Stan's Three Laws of Finance

Bibble ! Bibble! Bibble!

Good evening. The noise you hear is me making Bibble noises with my finger on my lips as I contemplate the Bank of England's response to the Credit Crunch.

Bibble !

Remember my previous posting where I compared mortgage-backed securities with contaminated meat in the Pie industry ? Well, the Bank of England has decided to allow banks to borrow money from them using this second-hand toilet-paper as collateral.

"Who cares ?" I hear you cry. Before answering, please be aware of Stan's three laws of finance.

• Stan's First Law of Finance : "In any complex financial transaction, someone always gets shafted."
• Stan's Second Law of Finance : "If you don't know who is getting shafted, then it's probably you"
• Stan's Third Law of Finance : "If the Government is involved, it's definitely you"

Put simply - your money will be used to sort out all the bad bets made by banks in the last few years. This is to allow them to carry on making bad bets in the future.

Whatever happened to the quaint notion of letting the markets decide who survives and who fails? It seems if you're a bank then you get all the government help you need. But if you're a private citizen , you're on your own.

There is only one reasoned, sane thought-out response : take your finger, put it on your lips, and everyone repeat after me :

Bibble ! Bibble ! Bibble !