The misinformation age

So little of the present febrile economic debate factors in the effects of the "information age" - a world of bytes and transparency where just about any data on anything is allegedly instantly accessible from anywhere. But apparently the Googlebot has not yet trawled any of the key details of toxic loans, because we STILL have no hard information on exactly what these things that have trashed the UK economy actually are.

All this is reducing economics to the status of a superstitious religious belief, managed by high priests of presumptions and guesswork - and based on the success of the oldest confidence trick in the book - namely that there is a God, or in this case, some supreme being that knows WTF is going on. But if there is, it sure ain't Gordon Brown or Alistair Darling.

In the absence of the essential hard analysis, sceptics have to suspect that there is yet more bad news being covered up (eg the sort of news that medieval catholics were frequently spared for their own goods, such as news that the pope was actually a serial pederast), and the really irritating thing is that with the (unavoidable) retirement of Bush all the old priesthood still remain mostly in control. Especially some from the "Clinton" era when the whole manipulation of banking for political expedience got started.

If the toxic loans based on securitised mortgages that are dragging down UK banks are being "backed" by depressed property assets in the US, then let's be told about it, please, so if that property is valued at 10c on the $, we, the banks' shareholders, can decide to buy it and do something more creative with it than let it rot. Maybe we can use any land to build jails to lock away our useless bankers and politicians in our very own version of camp X-ray.

So do we in fact now "own" vast swathes of US housing and other assets? Let's bloody well go and live it and use them. If they really are worthless and don't actually exist in any corporeal form, then we are entitled to a good old-fashioned human sacrifice or two, to see if we can appease the God of Credit. Simply asking Him (of Her) for "a sign" is likely to result in the familiar gesture of the one or two digit variety.

When there is a train wreck, most folks expect those who were in charge of the faulty rails and trains to be replaced forthwith, not asked to keep on going until the entire rail network is a smoking heap of rubble.

It's ironic Broon kept on banging on about "do nothing Tories" when all he manages to "do" is stumble from crisis to crisis without the slightest whiff of inspiration or an exit strategy. So many of the catastrophically failed institutions have the word "Scottish" in their names, and the absence of anyone in the Cabinet from south of Watford is equally significant - the complete destruction of the UK by our calamitous Caledonian cabal is nearing it's completion.

Home rule for England, please - and let Scotland sort out its assorted busted institutions using the all-knowing Alex Salmond's fairyland "Arc of Prosperity"...