Well, Gordon Brown has said he’s good in a crisis. Now seems to be the time to prove it. Really, any piffling worries about the Labour leadership don’t stack up against what appears to be happening to the high street banks and the people who use them.
You might call it a shotgun nationalisation. Let’s hope it works.
Who are AIG – how much of the western financial world did they insure?
AIG are a very large insurance firm. One of the things they have insured in the last few years is bank lending based on the sale of mortgages. The idea is that in the event of a bad mortgage, the insurers indemnify the bank against potential losses. Many of those large losses are now being called in and AIG does not, apparently, have the resources to meet them. Unless the US Federal Reserve Board* intervenes, it will go down like Lehman Brothers – except that the business links and obligations AIG has are much wider than those of Lehman. There are more than a few commonplace UK names in the reporting following from The Guardian, the Telegraph. Time magazine has a good overview piece too.
Mind you, if you want a laugh, you can always watch the government(s)
* Effectively, a coalition of major US banks, many of whom may well be in individual financial trouble themselves
Thanks to Mark.
Help! Satire is dead. McCain campaign spokeswoman Carly Fiorina, former head of IT firm Hewlett-Packard (2000-05) responds to comedian Tina Fey’s parody of Sarah Palin which was broadcast on the last edition of veteran US TV programme Saturday Night Live.
How do you put a price on financial products which no one wants to buy? In brief, this is the problem. Very many large financial institutions no longer know what they are worth. The product is corrupt and nobody trusts each other. It’s a very nasty mixture of previous greed, current worry, possible panic, caused by a lack of effective regulation (editing 😉 Clearly, many efforts are being made to regain control of the financial system, but, we are in the realms of group psychology now. Let us hope a rational leader can be found – and then be successful.
Alex Brummer in The Daily Mail
Hack Clickable Cartoon published at Channel 4 News.
From the NBC and via the BBC. Sarah Palin out in public without minders. Interesting stuff.
