a lock-in at the vault

A gang of us converged on the City of London on Friday evening and took refuge in an underground bank vault a few moments along from the Bank of England.

No ordinary vault, we had to pass a roped off security line first and pass through the early evening buzz of a thriving bar. I arrived by taxi, cellphone to ear and headed straight for the front of the line to be waved in, to the consternation of others standing in the long line behind me. But of course I knew the secret word.

Fortunately, the vault itself had been prepared for our arrival and there was a useful bar on hand as well as someone shaking all manner of cocktails. As we chatted together, there was something slightly odd about mixing vodka cocktails in an ex mainstream bank vault in the heart of the City, whilst financial shenanigans were occurring all around us.

Heard any good rumours lately? I have - but I'm afraid they have to stay locked in.

dimeless

Thanks, Pat, for the idea to add this

silver top hat and an old boot

What a difference in a day. More banking sector turmoil almost joining the dots from the last couple of days. Some banks still seem to be sidestepping the problems, whilst others are disappearing in flames.

The US Government has effectively nationalized AIG to stop it from sinking. That means they've put around $300bn into rescuing a variety of financial organizations over the last few weeks. I make that somewhere around $2,400 for every citizen of the USA.

And it looks as if a well known horse logoed bank is about to rescue the ailing singing bank. Based upon a recent friendly lunch between Gordon and some senior bankers, it appears that all of the normal monopoly investigations can be bypassed.

Could there soon be a UK superbank with 1/3 of all UK financial arrangements held within it?

how to short the market

It looks as if the traders are still finding ways to make a turn even during the demise of once famous financial institutions.

It's easy really, borrow something you don't have. Sell the thing you've borrowed. Wait for it to devalue because of the market conditions. Buy it back with the money made when it was sold. Hand it back to the person who loaned it and pocket the difference in value.

Its called shorting, and there's a lot of it about.

It can bring down banks. Or governments.

cardboard boxes up

Good news for cardboard box manufacturers today as more shares plummeted in value because of poor financial decisions. I notice HBOS was off by 22% by close of business.

The latest spirals link to the AIG underwriting of $300bn of ropey bank business but its just after Lehman Brothers declaratiion of bankruptcy and Fanny Mae's earlier splash. The US Government is bemused now too, because whilst they loaned money to bail Fanny and Freddy, by the time they got to Lehman and AIG, the view of what a discounted dollar looked like was getting too hard to understand.

The Bank for International Settlements keeps a track of the amount of derivative based debt which hovers around the $600 trillion level. One of the factors in this counterparty risk based business is that the value of each contract depends on the solvency and ability of participants to honour their obligations. Not a lot of bankers appear to know that judging from recent events.

So AIG's write down of a dollar was to somewhere in the 60cent range and Lehman's was right down to 30 or so cents. Some might call these levels meltdown.

It certainly means that all the opportunistically commissioned missing money first being talked about a few months ago is now collecting into ever larger debt puddles and pools. I suppose we are still mainly talking in billions and haven't really got started on the trillions yet.

immortal pour homme

Up North on Sunday afternoon, to The Angel, Islington and Sadler's Wells to see the Dorian Gray performance. A modern twist on Oscar Wilde's novel with it moved to today and into the world of fashion and art.

An image-obsessed world shimmering with Matthew Bourne’s dark humour, and the addition of a Conan Doyle plotline to the original story. Dorian Gray becomes the latest icon of 21st Century style amongst the glitterati. Promoting fragrance as a model and rising quickly to TV chat show guest.

There's a darkness behind the hedonism and we see the façade fray after the arrival of a doppelganger stalking Dorian's shadows.

Brilliantly staged and choreographed, with hardly a pause in the action, an amazingly strong cast, great lighting, some moments of Matthew Bourne's mischievous humour (the blue rubber gloves, the four poofs and a piano, the nod to dancer Nureyev) alongside the journey towards destruction of the leading character.

Excellent performance - no wonder its sold out.

black box fun

Worth a spin. It certainly took me somewhere interesting!

eNough

I wasn't sure whether to post this here or over on rashbre snapped because its sort of about photography. But I think it's more about eBay, and a little bit daft, so here is probably okay.

The story was that a few days ago I dug out my old film camera, with a view to taking some film pictures. I discovered it was somewhat broken. The mirror had jammed and the viewfinder had some sort of black gunk in it. A Google later and I realized it was going to be expensive to fix. I also noticed in the Google search a few eBay cameras roughly the same, for relatively small money.

It got me thinking that perhaps I could replace the broken camera and even acquire a small number of lenses to augment the two that I already owned.

My criteria was that this had to be an inexpensive project, so I set myself a very low budget. I decided on Olympus because (a) its what I had before (b) its beautiful, well designed precision machinery, (c) its not Nikon or Canon where there are lots of buyers trying to acquire old lenses for their digital equipment and pushing the price up. I regard it as a kind of SLR version of a Leica.

The plan all worked rather well. A few days later, I have everything I could possibly need. A camera with a fine lens was my first acquisition and then a couple of other wide angle lenses. All good. Then a pair of zoom lenses, which happened to have another Olympus camera attached.

Altogether, it was somewhat less than the cost of a modest new digital compact, and I now have a rather fine film kit. In some ways its sad that this type of equipment is viewed by many as obsolete, yet the modern camera makers are only just geting to the same resolution as film and only in their top range £2,000+ cameras.

One thing I can't get over is how small it all looks next to today's DSLRs. Yet, although it has manual focus is mainly mechanical and doesn't need 150 computerised menus, it seems to take some nice snaps already.

Wheatstalk 2008

I'll be listening to one of my old favourite radio stations from Talkeetna, Alaska during this weekend, where the nice people from Whole Wheat Radio are running live music webcasts, house concert style.

(They are just playing some Michelle Shocked) "well she may blow your mind like some old transistor..."

You'll have to cook your own chili and cornbread to get the full experience.

a streamed link via iTunes here

soft

Another busy week and I think I've earned some cushion time at the weekend. Way back at Wednesday there was someone on the radio saying "Hooray, it's over half way through the week towards the weekend!"...and I was thinking,"Noooo, I still need as much time as possible to get my stuff done". Others cast doubts upon my sanity when I revealed this thought openly.

Anyway, the weekend is finally here and I can tick off most things, but there's still overhang into Saturday as well as a quietly accumulating collection of domestic items too.

So tonight as we ate my hastily improvised 'Grolsch potatoes' and watched a movie, the cushions seemed like just the right option.

World Trade Center

I guess there's millions of regular pictures of the World Trade Center in peoples' photo archives. I just found a few whilst I was riffling through some snaps to test my scanner. The pictures either side help me place the occasion.

We'd been on a cross US visit and were meeting someone in New York at the Marquis. We'd been with one person and were meeting someone else, who didn't show up.

We decided to convert ourselves into tourists and although some of us had 'done' New York before, there was one of us for whom it was a new experience, so we decided to do a tourist route. Times Square, Empire State, the Village, Canal Street, Wall Street, WTC, the Seaport piers, Staten Island Ferry both ways and then back up to Broadway for some beers.

So part way through I took these snaps, where we'd gone to the tourist entrance to the World Trade, taken the elevator to the top and then walked around to look at the view. My pix include the look back towards the Empire State, across to the statue of Liberty, down to the ground and across to the other Tower.

Simpler days?

The Ka gets another mention

We drove around half of London without the front part of the radio in this Ka called Harvey earlier today, before stealthily parking to buy some milk, a loaf of bread and to post a postcard.

Then, whilst paused, I found the radio fascia in the side pocket and clipped it in. It lasted for about ten minutes of me driving before I accidentally pressed the eject button, which made it flip across to the unreachable part of the footwell.

When I retrieved it later, I noticed the radio was called a Sony Xplode. Very appropriate.

no Swiss quarky xplode either (britney vs muse)