When I was a young fella back in the 1970’s, it was a thrill to receive a letter in the post. In those innocent times, you always assumed it meant good news, unlike in later years when envelopes carried bills and “Dear John” letters from childhood sweethearts.
It was a general rule in the “good old days” that bad news was delivered by telephone while the post delivered letters from overseas relatives with exotic dollar notes enclosed and scented letters in German from a pen friend you would never meet. This was particularly true in our house, because we didn’t have a telephone and like the rest of the street, we depended on the good grace of Mrs Gray across the road to be our telephonic link to the outside world. Needless to say, we didn’t abuse that gift and used it only for news of family bereavements and hospital appointments. Mrs Gray was a lovely women but she wouldn’t appreciate you spending half an hour in her living room telling your mate about the weather or the celebrity you had spotted the night before.
I learned at an early age however, that letters didn’t come out of the blue. You had to work for them, usually by firing off an initial mail yourself. One fruitful avenue was to write to embassies enquiring as to their country and seeking any information they might have, as though you had just heard of Canada and felt the need to understand it. Embassies seemed to have entire departments focussed on servicing the queries of small boys, because two weeks after my initial query, a large brown envelope would be plopped into our hallway enclosing maps and wall charts.
It was all positive stuff of course, designed to promote their country. The information from the German embassy contained beautiful pictures of the Black Forest or the Munich Beer Festival with no mention of the war or the ugly steel works of the Ruhr Valley. The Americans sent me a wall chart of their National parks but glossed over the Indians who used to live in them, while the Australians showed lots of smiling black Aboriginal faces but kept quiet about the “White Only” only policy that was still in force at the time.
These posters were my childhood window to the wider world and planted a seed of adventure within me that is still growing. Thankfully, I’ve managed to see most of the places depicted in those pictures, even if the reality has been different to my childhood thoughts.
For example, Australia was always depicted as a country of red dirt, kangaroos and suntanned blokes in wide brimmed hats under a clear blue sky. Cities were rarely presented, unless it was a romantic shot of the Sydney Opera House and bridge. You got no sense of what it meant to live in an Australian City or of seasons that differed from high summer.
There is of course another Australia. The country in which most Australians live and where the weather is pretty crap for six months of the year. While many countries have a North/South or City/Country divide, Australia takes this to the extreme. The South East is a different country to elsewhere, particularly Queensland and the Northern Territory, which are as foreign as Cambodia is to Iceland.
When you leave the sophisticated streets of Melbourne to venture north, you do so with the spirit of Phileas Fogg. The first thing you notice is that people wear different clothing. The natives of Queensland wear wide brimmed hats and knee high socks with shorts and look like they are about to audition for a Western movie. The locals in Melbourne wear European clothes because that’s where they think they live. It’s the same with cuisine. Italian, Greek and Lebanese food is the most popular in the South East whereas our cousins in the North like barbecuing their food, particularly if it involves animals found on Australia’s national emblem. They drink fizzy beer with all meals including breakfast, whereas we sip lattes and micro brewery ales.
The biggest difference you’ll notice is in the area of arts and entertainment. The only art you’ll find in any part of Australia beyond the metropolitan cities was painted 400 years ago by indigenous people and probably has a bowling alley built on it now. Sydney and Melbourne on the other hand have galleries displaying the work of 17th Century Masters as well as opera, ballet and theatre. When we want to watch sport, we head down to the MCG or the Sydney Cricket ground for a night of AFL or Rugby. In Queensland they prefer their sports to include animals, such as bulls that don’t want to be ridden by wannabe cowboys, or dwarves that don’t mind being chucked.
I guess the easiest way to describe the difference between these ‘two countries within a country’ is that one half takes its inspiration from Europe whereas the other looks to the worst excesses of the United States. This can be seen in all its ghastly glory along the Gold Coast, south of Brisbane. It boasts a Miami Beach clone in Surfers Paradise and a gaudy collection of theme parks designed to separate fools from their money. They also have all year round sun and beaches and so attract tourists from the more sophisticated parts of Australia, who dine off fried fast food for a week before returning to their normal routine of salads and almond croissants.
These two Australia’s exist in relative harmony with each other because each of them tries to pretend that the other doesn’t exist. Occasionally however, that harmony is shattered by the realisation that the other side is gaining the upper hand. The recent election is a good example. City Australia likes to think that they run the country and the political class is heavily Sydney and Melbourne based. This election, however, threw up a hung parliament which left the balance of power in the hands of three rural independents with views that made posh Melbournians choke on their lattes.
Their mission is to create “One Australia”. I suspect they will have the opposite affect and in a few years Queensland will split from the rest of the country and rename itself “New Las Vegas”. And afterwards, small Irish boys will have to write to two embassies to get pictures of kangaroos and the Sydney Opera House.
Sunday 19 September 2010
Sunday 12 September 2010
Subterranean Homesick Blues
Close your eyes for a second and imagine that you are sitting in a warm, dark room. All you can hear is the incessant dripping of water from far away and the slow monotonous sound of feet shuffling. Then imagine that you’ve just received word that it will be like that for at least the next 100 days.
That’s the hell that 33 miners are currently living through. Trapped 700 metres below the surface of the San Jose mine in Chile, they must wait for the rescuers to come. And they won’t be coming anytime soon.
Spare a thought for Carlos Mamani in particular. He’s the only non Chilean down there and must be the butt of many “A Bolivian walked into a bar” jokes by now.
Perhaps it’s just me, but Irish people seem to revel in stories from far flung places involving boys trapped down wells, astronauts floating in an airless capsule, or miners huddled in an underground chamber after a rock fall.
We have led the rush to places like California, South Africa and Victoria whenever a whiff of gold was in the air. One place we didn’t make it to was Chile. While it seems that every earthquake in Sumatra and bus crash in the Philippines has to involve at least one Irish backpacker, it’s safe to say that none of them are among the 33 unfortunate men currently trapped in the bowels of a deep and dark mine.
I can’t help feeling some of their pain when watching news reports of their plight and imagining how I would feel in the same situation. I don’t feel like this when I look at reports on oil spills in the Caribbean or airplane crashes in Russia. Mining disasters like this are different. They offer the immediate shock of a catastrophe and the possibility of redemption. News will be delivered breathlessly each night of progress and unlike most news stories; people trapped down mines who survive the initial accident are normally pulled out alive.
In the meantime, the media keeps us updated on their phone calls and video links with relatives, which just goes to show that mining disasters are staying up with the times. No doubt one of them will open a twitter account and keep us informed in 140 word tit bits such as “Went to bed last night and it was pitch dark and woke up this morning and it was the same. When is Spring due?” or “Is it hot down here because we’re closer to hell?”
The fact that they have MP3 players and video links is fantastic. But it does make you wonder how we could put a man on the moon in 1969 but it takes four months to dig a hole in the ground. In the last forty years, technology has moved on apace with digital TV, the Internet and mobile phones. But engineering is still where it was in the 1960’s. Those guys will have to wait for months to be rescued but the information hungry world can be fed with electronic feeds from the depths of the world on a daily basis.
Information is the drug of the 21st Century. We need GPS gadgets in our cars to get us to the same shopping centre we’ve been to for the last ten years. Mobile phones to tell our partners we are on the tram, even though we make the same trip at the same time each day and Twitter to tell the world when we’ve been to the toilet or found a large and unexpected bogie.
But as Leo in the West Wing said, technology developments in the last forty years are designed to deliver a more efficient method for the transmission of pornography and gossip. Some of which one presumes is being fed to the miners as we speak.
As a blog writer, I’m probably being hypocritical in this condemnation of modern technology. I text and email for example but draw the line at social networking or internet technology that involves more than checking out the Irish Times and the BBC. This is probably a generational thing. I was one of the first people in my peer group to have an email address and I treat that medium with the ease and efficiency that 12 years olds have for downloading illegal movies.
And as for mobile phones, I upgraded to predictive text a few years ago but draw the line at including smiley faces and I’m illiterate in the fine art of “text speak”.
Now we live in an era of IPads and wireless internet on mobile phones. I see people on the tram watching movies on screens the size of postage stamps and shake my head. I see them reading novels on Ipads and think “would it not be easier to buy a book and certainly a lot less hassle if it got wet or you lost it”.
If they can use these resources to entertain and inform those unfortunate Chilean miners, it will be worthwhile. But they should be careful about going too far.
Yesterday for example, they sent down a miniature TV set and allowed the guys to watch Chile play the Ukraine in Kiev. It’s not clear how the 2-1 defeat affected their spirits or whether Senor Mamani from Bolivia felt excluded from the process. Hopefully Chile doesn’t play Bolivia in the next 100 days or we could be looking at the first example of subterranean football hooliganism and I wouldn’t fancy Carlos’s chance of winning that argument.
Psychologists have been helping them deal with the stress of their confinement. But it’s not clear if this includes advice on how to deal with disputes that will arise when all 33 guys argue over the TV remote control. Imagine if the History channel was showing a documentary on the hunt for Nazi war criminals and Discovery had a show on killer sharks? At least there are an odd number of them and a majority will always arise. Unless the first decision of their community was that Bolivians don’t get a vote!
That’s the hell that 33 miners are currently living through. Trapped 700 metres below the surface of the San Jose mine in Chile, they must wait for the rescuers to come. And they won’t be coming anytime soon.
Spare a thought for Carlos Mamani in particular. He’s the only non Chilean down there and must be the butt of many “A Bolivian walked into a bar” jokes by now.
Perhaps it’s just me, but Irish people seem to revel in stories from far flung places involving boys trapped down wells, astronauts floating in an airless capsule, or miners huddled in an underground chamber after a rock fall.
We have led the rush to places like California, South Africa and Victoria whenever a whiff of gold was in the air. One place we didn’t make it to was Chile. While it seems that every earthquake in Sumatra and bus crash in the Philippines has to involve at least one Irish backpacker, it’s safe to say that none of them are among the 33 unfortunate men currently trapped in the bowels of a deep and dark mine.
I can’t help feeling some of their pain when watching news reports of their plight and imagining how I would feel in the same situation. I don’t feel like this when I look at reports on oil spills in the Caribbean or airplane crashes in Russia. Mining disasters like this are different. They offer the immediate shock of a catastrophe and the possibility of redemption. News will be delivered breathlessly each night of progress and unlike most news stories; people trapped down mines who survive the initial accident are normally pulled out alive.
In the meantime, the media keeps us updated on their phone calls and video links with relatives, which just goes to show that mining disasters are staying up with the times. No doubt one of them will open a twitter account and keep us informed in 140 word tit bits such as “Went to bed last night and it was pitch dark and woke up this morning and it was the same. When is Spring due?” or “Is it hot down here because we’re closer to hell?”
The fact that they have MP3 players and video links is fantastic. But it does make you wonder how we could put a man on the moon in 1969 but it takes four months to dig a hole in the ground. In the last forty years, technology has moved on apace with digital TV, the Internet and mobile phones. But engineering is still where it was in the 1960’s. Those guys will have to wait for months to be rescued but the information hungry world can be fed with electronic feeds from the depths of the world on a daily basis.
Information is the drug of the 21st Century. We need GPS gadgets in our cars to get us to the same shopping centre we’ve been to for the last ten years. Mobile phones to tell our partners we are on the tram, even though we make the same trip at the same time each day and Twitter to tell the world when we’ve been to the toilet or found a large and unexpected bogie.
But as Leo in the West Wing said, technology developments in the last forty years are designed to deliver a more efficient method for the transmission of pornography and gossip. Some of which one presumes is being fed to the miners as we speak.
As a blog writer, I’m probably being hypocritical in this condemnation of modern technology. I text and email for example but draw the line at social networking or internet technology that involves more than checking out the Irish Times and the BBC. This is probably a generational thing. I was one of the first people in my peer group to have an email address and I treat that medium with the ease and efficiency that 12 years olds have for downloading illegal movies.
And as for mobile phones, I upgraded to predictive text a few years ago but draw the line at including smiley faces and I’m illiterate in the fine art of “text speak”.
Now we live in an era of IPads and wireless internet on mobile phones. I see people on the tram watching movies on screens the size of postage stamps and shake my head. I see them reading novels on Ipads and think “would it not be easier to buy a book and certainly a lot less hassle if it got wet or you lost it”.
If they can use these resources to entertain and inform those unfortunate Chilean miners, it will be worthwhile. But they should be careful about going too far.
Yesterday for example, they sent down a miniature TV set and allowed the guys to watch Chile play the Ukraine in Kiev. It’s not clear how the 2-1 defeat affected their spirits or whether Senor Mamani from Bolivia felt excluded from the process. Hopefully Chile doesn’t play Bolivia in the next 100 days or we could be looking at the first example of subterranean football hooliganism and I wouldn’t fancy Carlos’s chance of winning that argument.
Psychologists have been helping them deal with the stress of their confinement. But it’s not clear if this includes advice on how to deal with disputes that will arise when all 33 guys argue over the TV remote control. Imagine if the History channel was showing a documentary on the hunt for Nazi war criminals and Discovery had a show on killer sharks? At least there are an odd number of them and a majority will always arise. Unless the first decision of their community was that Bolivians don’t get a vote!
Friday 3 September 2010
A Tale of Bank Robbers
Regular readers may have noticed that I use this blog to try out different writing styles, from self deprecatory humour to in depth analysis of current affairs. This is designed to give me an escape from the drudgery of my daily existence and train me for my future career as Ireland’s next Roddy Doyle. Or more likely, the world’s next Enid Blyton.
Today I want to delve into the world of financial journalism, in the knowledge that this will bore the socks off most of my regular readers. But it is a subject close to my heart and gives me an opportunity to satisfy one of the other purposes of this blog - to get things off my chest.
I want to talk about Anglo Irish Bank and what the people of Ireland should do about it. Anglo (which means “English” but we won’t go there) is a merchant bank with about 400 staff and a debt that would put an African dictator to shame. During Ireland’s boom years, Anglo was the poster boy of the financial industry. They borrowed money from bondholders and the European Central bank (ECB) and loaned it to developers to fuel the property boom. Now that the property market has crashed, Anglo is as insolvent as the last person holding tulips during the Dutch mania of the 17th Century.
There is now a debate as to what should happen to Anglo. Should it be allowed to go bust, or as the Irish Government proposes, should it be kept alive by tax payer investment?
I should nail my colours to the mast first. I work for a bank that would have gone bust but for a Government bail-out and I’m a dyed in the wool Socialist who questions the whole premise of Neo-Liberal Capitalism. But I’ll try to be as dispassionate as possible.
Banks aren’t like normal companies. They are so embedded into the overall economy that we need to give banks some wriggle room during recessions but can’t allow them to lose the run of themselves either. They are supposed to have a large Capital base which would protect them from the slings and arrows of economic downturns. And they are supposed to have lending limits (max 85% loans etc) and diversified lending so that they don’t have exposure to a single sector (like construction). This would allow them to absorb bad debts in a particular sector while making money elsewhere - the old argument that shops should sell umbrellas and ice cream.
Now think about what happened in Ireland. They allowed banks to lower their capital base because they were able to borrow unlimited funds from the ECB and Bondholders. Lax regulation allowed the banks to lend to anybody, regardless of credit status, to give 100% loans and to concentrate this on one sector (Property Development). When the property bubble collapsed, it took the whole house of cards with it.
Ireland now has banks with an over-reliance on International markets for funding because they outgrew the domestic deposit base by chasing asset growth. These markets leant to Anglo, but also to retail banks like AIB and BOI who also chased the same drug of cheap credit.
So that’s where we are. But the bigger question is how do we get out of this mess? The normal arguments for protecting banks from going bust are that:
1. They employ a lot of people.
2. Banks lend to Mams and Dads and hold deposits from little old ladies.
3. Allowing a bank to go bust spooks the International Markets and would make it difficult or expensive for other banks in that market to borrow funds. This is the Law of Unexpected Consequences.
In the case of Anglo, I don’t buy the first two arguments above. It employs hardly anyone and some may say that those that are there are partly culpable for the mess the company got into in the first place. It doesn’t have a deposit base among ordinary people. In fact it hardly has a deposit base at all. And it only lends to developers who attract as much sympathy in the general public as tax collectors..
There are two arguments for saving Anglo which might apply. Developers went crazy over the last ten years building ghost estates, multi storey car parks in small rural towns and showpiece vanity projects along Dublin’s quays. For the big stuff, they borrowed from Anglo and for the smaller stuff they borrowed from AIB and BOI.
The Government argues that if Anglo goes bust, it will bring down all the developers on its books at the same time. These developers as I mentioned above are also large borrowers from AIB and BOI. The argument is that if they go bust they could bring those domestic banks with them.
You could also argue that if Anglo goes bust, it will spook the International markets and AIB and BOI will find it impossible to borrow and the economy will grind to a halt.
In reality, if developers go bust, it will put pressure on AIB and BOI but it would be cheaper for the Government to lend money to these banks than it will cost them to bail out Anglo.
And as for International Markets and Bondholders, if they get burned, they’ll moan for a while but pretty soon they’ll be back if they think there is money to be made. And what harm is it if this disaster teaches the international markets to be more cautious in the future?
So who pays? I think it would have been better to let Anglo go bust, which would screw their bond holders. This might result in most Irish developers going bust, which is no bad thing either as they would be forced to sell all those helicopters and speed boats. This will have a knock effect on AIB and BOI, but the government can apply its help there and not at the top end.
The other option is to follow the government’s approach. Protect the markets and international bond holders and saddle the Irish people with a huge burden for the next twenty years. Is that the Ireland that we want?
Today I want to delve into the world of financial journalism, in the knowledge that this will bore the socks off most of my regular readers. But it is a subject close to my heart and gives me an opportunity to satisfy one of the other purposes of this blog - to get things off my chest.
I want to talk about Anglo Irish Bank and what the people of Ireland should do about it. Anglo (which means “English” but we won’t go there) is a merchant bank with about 400 staff and a debt that would put an African dictator to shame. During Ireland’s boom years, Anglo was the poster boy of the financial industry. They borrowed money from bondholders and the European Central bank (ECB) and loaned it to developers to fuel the property boom. Now that the property market has crashed, Anglo is as insolvent as the last person holding tulips during the Dutch mania of the 17th Century.
There is now a debate as to what should happen to Anglo. Should it be allowed to go bust, or as the Irish Government proposes, should it be kept alive by tax payer investment?
I should nail my colours to the mast first. I work for a bank that would have gone bust but for a Government bail-out and I’m a dyed in the wool Socialist who questions the whole premise of Neo-Liberal Capitalism. But I’ll try to be as dispassionate as possible.
Banks aren’t like normal companies. They are so embedded into the overall economy that we need to give banks some wriggle room during recessions but can’t allow them to lose the run of themselves either. They are supposed to have a large Capital base which would protect them from the slings and arrows of economic downturns. And they are supposed to have lending limits (max 85% loans etc) and diversified lending so that they don’t have exposure to a single sector (like construction). This would allow them to absorb bad debts in a particular sector while making money elsewhere - the old argument that shops should sell umbrellas and ice cream.
Now think about what happened in Ireland. They allowed banks to lower their capital base because they were able to borrow unlimited funds from the ECB and Bondholders. Lax regulation allowed the banks to lend to anybody, regardless of credit status, to give 100% loans and to concentrate this on one sector (Property Development). When the property bubble collapsed, it took the whole house of cards with it.
Ireland now has banks with an over-reliance on International markets for funding because they outgrew the domestic deposit base by chasing asset growth. These markets leant to Anglo, but also to retail banks like AIB and BOI who also chased the same drug of cheap credit.
So that’s where we are. But the bigger question is how do we get out of this mess? The normal arguments for protecting banks from going bust are that:
1. They employ a lot of people.
2. Banks lend to Mams and Dads and hold deposits from little old ladies.
3. Allowing a bank to go bust spooks the International Markets and would make it difficult or expensive for other banks in that market to borrow funds. This is the Law of Unexpected Consequences.
In the case of Anglo, I don’t buy the first two arguments above. It employs hardly anyone and some may say that those that are there are partly culpable for the mess the company got into in the first place. It doesn’t have a deposit base among ordinary people. In fact it hardly has a deposit base at all. And it only lends to developers who attract as much sympathy in the general public as tax collectors..
There are two arguments for saving Anglo which might apply. Developers went crazy over the last ten years building ghost estates, multi storey car parks in small rural towns and showpiece vanity projects along Dublin’s quays. For the big stuff, they borrowed from Anglo and for the smaller stuff they borrowed from AIB and BOI.
The Government argues that if Anglo goes bust, it will bring down all the developers on its books at the same time. These developers as I mentioned above are also large borrowers from AIB and BOI. The argument is that if they go bust they could bring those domestic banks with them.
You could also argue that if Anglo goes bust, it will spook the International markets and AIB and BOI will find it impossible to borrow and the economy will grind to a halt.
In reality, if developers go bust, it will put pressure on AIB and BOI but it would be cheaper for the Government to lend money to these banks than it will cost them to bail out Anglo.
And as for International Markets and Bondholders, if they get burned, they’ll moan for a while but pretty soon they’ll be back if they think there is money to be made. And what harm is it if this disaster teaches the international markets to be more cautious in the future?
So who pays? I think it would have been better to let Anglo go bust, which would screw their bond holders. This might result in most Irish developers going bust, which is no bad thing either as they would be forced to sell all those helicopters and speed boats. This will have a knock effect on AIB and BOI, but the government can apply its help there and not at the top end.
The other option is to follow the government’s approach. Protect the markets and international bond holders and saddle the Irish people with a huge burden for the next twenty years. Is that the Ireland that we want?
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