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The Economic Meltdown Playlist

September 30, 2008

The New Yorker is at it again. Click this link to find another not altogether reverential take on the global financial meltdown, as the newspaper seeks to compile a playlist of songs suitable for our current woes.

Pink Floyd’s Money is not allowed, but there appears to be no restriction on The Beatles’ Can’t Buy Me Love. Another cast-iron contender is, of course, Money, by The Flying Lizards, whose immortal first stanza puts Coleridge to shame:

The best things in life are free
But you can keep them for
the birds and bees
Now give me money
That’s what I want
That’s what I want, yeah
That’s what I want

Click here to see The Flying Lizards in action.

Wanted: a bailout for the bailout

September 30, 2008

The known world appears closer to collapse after the US Congress rejected a bailout plan designed to restore confidence to stricken banks. Wall Street promptly had one of its worst days ever and shock waves were felt all over the globe. The Times reports on the debacle here, in what might be described as a style of hard-edged abstraction: no frills, just the news, relentlessly conveyed, and all of it bad.

US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson now needs a new rescue scheme. Perhaps next time he might avoid using the word ‘bailout’, one which hardly masks the unpalatable reality that US taxpayers were being asked to come up with $5,000 each to help save denizens of massive financial institutions who wouldn’t blanche (in the good old days) at spending that sum on a night out. Or, as Stephen Harris succinctly has it over at WealthBriefing: “Senior politicians and financial officials were not able to convince the voting public that bailing out Wall Street firms would not be a move to bolster the positions of fat cat bankers but was a necessary move to shore up the world’s economy.” Harris notes, however, that politicians on both sides of the fence in the US insist that “lines of communication are still open”, a statement curiously omitted from the headline coverage of all this by just about every UK newspaper.

Where’s it all heading? Blade is no economist, but he can say that Blade Towers was yesterday valued by an estate agent. It was bought precisely two years ago, and in that time it apparently rose in value by some £45,000, only to drop back somewhat, and then drop back again, so that now it would be inadvisable to put it on the market for anything more than the price at which it was originally marketed. As the agent remarked, “Anyone in my trade who tells you he’s doing alright is lying. We’ve all been hit very bad, and the market has got further to go yet. Downwards.”

Meanwhile, Ana sends me this piece from the New Yorker. At least, thanks to the likes of Mark Borowitz, humour is alive and well. If you think you’re too big for a bailout, read Borowitz’ piece – and think again.

Image from Sweep da Leg.

Addleshaw Goddard: a haven for notorious criminals?

September 29, 2008

What is going on within the offices of Addleshaw Goddard?

The Lawyer reports here that the firm’s decision to purchase 36 prints by photographer David Bailey has sparked a row, for among said prints is one of notorious East End gangsters the Kray twins. It has apparently been suggested that a law firm may not be an appropriate setting for photographs of criminals, notorious or otherwise.

This contention raises an interesting line of thought. Should a lawyer commuting to work on a train be allowed to read an outré novel such as Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho? Presumably, this is “inappropriate” – though if said lawyer is reading the tome out of work hours, perhaps that’s OK? What, though, if he or she were to bring a copy of John Hawkes’ The Lime Twig into the office? Or, yet worse, Nabokov’s Lolita?  Surely it is inappropriate for lawyers to read these things.

Unless, of course, they have to read them for libel and other legal risks. The late, great Peter Carter-Ruck was famously charged with reading Lolita for these very reasons. He suggested four changes. If memory serves, not one was accepted.

The image of the Kray twins is courtesy of Michael Welch Sculptures.  It was initially deemed inappropriate for the Legal Business section of this blog, but after consultation with a libel lawyer it was felt that publication – just this once – would be permitted. Said libel lawyer also advised that no one in a million years would really think that Addleshaw Goddard is a haven for notorious criminals (for it is not), and so the headline was also allowed to stand. Meanwhile, a City law firm was rumoured to be hanging new work by Jeff Koons in its foyer. The libel lawyer said we should keep stum about this, for Koons has yet to be sanctified by the passage of time and, as said lawyer said, “the media might characterise the hanging in controversial terms when it is a storm in a teacup, the problem being that even storms in teacups can be the source of libel actions. That’ll be £10,750.” 

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