An audience of two

Sunday October 05, 2008

This is rumour control. These are the facts.
It's been a busy week and I've finally got around to jotting down some thoughts from earlier. Throughout this week there's been an image in my mind - the scenes from Alien 3 where Andrews groups the convicts together and shouts "This is rumour control. These are the facts." He then goes on to explain something of what is going on, in terms that they can understand. (I once had a manager, Mike Harding, who took a similar approach. It's very effective indeed.)

All week I've been waiting for someone - politician, journalist, ANYONE - to stand up and do this. It hasn't happened. What we have been told is that there's "toxic debt" in the system, and that's whet the government wants to buy. It's still not clear to me whether that means the government is going to buy up the defaulted mortgages themselves and thus guarantee that the debt will be repaid. Or whether they plan to buy the actual houses themselves. Or if they are only prepared to buy the "derivative securities" which the banks have created. It's not clear to me what the government and taxpayer is getting for their money, because it sure as hell isn't the same deal that Warren Buffet got, and it's not clear to me why he can arrange a better deal. OK, so he's the world's greatest investor; that somehow gives him more clout than every single other person in the USA combined?

Obviously this is Still-President Bush's job, but neither he nor Paulson seem capable of doing it. Neither are the presidential candidates. And Brian Glover died in 1997, so I guess we're stuffed.

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