Sub-primus mammonistus inter pares sperate miseri caveat felices sic transit gloria mundi
“We here discuss great matters and one matter contemporaneous our Society can be right proud of, is the absence off our balance sheet of sub-primes, SPV’s, or anything mortgage-wise, and it falls to me being unregulated to tell the unvarnished of it, sub-prime being somewhat the lesser of prime, meaning first among equals, when I am often asked what is it I do, a matter on which The Grand Secretary graciously recently reassured my investors just as I was packing for the Aegean to study the crisis from its earliest beginnings in The High Hellenic when banks were temples, since when as many will agree with me the general laity has roundly embraced secularism, treating assets and liabilities as if day into night phenomena are mere fluxions from trading coal-tar by-products or the high price of vegetables, likening volatilities to fainting-fits caused by corsets or double-entry book-keeping, why depositors finger-wag at salami slicing bankers as Adam Smiths and Physiocrats pun daily in the FT that dead cat bounces are catatonic, and claiming unsanitary conditions are upon us like a lung collapse after a years of wheezing, while I blame buy to lets bankrolled with all the circumspection of ankle-biters in sweetie-shops, or those who covet assets without walking banker’s walk, talking the talk, as in President’s words “Again and again returning to the distances…”, infra-visually speaking, to explain dark matters, usually after teatime when New York opens for the afternoon session and dark pools sweep up fungible losses to sell on to gullible Asians, not really triple or even double A, the 'only drinking straw offered' to use a wry cocktail phrase pertaining to ABS’s in SPV’s that were by definition incombustible until now being consumed daily in flames ignited by defaults that were 0.8% to 2.15%, now rising 3 to 20 times higher, intenser, like luminance in the vacuum of a standard light-bulb or the striking mismatches of credit ratings that all knew to be dodgy as yields & spreads high and low all narrowed to AA+, and the Chief Auditor’s warnings went unheeded, puncturing the cycles of rocket scientists, drive chains coming off and gearing useless, and as I set out for Central Asia banks my solution, to bottle written-down tranches in deepest caves, if only I had not said as the Irish delegate* “this reminds me of old MacPhillemy of Balinrobe, of no NPV to any but himself, coffined after a good day at the Curragh and then passing out in McDaids, who would have remained so had the Mask not burst its banks to flood the churchyard and he found floating on Lough Robe, in sum and in all aspects defining a genuine liquidity crisis,” but then I had been copied in on the Phrygian words of our Midas King Merv, code in clear, I quote, “Darling, sir, as matters stand res cogitans our dark bottlings in bonded warehousing may make little headway in the present headwinds of the sub-primal storms, yours Mervyn” followed shortly, on my return, by my apprehension by officers in the lounge of the Sheepdip, via Regia, during the Northern Rock Run and my own letter to the FT as to how liquidity loss in interbank markets coincides with months of incessant rain flooding millions of homes with effluence and others with cheap credit, explaining** that sub-primes are Greek myth, a taxonomic ploy by Standard & Poors, Moody and Fitch in a pass the parcel scam, though my editor H.Dobbs says the tragic tone is too knowing to be shocking, and he a member of the Speculative, who in the French edition uses 'prêt penoirs hypothécaire à haut risque' to mean 'high risk sub-prime mortgages hypothecated” over a trillion dollars by Connecticut’s Le Shred who, as his share price collapsed, told me “as you know yourself this is so far beyond a banker’s conscience… inasmuch as one being unable to say aught charitable or useful it behooves us to preserve the darkness of it at all costs” and that just about clarifies the whole dark matter!”
Prof. McDowell
* to the Baktrian Monetary Conference in Bukhara
** see my ‘Liquidity Crisis: how they bottled it’Failsafe Press, 2007
(with apologies to the footnotes in Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman)
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