Wednesdays P&L: GBP923

Wednesdays booze: 3 bottles of Australian white wine, 4 cans of Carlsberg Premium, 3 large Vodka & Tonic

Read the market completely wrong yesterday but managed to salvage something. I anticipated another sell-off yesterday. I don't pay huge amounts of attention to charts, although I should as most market participants are just sheep these days, blindly following the buy and sell indicators generated by whatever charting method they use. I am more interested in interpreting what I see happening around me and I still see hard times coming. I am not surprised there has been an uptick in the markets, the sheer amount of liquidity that has been pumped in has to have some effect. What surprises me is that people are not saying, "well hang on a minute...isn't this what got us into this mess in the first place"? I am not much of a student having left school at 16 but I always was interested in history and the belief that if you don't understand the past you cannot learn from it. The finance industry seems hopelessly unable to learn from its mistakes. After wasn't it only 2 months ago people were getting upset by the rewards bankers earned and just this week Citibank has had to defend its decision to pay an oil trader USD100million and our own RBS, (surely the UK version of Citi), has announced it is hiring a bond trader from Merrill Lynch for a minimum of GBP7million. There is no fuss about this, because of course the public has moved on to fresh outrages. All the time the US and the UK are printing money hoping that things will return to normal. The US knows that the enormous debt it has is not really its problem, it is China, Japan and the rest of the world. Of course America should lose its AAA rating. Of course the dollar should tank but if that happened the losers would be the holders of the debt. The UK is no better its own debt situation is nothing more than a ponzi scheme. It can only end badly.

What do I know if these recent events had happened when I was still working for a bank, I would have genuinely thought the global economy was coming to an end but instead things go on as normal. People go to ATM's and withdraw their cash - it doesn't matter to them if the Nat West is owned by RBS or the government. The banks continue to send out letters to people behind on their mortgages or credit cards admonishing them for imprudent borrowing and poor financial management with no hint of irony. When this first happened in the UK. Northern Rock should have been shuttered and the people who routinely sign repossession letters or say "computer says no" should have been made redundant. OK it wasn't their fault that the company collapsed they are just tiny cogs in a far bigger machine but the effects of a few thousand losing their jobs would have been significant and also given us a truer picture of the real situation at the banks. The depositors at the bank should have received the protection they were entitled to if they had more than that amount then that is their fault. It is not as though there were a shortage of alternatives to deposit their money. Instead we have the bizarre situation where the banks are being supported by the very people they have no hesitation in sending the bailiffs for. All the time the excess liquidity is building up in the system and when the banks finally find themselves confident to lend again, they may find there are a lot less people with jobs to be able to afford loans from them.