"If you had to choose between saving a banker from drowning...

... and taking a prizewinning picture of the event, what resolution should you set your camera to?" - adapted from the classic question of Journalistic Ethics.

What put this into my mind? Extract from a conversation I just had:

"Mr Vet, you're going to need to get an independent valuation on your property before we can give you a mortgage."

...

"Mr Vet? Are you there?"

"Yes, I'm still here. I'm just trying to work out, on a scale of one to ten, how angry I am right now."

"Well, it's because you paid significantly more than the current valuation..."

"I told you, we bought at auction. There were other bidders there willing to pay that much."

"It's very standard practice for banks at the moment, Mr Vet."

"What's the point? That is the market. You can't get a truer valuation than that, that's why it's called 'market value'. What kind of valuer do you think is going to be able to tell you better than the market itself?"

"Well, the valuer is independent, they're trained to estimate very closely the true market value."

...

There are some questions that you will never hear an answer to, no matter how many times or ways you persist in asking them, because the honest answer would be "solely so that we can charge you more money".

In response to my badgering, he eventually promised that the bank would pay part of the cost of the valuation. So far, so good. Now all that remains is for me to bring the rest of my cash over from the UK, to raise the amount of our deposit as necessary so that we don't have to pay any further insurance - and the bank will be a few hundred dollars out of pocket, and they'll end up making less from us than if they'd just shut up and paid up.

I bet some genius banker earned a several-thousand-dollar bonus for working out this policy, which is about to cost his bank, probably, several thousand dollars in lost profit. I really hope that person is now dying painfully somewhere, but I don't have that much faith in karma.

Disasters

Bad things happen in threes.

I'm not quite sure where I picked up that bit of folk idiocy. I suspect my mother is to blame. But anyway, it's bugging me now.

Two weeks ago, I ran the car into a small rock that someone had thoughtfully dropped in the middle of the road. The impact bent the arm of the suspension, and made the car unnecessarily interesting to steer. It cost $400 to fix.

Last week it was the TV. That only cost $100, plus a week of Making Our Own Entertainment.

All this is bad enough, but what's worse now is waiting for the third shoe to drop, if you see what I mean.

Has it already happened? Is it the nice house we saw last weekend, that - by the time we got around to making an offer for it - had already been sold, for less than we were willing to offer? (I blame that one mostly on the bank, but partly on my own incompetence.)

Is it something health-related? Susan is currently struggling with a cold, and I've been fighting an ongoing battle with my innards for longer than I care to tell you.

Or is there something worse, something more dramatic and acute, lurking around the corner to complete the set?

I don't know. If no-one had ever told me that bad things happen in threes, I wouldn't be worrying about it. But on the other hand, I wouldn't have understood all those cultural allusions and references either.

So I can't really blame my mother. Blame myself, rather, for not believing me when I tell myself superstition is bollocks. I'm such an idiot.

A wunch of bankers

(One more rant. I'm sorry. I promise I'll give it a rest - just after I get this off my chest.)

Back home, the Royal Bank of Scotland has announced the biggest corporate loss in British history. That's - my bank, since it swallowed up NatWest early in its greed-fuelled acquisition spree. And last year it lost £24 billion. That's more than General Motors. Its share price has dropped more than 98% in the past two years.

Impressive as these sums are, they're barely the tip of the RBS iceberg. The truly breathtaking number here is the amount of debt that the RBS has asked the British taxpayer to underwrite: £300 billion.

Three hundred billion pounds.

It's an unthinkable amount of money. If we simply printed it out and distributed it equally to every single man, woman and child on earth, they'd each have enough to buy a brand-new DVD player.

Three hundred billion pounds.

To put it in context: it's half the annual government budget of the UK. In other words, enough to give the entire population a six-month tax holiday. It's 20% - one fifth - of the country's entire GDP.

Three hundred billion pounds.

How do you lose that kind of money? How do you get it in the first place? If you're a bank, of course, you don't - you just pretend you've got it, lend it out to other people, and hope nobody asks for actual cash. Then you write the whole thing up in your books as a record profit. Added value? - don't make me laugh. Ponzi schemes look honest by comparison.

Three hundred billion pounds.

That's over US$420 billion - equivalent to more than half of Obama's entire stimulus package, swallowed up by one company. Truly, British banks are world-class. If the British economy were steaming ahead at full throttle, such a blow would probably be enough to put it into recession all by itself. With the economy already in recession...

I shouldn't complain - as an ex-pat, erstwhile depositor with the bank, I'm more beneficiary than payer. I'm just glad I got my money out. No, the losers are people like poor ol' former CEO Sir Fred Goodwin, who finds himself jobless and probably unemployable at the tender age of 50, with nothing but his half-million-a-year pension to fall back on...

Surely - surely - the time has come to abandon the pretence that "banking" is some kind of industry. "Industry" implies a process whereby inputs of land, labour and capital are translated into goods or services of greater value than what goes in. When companies find themselves unable to do that, they go out of business, so that their land, labour and capital become available to someone who has a fucking clue about what they're doing.

None of which, evidently, happens in banking. Taxpayers, it turns out, are underwriting the losses. So where was our share of the profits?

The conventional answer to that was that banking was essential to "fuel" economic growth, which benefits everyone. But what should we conclude, now it turns out that most of that growth for the past ten years has been an illusion - that the banks have "improved" our living standards only by running up our debt? Without asking us?

As far as I'm concerned, there's only one agency that's entitled to spend my money on my behalf without giving me some kind of option to veto each transaction... and that's my government. If banks are going to be doing that, then they need to be openly and accountably run by said government.

I'm not so naïve as to think that will make us any better off. But at least it'll stop Sir Fred and his cronies from being role models. They'll still be robbing us all, and no doubt they'll still get knighted for it, but they'll be seen for the idiotic, wasteful bureaucrats they are.

Just call me Alex

I'm having an agreeable yuppie fantasy today.

That probably sounds contradictory. What it involves is a little window in the corner of my second monitor that shows me the exchange rate between the UK pound and the NZ dollar, and -- and this is the nifty bit -- updates itself once per minute. This window is provided courtesy xe.com, a lovely little site that epitomises the service industry ideal of doing one thing and doing it well. And, most importantly, for free.

This rate is of interest to me because I still have a noticeable amount of money in the UK, and I've been meaning to bring it over, for house-buying purposes, when the rate looks good. As I type this, 1GBP would buy me NZ$2.68159, up from $2.67496 when I first checked this morning.

Over the day, the pound has been trending slightly upwards. But every time I watch it actually make its update, the pound weakens (which is bad). It's almost touched 2.686, before dropping back again when I got too excited and began watching too closely.

This is, of course, entirely in keeping with the known laws of economics, and will come as no surprise to anyone.

When the rate hits 2.71 -- which, for the record, I don't think is going to happen this week -- I'll call my trader and finally switch over my millions from sterling. That's the agreeable fantasy part, anyway. In the meantime, however, it really is pretty exciting to watch it out of the corner of my eye.

(D'oh! Just lost another $200.)

So here's this information that, when I was entering the job market, would have been available only to braying young wine-bar-haunting gits with bicycle clips on their sleeves, whose employers paid more for the service than for the people to watch it... and today, it's freely available to anyone with a broadband connection. Today, a mere twenty years too late to make my fortune, I get to play at being a yuppie for free, without even having to take time out from my real job.

That's so cool.

Addendum (added Thursday lunchtime): So much for my powers of prediction. Today the pound is over $2.72. I'm not pushing my luck any further.