Boring & the Vulgar society at large and a mortgage market in flux
“Giving Sants a knighthood was tantamount to appointing John Terry as the new Race Relations Commissioner or Jimmy Saville as a Tawney Owl at the local girl scouts.
Photo © Brian Minkoff-London Pixels Alan Pardew: Boring peacock
“Ferguson is a brilliant manager but he’s essentially a bully from a wee shipyard in Glasgow”
Gold Bullion than we do now? T e Out- law would have loved to have answered that one for Osborne... “Well Ma’m, it’s like this. Gordon Brown
– remember him? T e dithering idiot from Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath – and his kiss-ass apparatchik Ed Balls decided that it was a good idea to sell a shed-load of our gold reserves at the bottom of the cycle.” Incidentally, Balls is now accusing Os-
borne of cooking the books on infl ation measurements and growth-undershoots. Has the Millipede actually got the back- bone to jettison his toxic shadow Chan- cellor this year? Probably not. And hope- fully not.
P
utting T e Outlaw to sleep this month is talk of a treble-dip reces- sion. What a waste of ink. We are
still in the fi rst recession and we prob-
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Hector Sants: Asleep at the wheel
ably will be for a year yet. Why do the media and others get hung up on such daſt measurements? Equally mundane was the furore
around Alex Ferguson’s jibe that New- castle was a “wee club in the North East”. Somewhat boring. Ferguson is a brilliant manager but he’s essentially a bully from a wee shipyard in Glasgow. T e story’s combatants actually deserve each other because Newcastle fans have bored us all for years with their “way aye man, it’s the heartbeat of the city, man” bullshit. Correct! You are the only major UK
city lucky enough to just have one club and ideally placed at that. Yet with 50,000 largely fantastic fans
and a monopoly position you still can’t win more than a Fairs Cup every 50 years. Pardew the boring peacock could yet get found out. He forgets all that T e Outlaw did for him (ouch!).
T
his month’s vulgarity award is dominated by Hector Sants. What a scandal. T is is the guy
who in recent years has given the follow- ing “outstanding service to the industry”. Waiving through the Lloyds / HBOS deal
without suffi cient due diligence. Asleep at the wheel as other lenders profl igacy led to the taxpayer paying. Mis-selling scandals galore. And foremost amongst these were Barclays Bank which has been fi ned or censured on three separate oc- casions and who are now paying Sants three million quid a year. T e incredu- lous thing about this is that Sants actu- ally got his position at the FSA on the back of having held senior appointments in, yes, you’ve guessed it... the banking industry! Giving him a knighthood was tantamount to appointing John Terry as the new Race Relations Commissioner or Jimmy Saville as a Tawney Owl at the local girl scouts. Sants’ previous employer ran him
close though. T e bans handed out to the directors of Black & White are redun- dant grandstanding. T is investigation started fi ve years ago and anybody half- connected in the industry knew full well at the time that there were some pack- agers clearly preferring certain lenders above others on unhealthy grounds. Indeed, we are hearing more and more
about the Upper Tribunal at the FSA. T e Outlaw is impressed that Simon Cowell, Daff y Duck, Sylvester the Cat, Obi Wan Kenobi and Seb Coe can actually fi nd the time to fi t these commitments into their schedules.
MORTGAGE INTRODUCER JANUARY 2013 23
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