The bankers' bonus culture - a complete red herring.

They're all wading in now, even the Tories, muttering darkly about the 'bonus culture' having got the banks into a mess.

*rant*

Which is complete tripe of course - these bonuses were a symptom of the credit bubble and not the cause. It must be quite clear to anybody that the whole New Labour economic miracle and G-d knows how many consecutive-quarters-of-economic -growth since 1997 (cheerfully adding on a dozen that happened under the previous government, of course) were based on the house price bubble (which makes home-owners feel wealthier and allows them to spend in excess of their incomes by constantly re-mortgaging), and that the property price bubble is merely the flip-side of the credit bubble (you can't have one without the other).

So Labour wanted there to be a bubble; and the gullible British public wanted there to be a bubble - have we already forgotten all the smug conversations about how much our houses had gone up in value?

Both bubbles are themselves huge con-tricks, of course, but somebody somewhere has to do the conning. On the property-bubble side we had endless property shows on the telly, endless newspaper articles ramping property and the constant drip-drip saying that you have to 'get on the ladder' and the way that home-owners look down on tenants (while cheerfully piling into buy-to-let...). On the other side we had the Chinese (and others) selling us cheap goods and lending the proceeds back to UK banks; we had the Bank of England keeping base rates artificially low; we had the FSA turning a wilfully blind eye to reckless lending; and of course we had the whizz-kids at the banks performing alchemy whereby self-certified and 125% loans were securitised and so on.

These whizz-kids were just doing the government's dirty work for them - the government and the gullible British public wanted them to do this in order to maintain the illusion that the paper profits we were all earning were somehow a real and just reward merely for owning a home.

Sure, these whizz-kids paid themselves handsomely at their shareholders' expense, but even the shareholders believed the hype, and, like victims of all good con-tricks, they wanted to believe the hype - now it's all gone tits up they claim that they were completely hoodwinked, or in the case of many Northern Rock shareholders, believe that the government brought the bank down and now want compensation.

I am not ashamed to say that I also made handsome pile of money from the property market in the ten years 1998 - 2008 (and am now renting again, I'll sit this one out, thanks); the opportunity was there, so why shouldn't I take it? Neither I nor the whizz-kids make the rules, so don't blame us for cashing in*. Blame yourselves for going along with the crazy Ponzi scheme that is the UK housing 'market'.

Just sayin', is all.

*/rant*

* The same applies to George Soros on White Wednesday, or indeed the millions who stay on the dole because The Rules tell them there is no point working unless they can earn something approaching the median wage. Don't blame George Soros, blame whomever it was who took us into the ERM; don't blame the scroungers (as easy a target as they may be), blame whomever it was who invented means testing.