all to improve matters. John M Berry is being somewhat disingenuous in not mentioning in his article that the SEC had already issued a statement allowing people to take a much more cheery view of their Troubled Assets, but perhaps he just overlooked it in all the excitement. (Image: Beau Bo D’Or) Equally, John M Berry pointedly ignores a little local difficulty called Enron, which I suppose is unsurprising given that the fraud there involved taking a view of their Troubled Assets so cheery that people ended up doing jail time. Ironically, he even cites the Sovereign Debt fiasco of the early 80’s, which I have written about, as an excellent example of what a good idea it is to pretend that banks are not insolvent when they are insolvent. I have written about it as an excellent example of how stupid the bankers were in the first place to lend vast sums of money to countries which did not have a hope in hell of servicing the debt, much less repaying the principal. Voodoo accounting is almost as attractive as voodoo tax breaks to people who want to believe that there really isn’t anything wrong with laisser faire financial markets as exemplified over the last quarter of a centu ...