GutClean

GutClean says: pleasant enough and respectful DT obituary of Jade Goody whose legacy is indeed curious although our admiration for her support for cervical cancer screening is tempered somewhat by the suspicion that she ignored a routine prophylactic scrape to go to India and salvage her celebrity career and where she was finally diagnosed with the cancer and tragic if so while the thought does arise that in that case we effectively did for her.

Tracy Corrigan has some sensible observations on our feelyphilia here videlicet 1 it was ever thus (internet or no) 2 perhaps we ought to discipline ourselves a bit every now and then and the prolific Simon Coulter posting a comment in the same piece observes "I suspect a prurient interest in the lives of others enriches our own lives more than we tend to admit" and GutClean thinks that is so and doesn't knock it too much - our own posting and blogging is after all essentially a sophisticated and (so we vainly hope) literate version of the same species of social grooming.

Last word to The Daily Mash.

GutClean says: Wall Street is happy and so would you be if you had just been given a present of one trillion US dollars for screwing up your household budget. But Geithner's fix is predicated on the whole thing being a liquidity crisis. It's no longer that but a crisis about the solvency of our banks. In one simple word they're not - buy horse head for hills.

Damian Reece gives some cogent reasons why the scheme may not be a success here. The Fed's own example postulates an 84 cents in the dollar bidding price for these assets. No way assets past 2005 anyway. Without bothering to look it up we recall Merill Lynch offloading some of its corrupt assets onto a distress fund at 30 cents in the dollar (and loaning them the cash to buy them for good measure - not a happy precedent).

Indeed these assets are priceless and like most priceless assets rather likely to remain with their owner.

And here, a day later, is Joseph Stiglitz's take echoing the concerns of Paul Krugman and Joseph Galbraith voiced in the byline link. It is of course high time we let the bad banks fail and an example of how we don't always learn the the lessons of history right: we know that the failure of Creditanstalt in 1931 led directly to the disastrous chain of bank collapses in Europe during the Great Depression but that's no argument for saying that keeping it afloat (and in fact an attempt was made to rescue it) would have been better. Citizendium has an interesting draft page on bank rescues and failures.

Finally Martin Wolf of the FT has an (as ever) especially lucid treatment of the material above here (but you'll have to log in or try here - FT non-subscriber tip: google the first few sentences - this will usually bring up a in-breach-of copyright page). To quote from his piece and in support of our own position "The danger is that this scheme will, at best, achieve something not particularly important - making past loans more liquid - at the cost of making harder something that is essential - recapitalising banks.".

GutClean says: Thus Vicki: "There is a yawning divide between state and private educational achievement ... My new job as a school governor at the village primary has me more interested than heretofore in "educational outcomes". (Governors have to learn this jargon, or we'd never understand a word Ed Balls says: results are "outcomes", pupils are "learners".) The most incredible news I've heard recently about outcomes is last year's A-level results: 17,500 learners gained three straight As in their exams last August. Of these, 10,000 were educated in the private sector, the other 7,500 in state schools. The private sector educates only seven per cent of children, but gets more straight As than the other 93 per cent put together."

Her disobligingly partisan use of statistics 'recently released by the Conservartives' merits separate attention we supply here but all we have to do presently is to agree that private education is indeed superior to state education and that it has nevertheless brought this country to a state of disaster.

For it is private education and their embarrassingly more successful half-cousins, selective state education in the form of grammar schools, that has for the most part educated our elite that have produced this disaster and this is why we can only welcome the rapid demise of most of these schools as the the Great Global Depression progresses and in our own case as our feeble hoplelessly enweakened attempts to cope with the crisis also all fail.

We await a saviour finally to talk real sense about how and in what we should educate our children (a lot more more arts and a lot less science is quite a good working first thought we suggest) who in any case will have to pay the price of our failure and she's certainly not to be found in the likes of Vicki what a real cunt she must be.