The Idiots Guide To HBOS And The Singing Malteser
HSBOS bank collapses, proof that capitalism works and you’re never to big to go under. (See Lehman Brothers.)
Big news, then. But the red-tops have a problem: they need to make their readers understand what Lehman Brothers was. They do this by finding an easy point of reference and talking down to them in words of one syllable or fewer.
THE SUN: “MASS EXIT - 40,000 face axe, including Howard.”
Howard..? Is he the boss of the failed outfit? In a way yes.
It’s Howard Brown, the bespectacled singing Malteser, star of the bank’s adverts. He “may” go…
Pages 6 and7: There’s Howard Brown riding Black Beauty, otherwise known as the Lloyds TSB pony.
He’s the Lloyds TSB “howboy”
DAILY MIRROR: “GREEDY PIG – Fund chief’s millions from HBOS misery”
The Mirror looks beyond the victims to the culprit. The paper says he’s Philip Flalcone who is “Said” to have made hundreds of millions of pounds gambling that HBOS shares would plummet.
How is he the villain, is not described.
On a brighter note, the Mirror says “30,000 FACE AXE IN CREDIT CRISIS BANK RESCUE”.
So 10,000 jobs have been save, just like that. Hurrah!
Posted: 18th, September 2008 | In: Money, Tabloids Comments (11) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
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September 18th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
chenier says:
stockbrokers are, on the whole, inoffensive little people who are kind to their elderly mothers and rescue stray kittens.
……………..
Oi! chenier! Do you mind????! Just because I am kind to my elderly mother and have rescued some kittens I don’t think that makes me an inoffensive little stockbroker! Hrrmph.
(And why has your name gone blue?)
September 18th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
have to disagree with you chenier - it’s the little oiks on the stock exchange floor that make the markets go up and down when they lose their bottle, not Gordie or John McCain.
those two and their ilk may be responsible for many things, but it’s those nasty little bastards shouting all day and making obscene amounts of money using everybody else’s to do it who would get the Sarah Palin treatment from me given half the chance.
September 18th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Unfortunately the flight from risk has made silver linings unobtainable, but I take your point…
September 18th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Anythıng that gets those bloody adverts of the telly ıs worth a few bıllıon ın my book.
September 18th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Yep, never believe a banker; particularly when he telling you it’s as solid as a rock…
September 18th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
personally i’d let them all fail, the housing markets, banks, the lot.
that way leads to a true meritocracy, see how long a fat banker lasts when he’s trying to catch lunch instead of stealing it.
September 18th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
while also telling us how safe they are.
ffs, if they can’t trust each other, why should we trust them?
grannies biscuit tin wasn’t such a bad idea after all, especially if it’s stuffed with gold.
i’d like to see a broker borrow a shitload of that to dump on the market hoping to buy it back for less a week later.
always the same, if you let greedy, simple people do greedy, simple things you’re going to end up in the shit.
if nothing else, it’s exposed their financial cleverness for the people-bleeding scam it’s aways been.
September 18th, 2008 at 11:52 am
dairy,
stockbrokers are, on the whole, inoffensive little people who are kind to their elderly mothers and rescue stray kittens.
Sad stocks and shares are merely the end result of a catastrophic policy of deliberately failing to regulate complex financial instruments.
The people you have to worry about are the politicians like John McCain and Gordon Brown who managed to convince themselves that the markets would take care of everything.
It has got so bad that banks won’t even lend to other banks; LIBOR -the rate on short term loans to other banks- doubled in one night.
And that is why, as the New York Times so politely puts it:
‘Central Banks Unite to Aid Global Money Markets’
They have to, because otherwise we are all down the swannee…
September 18th, 2008 at 11:44 am
and other wankers whoops sorry my ‘b’ is having problems this week
September 18th, 2008 at 11:36 am
I am rapidly getting around to the opinion that the scum of this world are not estate agents, but the extremely twitchy, nasty little men with no bollocks or common sense, commonly referred to as stockbrokers….
September 18th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Er, Anorak? About that idiot’s guide thing?
I think you’re still over leveraged.
HBOS didn’t collapse.
It may have been deliberately screwed by short selling, but it didn’t collapse.
It didn’t get the chance because it finally dawned on the pols that the US had just lost the last vestiges of a fig leaf on the free market capitalism bit, and that they should do the same.
So HBOS has done the deed with Lloyds, and they now emerge leaner, hungrier and fitter than ever before.
And anyone believing that sentence probably thinks Dark Matter is Mystic Meg…