One of the more obnoxious aspects of the ongoing financial meltdown is the self-pitying whining from the hedge fund class. Now if  the country you live in goes bankrupt (such as Iceland is about to do) then I do think there you have a valid reason to write the odd letter of complaint to the government. But do you have cause to complain because you are moronic greedy pig who has had their snout dented? No.

What will be next? Our local pub has closed ‘due to circumstances beyond control’ and the local paper cites debts that could not be paid on time. A wreath has been pinned to the wall with the message: 

‘In Memory of the Tap and Spile - closed by people who understand the price of everything and the value of nothing’.

I have this terrible feeling that whole chunks of the economy are going to stop. Supermarkets close. The east coast mainline grinding to a halt outside Retford because they can’t afford more fuel, my invoices not being paid (a genuine fear), the local hospital and school closing. Why can’t something go bust though in a way that cancels our obligations? The Halifax seems to have disappeared as the Halifax - but I still have to pay my mortgage. This doesn’t seem fair somehow.

And just one more question - what exactly has happened to the £200 billion that the UK government has allegedly put into the ‘banking system?’. Where exactly is that money now??

Lucy Kellaway writing in yesterday’s FT suggests that one benefit of the global -financial - meltdown - recession - is that it will be the end of management bullshit. Would that this were true. I think the last few days have seen a temporary halt to management bullshit because quite clearly governments and captains of industry are totally at a loss for words. They are speechless as the world’s banking system falls apart. This will not last. 

Once they recover their wits, if not their shares or assets, there will be a terrible wailing and squealing. It will be followed by companies using ever more outrageous lies and nonsense because really, nothing else much matters any more. If the economy, or a company has lost billions of pounds, what’s the odd porky pie going to mean?

Just for starters, I got an email from one of the world’s biggest software companies today that started..

“Hi there,

One of the reasons I love working at Microsoft is that there’s no end to the innovative and creative things my colleagues are doing”. 

The credit-crunch-turned-global-financial-meltdown-turned-recession obviously hasn’t hit Redmond yet.

But it will. And once it does, they will also be singing the global song of corporate financial fear. ‘Shit. Help. Bail-us-out. No shit. Really help us’.

And do we have such short memories to forget that for the past 10 years hundreds of organisations have been fighting to have the debts in Africa and South America and Asia cancelled, to have money and aid delivered to people without clean water or adequate medicines. And the same people who are now shovelling money as fast as they can to their friends in Wall Street and the City of London couldn’t find the time, or the will, or the money? Or made promises that they didn’t keep? Or made excuses about time and distance and money? Or made endless conditions and dependencies?

If nothing else, the current events are going to expose and sharpen the myriad contradictions within the system. It may not just be the banking system that explodes.