This is a story about immorality...

When the end comes, did you feed people? Did you clothe people? Did you shelter people from the storm?

If you profited from human misery, you're going to find it pretty hard to live with yourself, knowing that you're about to die.

If you didn't build anything of consequence, or bring joy to people's lives, the chances are that you were simply a perpetrator of human suffering.

"Oh I just did the accounting"

Yes, but you probably helped the loan sharks to kneecap ordinary people. Debt is slavery. Did you work for the banks, in raping the planet and taking all her natural resources in order to poison the very air we breathe? How are you able to sleep at night? Because you shredded all the evidence? What a load of horse shit!

Have you extrapolated what you do, and considered a planet where we all perpetrated the same fucktardery as you do? It's literally Hell on Earth when everybody is just a selfish shitbag.

You can't say "other people were doing it too" as any kind of defence. Morality is absolute, not relative. Just because you were surrounded with other monsters who were riding roughshod over the struggling masses, doesn't mean that you are somewhat in the clear. Your conscience doesn't lie: if you're fucking people over, you're a bad person.

Unquestionably capitalism doesn't work for the vast majority. When less than 70 individuals have more money than over 50% of the global population put together, you've gotta call out that system as utter bullshit.

Sure, you've gotta pay your mortgage and your kids need shoes, but what the fuck kind of world are they going to inherit anyway if you're just an immoral fucktard. It's no defence to say "I was just following orders" or "I was just doing what everybody else was doing".

Stop. Think. Act.

Tags: #capitalism #banking

This is a story about bullshit jobs...

In the east end of London, sandwiched inbetween Hackney and the area that used to be responsible for producing clothes and shoes, is the tiny oasis of Silicon Roundabout. The concrete mostronsities that sprung up in the postwar era, after the factories were bombed to shit, are now home to the darlings of the UK's tech industry.

TechHub, which is just a stone's throw away from the Old Street roundabout, prides itself on not having a proper ceiling to conceal its air conditioning ducts. The desks are battered and constructed from scaffolding. The urban decay of the whole area is part of the appeal. I mean, you can work in a disused underground train carriage for fuck's sake... some kind of hyper-trendy modern office.

And yet, this hipster village borders the City of London, where the world's investment banks and hedge funds headquarter themselves. Money is made hand-over-fist in London's financial districts, and all of the profits are enabled by smart tech people. There isn't a single cent that lines the pocket of a capitalist without some computer geek having written some software to make it possible.

There are two kinds of brain drain in operation.

Jaded City workers jack in the corporate humdrum of suits and 9 to 5, to head into the world of Hoxton, Shoreditch and Silicon Roundabout in order to grow a ridiculous beard and ride a bicycle with fixed gearing. Meanwhile, the very smartest are poached from the digital agencies and other parts of the thriving software community, in order to build the backbone of the financial system and re-architect the whole world economy.

Sadly, the main conduits for smart people still deliver the bulk of those graduating with first-class degrees and 2:1s from the best institutions, straight into the hands of bloodsucking parasites.

What was your degree in? Chemistry? Geography? Psychology? English? History? Epidemiology? Medieval iconography?

Who fucking cares?

If you're smart enough to have risen to the top of your classes, you're going to be hoovered up by the financial services sector, which dominates 80% of the British economy. Sooner or later, you're going to find yourself working in a towering phallus of glass and steel, which is a monument to the stupendous stupidity of man.

While red-braces wearing men fill their wheelbarrows with worthless paper, the rest of the world rumbles on, but is seen as unimportant compared with the "masters of the universe". It's obvious that you can't eat a futures contract, or a derivative, but yet the bulk of the 'money' in the world is derived from legal contracts that are almost impenentrably complex. Clever little cunts just coming up with clever schemes to scam the 'real' economy out of their labour and productive output.

How did it all begin?

Well, at the Royal Exchange, a farmer decided to sell his crop of wheat before it had been even harvested. This was the original futures contract. From this grew options, swaptions, interest rate derivatives, exotic credit derivatives and every flavour of cuntery inbetween. It's utter horse shit.

Now, you work all fucking day and your salary isn't even a rounding error on a balance sheet somewhere.

The amount of cash in circulation is nothing. It's meaningless. Financial services and the abolition of the gold standard means that the bankers are just adding extra zeros onto the end of everything just to prop up an utter horseshit system based on perpetual growth. As long as the masters of the universe are getting more zeros on their salaries and bonuses. That's the real reason why anybody has to suffer austerity.

Sorry about that.

Tags: #capitalism #banking

This is a story about getting rich or dying trying...

People come to London seeking their fortune. I went to Ireland seeking my salvation. In a way, I kinda found it.

My life had fallen apart. I had lost a lucrative contract with Barclays through no fault of my own (the guy who terminated my contract was then sacked because of his stupid decision) as well as breaking up with my girlfriend, being evicted from my apartment in Swiss Cottage (again, through no fault of my own) and had once again found myself homeless and unemployed. Many friends took sides during my breakup, and I ended up suddenly alone.

It was January, in the depths of a depressing British winter. No job, no money, no friends, no girlfriend, no nothing. I was fucked.

A friend who I met in the summer, when I first became homeless, had returned to the emerald isle. He had generously made an open offer that I could go and stay with him and his family if I ever needed it, and oh boy did I need it. I was suicidally depressed and a big danger to myself. Camden council had been supremely unhelpful to a resident who they owed a legal duty of care, but they didn't give a shit whether I lived or died.

I guess a lot of unimaginative runaways go to London, and a huge proportion of them will end up in Camden Town. Camden is cool, undoubtably. Camden is full of wide-eyed young people, tourists, and huge amounts of recreational drugs, casual sex and music venues. It's a great place to spend a summer on a shoestring, smoking strong cannabis and chatting up girls.

I had made a couple of similarly Peter Pan-esque pals in Camden, in their mid thirties and working dead-end jobs on low pay, forced into living in hostels and dreadful squat-like houses with several people sleeping in every room. For me, it was a hugely novel experience, having been a wealthy IT consultant working in banking since I took my first big money contract at the age of 20, for Lloyds TSB in Canary Wharf. After 17 or so years of fabulous wealth, slumming it for a summer was almost fun.

My girlfriend at the time was a waitress at an Italian restaurant. Despite having a degree in economics from the University of Bologna, she had rejected the rat race in favour of a minimum wage job and getting ridiculously stoned every day. She was fun and easy going, just so long as all you wanted to do was sit around while she chain-smoked joints, and have great sex of course.

I wouldn't say I outgrew my circle of friends, because I loved them dearly, but the stresses and demands of my contract at Barclays were not really compatible with the lifestyle of casual labour and the pursuit of recreational drugs. At some point, the worlds were going to collide.

My girlfriend and most of my friends felt that I had arrogantly snubbed them, but in fact I was desperately dependent on our social circle for my wellbeing and happiness. When things all fell apart, I did too. I was devastated by the collapse of my social life, as well as losing the structure and routine of my employment.

I ran away to Ireland, and my friend picked me up from Cork airport and took me back to the little village of Killavullen, that he and his family call home. Nestled in the hillside above the village, looking over the valley below and just at the edge of a vast forest, my friend's family home is a peaceful idyll that is completely unlike the rat race of London.

The timing was not ideal, and I arrived in the middle of various challenges facing the family, but they welcomed me and treated me with incredible warmth, kindness, care, despite the crises that they were dealing with. It's not my place to be indiscreet about the family matters that I became aware of, but suffice to say the last thing they needed was some sick burnt out heartbroken citydweller suddenly thrust into the mix.

My state of mind collapsed still further, as it became clear that there would be no reconciliation with my former friends: I was a pariah. There was nothing for me back in London, except a certain collapse in my will to live. My friend's family insisted that I should stay with them until I felt fit and well enough to return home. I missed my return flight and didn't book another.

I tried to go along with the flow of family and village life, getting to know the people that my friend grew up with, and his family.

My friend and I went panning for gold - I had bought him a kit while in England and had brought it over to Ireland for him - as well as climbing to the top of the 'mountain' that he lived on. We drove around the vast forest that covered the hillside, and explored the neighbouring villages, as well as nearby Cork city centre. Although I had visited Ireland twice before, I had missed the point about stopping to smell the shamrocks. I'm always in the mode of rush, rush, rush.

We travelled to the huge cliffs at Old Head, and I stood there on the edge, having had a haircut, a shave, a bunch of hot meals and having slept in a warm comfortable bed in a welcoming family home for some time. Instead of wanting to jump off the edge of the cliff, I was actually happy to be alive.

Tags: #friends #homeless #london #ireland #family #suicide #depression #career #banking #computing

This is a story about self sabotage...

What the hell am I doing, blogging about stuff that could get me fired, sued and make me unemployable? Why the hell am I burning so many bridges, and destroying my own reputation? Is this simply self-sabotaging behaviour?

If we look at the wider context of my story, the rat race has made me unwell. The boring office jobs propping up the instruments of capitalism so that an idle wealthy elite can ride roughshod over the proletariat, has made me unhappy. Compromising on my moral, ethical position, five days a week is not healthy. Working in an unstimulating environment that is unchallenging and uninteresting is a fate worse than death.

It's very easy to keep doing what you do because you fear change and it's the path of least resistance. I've been moulded into a certain career and industry sector. I'm the perfect guy to have join your massive corporation and quickly get up to speed with the bureaucracy, systems and processes. The bulk of the hard work in a big organisation is not the actual skilled thing that people are qualified to do, but just dealing with the crap that gets built up by a zillion little Hitlers all micromanaging their tiny empires they're building and trying to justify their pathetic jobs.

It's interesting who I'm friends with on Facebook, and who follows me on Twitter. In fact, with very little digging you can even find this vast cache of dirt, on Google. This is not about how important and influential I am, because I'm not. This is about public exposure. I took a decision to lay my soul bare, and I stand by that decision. But, for a moment, let's consider the kinds of people who I know or suspect have at one time dipped into my social media and online accessible over-sharing:

• Ex colleagues from JPMorgan
• Ex colleagues from HSBC
• Cohorts from a technology startup accelerator
• Two influential and well respected directors of startup accelerators
• Mentors from startup accelerator
• My accountant
• People who are influential and well respected in the technology sector
• Friends who work in tech and/or industry sectors that I work in

I've stopped short of actually tying my LinkedIn profile back in this direction, towards my blog. I've stopped short of in any way linking my limited company back towards this new alter ego of mine, although I did briefly get myself in a muddle over some suicide watch startup idea that I had. That was on September 21st... right when I started this journey of deciding to go public with every struggle I faced when I finally lost my grip on my career, my company, my reputation, everything.

For sure, I'm a nobody. However, people still talk. There is a rumour mill, no matter how small and insignificant you are. And people who work in offices are particularly interested in lurid tales of people who're doing anything that is out of the ordinary, even if that's losing your mind and ending up in the gutter.

By now, my tale of the toxic combination of stress, abusive relationship, mental health problems, heavy drinking, drug abuse (in that order) leading to suicide attempts, hospitalisation, homelessness, destitution and even police involvement, is well documented.

Well, I guess it's not that well documented, but it's out there in the public domain.

I have no idea how much was known before I decided to embark upon a mission of full disclosure, but I know that my abusive ex-wife was particularly indiscreet and insensitive. I'm sure that my friends did their best to save my blushes and protect my reputation as much as they could, but people still knew that I was getting more and more unwell.

Obviously, at times during my descent into melancholy and the infinite madness, I sabotaged my own reputation amongst my Facebook friends. I once shared a picture of some potassium cyanide that I had bought with the express intention of ending my life quickly and cleanly. The lethal dose is about 250 milligrams. I bought 2 grams of the toxic chemical: 8 times more than was strictly necessary.

Depression now has less stigma associated with it. We pretty much all know somebody who suffers with depression, and takes anti-depressant medication to help them with their low mood. These things are no longer taboo to talk about, and many people are able to still continue to hold down good jobs and be in positions of responsibility. Suffering from clinical depression is not a death sentence, certainly as far as a person's professional reputation is concerned.

Bipolar disorder has almost become cool to have. There are a list of celebrities and politicians as long as your arm, who have come forward and declared that they are living with the condition. Obviously, the ability to turn your hypomanic episodes into hyper-energetic flurries of productive activity, means that you can get shit done. In a way, we celebrate the person who has these mood episodes, because they can produce the 'overnight' successes we so revere in society.

Alcohol is everywhere, so unless you're swigging from a bottle of vodka hidden in your desk and reeking of liquor fumes as you breathe on people, just about any amount of drinking is socially acceptable. It's only if you declare yourself an alcoholic and have a stay in rehab that people start to stigmatise you. You can cover up your 28 days in The Priory, by saying that it was private hospital treatment for stress and anxiety.

Drug abuse is the last taboo. You pretty much don't want to put that one down on your CV. Cocaine use is widespread throughout London, and coffee gets stronger and stronger to the point where you're practically swallowing amphetamines. A few cans of Red Bull is the socially acceptable equivalent to snorting a couple of lines of some stimulant. Students are increasingly using Modafinil, Ritalin and Adderall to improve their concentration span and fact retention, as well as to stay awake during long revision binges.

If you think that these things feature in my daily life, you're wrong. These issues are simply incompatible with day-to-day existence. Depression robs you of the energy to get out of bed and face the day. Bipolar hypomania robs you of the contents of your bank balance, as it all gets ploughed into crazy schemes. Alcoholism is hard to hide, not that I've ever been physically dependent on booze, thank God. Drug addiction is all-consuming: there's no hiding it when you've lost the battle with addiction and it's taking you on a white-knuckle ride to an early grave.

So, if I've won the battles, why would I make it public knowledge that I fought them? Why would I take the time to declare, beyond all reasonable doubt, that I'm a flawed individual? Why would I spell it out, that I could relapse into any number of life-destroying illnesses at any moment?

Well, we could all succumb to these things at any moment.

I was 28 years young when I was knocked flat by clinical depression. I was 32 when addiction got its hooks in me. Just because I'd been a good student, a well behaved polite boy, a model employee, a career go-getter, and on the face of it I had a perfect little life, it doesn't mean that I was immune from anything.

But "it could never happen to me" right?

We believe that smart life choices will keep us safe. We believe that we have free will, and that therefore we would never choose to do something stupid. We believe that past performance is indicative of future results, even if the disclaimers always tell us the opposite.

There's something ugly about academic and corporate life, where we put a black mark against people's name if they fuck up even once. Screw up your school exams and you'll never get a chance to go to university. Screw up in your career and you'll be frozen out of the good jobs forevermore. Screw up in life and you'll be a dirty leper who nobody will want to know or to help.

This is the bleak outlook for so many people, who were simply unlucky or made a decision that was obviously regrettable, but life is continuously setting us traps and pitfalls. Why do consequences have to be so long lasting? Oh, you got in financial trouble? Here, let us help you by now charging you fines and punitive rates of interest, plus denying you opportunities and making the cost of living sky high because you have a poor credit rating.

The punishment for not having any money is that you have to pay more money. The punishment for your crimes is the deprivation of your liberty and the destruction of your future opportunities.

Apparently people are mocking those who have chosen to get a semicolon tattoo, but let's think about this for a minute.

I work in a big office and I see hundreds of people every day. In all likelihood they have seen that I have a semicolon tattooed behind my ear. If you were to Google "what does a semicolon tattoo mean?" then you will see that it's mostly to do with struggles with depression, addiction, self-harm and suicide attempts. I wonder how many people are thinking "why the hell did we employ this guy?".

When I did my interview, I sat so that my interviewers were on my right-hand side. The people who interviewed me never saw that tattoo, until soon after I started in my new job. I wonder if they'd have hired me if they had seen the tattoo.

Tattoos are actually uncommon amongst investment banking IT consultants. Certainly visible tattoos are even declared as not permitted, in many banks dress codes. I even thought about putting a sticking plaster over the mark on my skin, for my interview.

However, that's all I ever did for years and years. That's our whole approach to mental health and the problems that people face in their private lives: put a sticking plaster over it.

I've written at length about how angry I am that our first line of defence for people who are stressed out and depressed by their shitty unfulfilling office jobs, is to give them powerful psychoactive medications that artificially alter their mood so they can continue to work their dreadful jobs.

I'm angry that I'm so pressurised by wider society to cover up my problems, in order to retain a blemish-free reputation. I feel like the need to appear pristine and infallible to potential employers, fellow work colleagues and bosses, is largely to blame for why I had a massive breakdown and implosion, instead of things getting fixed before they got out of hand.

We are brainwashed to believe that we can't have any gaps on our CV that we can't explain. We are brainwashed to believe that we can't take our foot off the gas pedal for a single second. We are brainwashed to believe that a stain on our reputation will hang around for the rest of our careers.

You know what the problem is? It's our fucking careers. The treadmill. The rat race. It's making so many people mentally unwell, as well as causing physical health damage due to the sedentary nature of the work. No amount of standing desks or free gym membership is going to compensate for the problem.

I backslid into office employment because it was easy and I was desperate. My back was against the wall, and it made perfect financial sense to go and suffer another stretch of agonising misery back doing the shit that I'm most qualified and experienced to do, but it's fucking killing me.

It's important to be values-aligned, but it's also so easy to be tempted by 'easy' money. The cash rewards for doing the kind of mind-bogglingly boring work that I do are substantial. In theory, I only have to do this work for short bursts, and then I have spare time and cash to do whatever I need to do to balance the books, psychologically. However, in practice, all I'm doing is servicing debts that were built up just staying alive.

The welfare state took a dim view on my situation. Why do I need help, when I can go and get a job that pays fabulously well? Well, guess what? I tried it. I tried getting one of these shitty desk jobs that kill me, while I was homeless living in a hostel. And guess what? Working one of those jobs that made you unwell in the first place while you are still unwell really fucks you up.

This whole exercise of blowing my existence and private life wide open serves to document the ridiculousness of the mental health destroying lives that we are forced to live. If this whole experience ends up killing me, at least I've left the evidence: the smoking gun.

Nobody really cares when white middle class, well educated men in good jobs kill themselves. Why would they? Well, look around you. Do you see people getting happier? Do you see mental illness declining? Do you see suicide rates declining? Do you feel secure, fulfilled? Do you feel like the human condition is improving?

I look around and I see war and I see poverty. I see ordinary British people being forced into zero hours contract minimum wage McJobs, and still unable to afford basic amenities. I see loneliness and depression. I see a lack of real local community. I see families pulled apart by the need to go to large urban centres to seek your fortune. I see people locked into their own little world: headphones plugged in, eyes cast downwards at their smartphone, not talking to anybody face to face except to ask for their morning coffee.

Is this just a London thing? Is my view tainted because I'm struggling with depression myself? Actually, London is the canary in the coal mine. The sensitive people who have their head up looking around, sensing for danger, are usually on to something. Everything is pretty shit and fucked up right now.

And so, I am rejecting the conventional. I'm rejecting the sensible, rational and tried-and-tested. I'm burning the bridges that lead back to places I should never return to.

Yes, I might be making a fool of myself. Yes, people might be sniggering at me, safe behind their computer screens. Yes, important people are judging me and they have the ability to thwart me because of their prejudice, and make my life hard and even impossible. I could find myself unemployable, but not know why, because nobody has to tell me. I'm giving away all the ammunition you need to destroy me, and people are eagerly taking it.

But you know, who's the real winner? If you take what I gave you and use it against me, how are you going to feel? We're all doing that. We're all exploiting weaknesses that we discover in each other, in order to get ahead in the rat race.

How do you win a rigged contest? If everybody is cheating, do you cheat too?

The other option is to martyr yourself. For sure, you'll be hated and excluded. Nobody will thank you. But at least you can sleep at night, in the gutter.

Prisons can mean anywhere you feel trapped and your liberty is restricted

Tags: #career #london #computing #banking #depression #suicide #mentalhealth

This is a story about the rich:poor divide...

Theresa May, the British prime minister, had the gall to lecture the poor on living within their means. In actual fact, the poor are working hard and just trying to keep up with the wealthy, who are racing ahead.

If you look at the Instagram account called Rich Kids of Instagram you will see that it is extremely popular. 'Reality' TV shows that have followed mega-rich people like Ozzy Osborne and family, the Kardashians and the cast of Made in Chelsea, are some of the most viewed and talked about things on television. Wealth worship is everywhere, and is it wrong for people to feel that they deserve a little of the life that is rammed down their throats by the media?

When we are talking about living within our means, this is coming from politicians who spend 6-figure sums of money each year on expenses alone, while also pocketing salaries that are many many times more than the average wage. The problem comes right from the top. The more that rich public figures splash their cash, the more the hypocrisy is insulting when they tell the poor to tighten their belts.

How many people on council estates are driving Ferraris that they can't afford the repayments on? How many hardworking families have ordered yachts that they now can't afford to pay the remaining balance on?

When we talk about living within our means, we are talking about people who are quite familiar with budgeting, make do and mending, and the general attitudes of postwar austerity. Really, when talking about living within our means, we should be talking to the banks, who recklessly endangered their financial stability by not living within their means in terms of their ability to maintain solvency. It's the banks that are insufficiently capitalised and are excessively over-leveraged. It's the banks that have lent many, many, many times more money than their reserves allow, in the pursuit of endless effortless profits.

When a person borrows money, they intend to repay that money using hard work. The borrower will go to their job every day, and be productive. In return for a person's hard work - productivity - they will receive their salary, with which they will buy the things that they need and repay their debts.

When a banker lends money, they intend to profit for no labour at all. Through interest slavery, the banker will make money, simply because they already have money. Using the money multiplier - fractional reserve banking - the banker will in fact be able to lend the same money, over and over and over again, multiplying the amount of effortless interest that is earned each time.

It is the banks who are not living within their means, nor being hardworking or productive in any way. It is the banks who have decimated global finances, and are now demanding that the hardworking people accept austerity, pay freezes, job insecurity, unemployment and low growth, simply because they overstretched themselves in pursuit of yet more effortless and labour free income for doing absolutely nothing.

Let's imagine that a banker, with zero money of his own, is paying a generous interest rate of 0.25% on deposits - exactly the same as the Bank of England. Using a fractional reserve of 5%, which is the minimum requirement for today's stress-tests of banks, to make sure they're adequately capitalised in the event of another credit crunch, that means the banker can multiply a £1,000 deposit into nearly £19,000 worth of loans. Obviously, the loans carry a hefty interest rate. Let's imagine that the banker lends out the £19k as overdrafts, which often carry a 20% APR on the high street. In a year, the banker will now net nearly £4,000 of profit, for doing absolutely nothing, out of just a £1,000 deposit. That's a 4 to 1 ratio! For every £1 deposited with Utter Bastard Bank Plc, they're going to make nearly £4!!

So, while the poor toil and tighten their belts, buying the cheapest groceries they can and cutting back on every expense, the banks are getting fat for doing absolutely nothing at all. Interest slavery is a con and a crime, and the perpetuation of this situation is the only reason why ordinary hardworking people are having to suffer NHS cuts, crowded public transport, packed classrooms, pay cuts, redundancies and every other economic penalty for the bankers' failure to live within their means.

Yes, we'd all like to make money while we sleep. Yes, we'd all like money for nothing. However, a bank is just utter bullshit. A bank is supposed to be an instrument to grease the wheels of commerce, not a massive leech, sucking so many pounds out of people's pockets, for every penny they leave in their bank accounts.

And, when you're richer, the things that go wrong in your life are mere pocket change. Let's look at a person who earns £20k, versus a banker who earns £200k, i.e. a 10 to 1 ratio:

• Parking fine £50... costs the banker £5
• Car breakdown £500... costs the banker £50
• Need a new central heating boiler £3,000... costs the banker £300
• Private school fees £12,000... costs the banker £1,200
• Food £300... costs the banker £30
• Holiday £700... costs the banker £70

Imagine if your budget used the values that the banker pays. They're a much smaller percentage of your income, aren't they? Life would be a lot easier if everything cost 1/10th of what it does. Well, guess what, the banker pays exactly what you pay, except they earn 10 times as much, so the two things are equivalent.

Everybody's car breaks down from time to time. It's a fact of life. In fact the shitty old unreliable banger that the poor family bought, is much more likely to break down than the brand new BMW that has a warranty, that the banker bought.

Once you've got money, you can keep it and you can make some more. If you haven't got any, no amount of living within your means is going to improve your situtation. It's a con. It's utter bullshit. It's a swindle.

When the banks in Italy start to fail, and cause a domino-like collapse of all the banks across the world in a re-run of the 2007/08 financial crisis, except much, much worse, it will become apparent that all of the suffering that ordinary people have gone through in order to rescue a deeply flawed banking system, was for nothing.

I think people are going to be pretty angry when they realise that patronising idiots like Theresa May arrived in their positions of power by luck not good judgement. I think people are going to be pretty angry when they find out that the good times never stopped in the City of London, and pay rises and bonuses are just as big as they ever were, while all the hardworking ordinary people suffer the consequences of propping up a broken and corrupt system.

It's time to smash the system, and rip it out of the hands of a psychopathic elite who would have us starving and dirty, living on the streets, if it meant they could maintain their ill-gotten position of wealth, power and domination.

What's the difference between a successful banker and a struggling worker? Absolutely fuck all, apart from pure dumb luck, but those arrogant fucks don't even realise how fucking hypocritical and patronising they are when they accuse other people of being underachievers, having been profligate and poorly mismanaged their finances, and having not worked hard enough.

It incenses me, that a tiny handful have such unimaginable wealth, when so many billions live in abject poverty. Just 62 people have as much money as 3.6 billion others. There is so much that is wrong with that. Off with their fucking heads!

Tags: #banking #capitalism #politics

This is a story about profit...

If you work in a free market capitalist economy, the company you work for is run for maximum profitability. In order to maximise profits, a company will have the fewest possible admin staff it can, to keep overheads low, whilst also having as many revenue generating staff members as the demand for the company's products and services can support. There are no jobs that are created, solely for the benefit of the employee.

Think about it: if you were to quit, the things that you do wouldn't be getting done. If you're in an administrative function, perhaps that means bills not getting paid, invoices not being issued or regulatory requirements not being met. Sooner or later your business is going to get shut down if it neglects its backoffice functions. If you're in a sales function, that means less revenue for the business. Less revenue means less turnover, which lowers the company's valuation, making it harder for them to raise money for expansion. Less revenue means lower profits, meaning less champagne at the shareholders' annual meeting and tough questions asked of the board of directors.

Your salary is a payment for your time. Your time is then used to enable the company to continue to trade, or to make it directly more profitable. Your salary is offset by profits. Your salary is not a gift, out of the kindness of the heart of your boss. Your salary is way less than the profit that somebody else will pocket, for your efforts. Your salary is a price worth paying because the things that you do while at work will generate more money than it costs to employ you.

The business of employing people, is the process of getting somebody to do something instead of you doing it, but you get to keep a proportion of the fruits of their labour. The profit generated is many, many times more than the cost of the wages.

And so, we have described the ragged trousered philanthropists. It is the workers who are generously donating the vast proportion of the fruits of their labour, to an idle wealthy elite who employ them. The wages of those who toil at the bottom of the pyramid scheme, are inadequate to pay for high quality housing, the education of their children and nutritious food. Instead, the people who pick your vegetables and build your houses, and generally give themselves arthritic joints, bad backs and knackered knees, are left with ill health and a pittance of a pension when they are so overworked that they can no longer remain in the workforce.

But, we are told, you should count yourself lucky to have a job!

Lucky? Lucky? Oh, how terribly fortunate that I have enabled members of the board of directors to buy another yacht, or to purchase another rare artwork to hang on the walls of their mansion. La-de-da, how lucky I am to have been able to plump up the trust funds and offshore bank balances of rich shareholders.

But, there's nothing to stop the likes of you or I from quitting our jobs, and starting our own companies, is there?

Well, there are economies of scale and there are monopolies. Certain businesses will not be very profitable for the likes of you or I, because they have a low gross margin. When a company grows very large through acquisitions, swallowing up all of its competitors, it is better placed to capitalise on a market, because it's a dominant player. Also, the cost of administrative, legal and tax obligations as percentage of the overall running costs, is much lower for the very large company, which makes it more profitable.

When a company becomes very large indeed, it is even able to headquarter itself in a country with a favourable tax deal, so all the wealth that is generated by those ragged-trousered philanthropists, flows out of the country where they live and work, so even their public services become deprived of their vital cash.

Yes, you must consider yourself lucky to be able to have grown your company so large that it is able to cheat even the government out of the taxes that would pay for higher quality housing, healthcare and eduction, that would at least be some recompense for the fact that you see such a tiny share of the profit that you generate.

But don't companies offer their staff share options, and bonuses? No. These schemes are just scams to buy your loyalty cheaply. Share options cost far less than offering an attractive salary that would keep you with the company. When you really look into how much money you're going to make when you can finally exercise the options, you will see that your employer has bought your loyalty extremely cheaply.

The pips have been squeezed too much, and the wealth has not been shared. Large companies have not made the societal contributions that we must all make - taxes - to prevent the ordinary workers from suffering a drop in living standards. Education, healthcare, public transport, housing: these things are all chronically underfunded, while the mega-rich are opulently wealthy, living in a totally different world from those who toil tirelessly to add yet more zeros onto obscene bank balances.

It's time to soak the rich, not be grateful for our jobs.

Tags: #capitalism #banking #politics

This is a story about brainwashing...

How do you think that somebody who has worked for the best part of 20 years in the investment banking technology sector, mostly as an IT consultant, would re-adjust to being under lock and key in a psychiatric hospital? The answer is: very easily.

Hospitals and the NHS are a home from home for anybody who's worked for an organisation with hundreds of thousands of employees. The ways that large organisations function are largely the same. The way that systems and processes are supposed to control large numbers of people, are nearly identical.

Being in the loony bin was welcome relief from the bullshit day job, but it's not like I had absented myself from all responsibilities. I still had to have my wits about me to avoid being medicated against my will and put under a 'section' - involuntary commitment to a secure facility, by rule of law - which could have seen my 2 week voluntary stay extended anywhere from 28 days to 6 months.

How did I manage it so easily? Perhaps it's because I knew I could leave any time I wanted to, but perhaps it could be because nearly 20 years of going to a shit office to do a shit job, has kinda prepared me for the monotony, rhythm and routine of spending weeks on end trapped somewhere I don't want to be.

There was a danger that just the very act of asking to leave could have triggered the doctors to decide to force me to stay longer. I knew that I had to remain calm, and give the medical team  enough of a peek at my psyche to be able to make a judgement that I was safe to release back into the wilderness.

The psychiatrist who took me under his care was in two minds, after 6 days, whether he was going to insist on 'committing' me, so that he'd get 28 or so days to poke around inside my head. Naturally, most people would freak out, if they found out that their liberty was about to be taken away from them. It's a game of brinksmanship: who's going to blink first.

Obviously, we don't 'commit' people any more to asylums. Instead we detain them under a section of the Mental Health Act, and put them in secure psychiatric facilities. You're no longer a loony in the loony bin. You're a "service user" in a "care facility". Of course, I'm not saying that the function is not useful or should not be trusted. I'm just pointing out that the names of things have been changed.

Bizarrely, if you say "I'm going to kill myself, I need to be locked up" you are very unlikely to be locked up. If you walk up to the hospital reception desk and use their phone to contact the switchboard, ask to be connected to the bleep holder for Psychiatric Liaison, and explain frankly your situation, you will have an amusing conversation with the poor Psychiatrist who has to follow official channels, but you're not going to get anywhere. The times that I have been admitted as an inpatient to a psychiatric facility, it has just taken time & patience. Only the truly desperate will sit in Accident & Emergency for 13 hours just patiently waiting for help.

Conversely, if you say "I'm not mad, I'm fine" once you're in the system, or in any way try to rush the process along, you're going to end up held down on the floor with somebody injecting Risperidone and Haloperidol in you, and you might wake up 40 years later, shuffling around the corridors of some institution, with the marked side effects of powerful psychiatric drugs causing you to make involuntary facial movements.

You can't fight the system. You can't fight the frustrating fact that you'll never get ahead in life and must instead sit at a desk keeping a seat warm, just so that your boss can appoint somebody from outside the company to come in and be incompetent at the job you were hoping to be promoted into, even though you were experienced and qualified to do it. You can't fight the frustrating fact that your miserable boring existence, helping the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, is making you pretty depressed, and you really want to fuck everything off and watch everything burn down.

Who is mad and who is sane? That doctor who just declared you to be mentally ill probably talks to their imaginary friend called Dob or Gob or Dog or Dod (or is it God?) who really knows? There's no proof that their imaginary friend exists, just like the doctor has no proof that the voices you hear aren't real and you aren't actually the Son of Dob, resurrected on Earth.

The invisible line between sane and insane is very blurry, when billions of people genuinely believe in magic, invisible entities that don't exist, and have absolute faith that some children's fairy tales are actually instructions that should be devoutly and literally followed to the letter as some kind of prescription for life.

It seems highly irreverent to say it, but people need to speak up, because the loonies are actually in charge of the asylum, when we elect and hand over power to people who believe in their invisible friends, fairy tales and magic.

By the way, for the record, I don't hear voices and I don't think I'm Jesus. But then, saying that kinda makes me sound a bit mad, doesn't it?

Tags: #mentalhealth #nhs #hospital #suicide #depression #religion #politics

This is a story about ingratitude...

Why do I attack the industry that has suckled me? Why am I so angry and upset with the profession that has nurtured me? Why am I so ungrateful for my whopping big salary and cushy benefits?

Administration: the unnecessary bureaucratic headache that creates unwelcome red tape, adds no value to the real economy and is an overhead that limits the productivity, innovation and creativity of those who are truly useful. I don't work in the Information Technology business. I work in the business of administration.

The two most productive things that I do in any given week are filling in my timesheet and submitting my invoice for payment. The most important thing that I do each quarter is to pay my Value-Added Tax (VAT) down to the precise penny that I owe. If I'm not perfectly on top of my bureaucratic administration, the Government will stop me doing my 'real' job, which is creating software.

But what does the software I create do anyway? Most of it is just keeping score. It's bean-counting software. It's software that creates jobs for zillions of IT professionals like me, so that companies can get rid of zillions of administrators, that they immediately re-employ to make sure their IT professionals are filling in their timesheets correctly.

For every person who I put out of a job, by automating the processes they perform, the company will then invent some other pointless position. Our whole economy is based on bullshit jobs.

Should I be happy to have a job, and to count my blessings? Well, no. It's immoral to not consider whether you are having a positive or a negative impact on society, and on the planet. To count my blessings is an incitement to be wilfully ignorant of global issues, and the betterment of humanity.

So what am I doing instead, to align my values? How do I reconcile the rhetoric of what I preach with the obvious fact that I am enabling massive corporations to continue to ride roughshod over the human race and the fragile planet?

Well, I take the money, and with it I pay my rent & bills. And then, I spend 90% of my time thinking about issues and writing this blog. I'm not paid to create software - so little of my time is actually spent doing that - instead, I'm paid to bite the hand that feeds me. It's an inside job. I'm disruptive and cynical. I'm disillusioned and critical.

Does that mean my colleagues have to work harder to make up for me slacking? No. It doesn't work like that. If my boss asks me to do something, I won't do it. I'll wait to see if they ask me again. My boss isn't going to ask somebody else to do it, because they've already asked me to do it. 9 times out of 10, I'll never be asked again. The tenth time, I'll realise that whatever was asked of me actually was important, so I'll apologise and do the work.

So, am I idle? Absolutely not. With the time I could have spent doing those 9 things that were clearly unnecessary, I will conduct a kind of audit. I will go around, looking to see if there's anything more useful I could be doing. Invariably, there isn't. Everybody is just so locked into a hierarchical system of managers, administrators & clerks, that nobody has looked at the bigger picture and realised that what they're doing is absolute bullshit. Or if anybody has realised that their job is utter bullshit, they're not talking about it.

Now, I'm not talking about nurses, garbage collectors, train drivers, firemen. It's pretty obvious what the useful function of many front-line workers is. However, these people are working all hours for some of the lowest wages. No manager needs to tell a nurse to help a patient who is in pain & discomfort. No administrative drone needs to make sure that a garbage collector is hitting their Key Performance Indicators and is going to achieve their annual objectives at their appraisal. Either the important job is done, or it isn't.

There are functions that literally nobody would miss, except maybe not being harassed by an army of micromanagers and bureaucrats. Isn't it the case that you're propping up a sick and twisted system, by continuing to count your blessings and not rock the boat?

I frankly find it disgusting that I'm paid so many more times more than what a nurse gets paid. If I was to simply sit back and "think positive" and try to enjoy my ill-gotten gains, doesn't that make me a terrible, terrible person?

It's probably true that the world doesn't need any more bloggers, but what am I supposed to do? Impoverish myself and retrain as yet another disrespected front-line worker? It's hardly like they're being heard today, is it? How are the social wrongs ever going to be righted?

It seems to me that the right thing to do is to speak up. Yes, I jeopardise my lucrative career in doing so, but it's the right thing to do. People are more likely to listen to an IT consultant from the banking world, who is critical of the sector that pays me handsomely, than they are to somebody who could easily be dismissed as simply "jealous" or "not smart enough" to land themselves a similar job.

Truly, I do not think that front line workers are not smart enough to do my job. In actual fact, you have to be pretty dumb to be able to turn a blind eye to the social injustice of being highly paid to be an idle manager of hardworking people who do the real jobs.

I currently have no cash to put my money where my mouth is. Quitting my job would literally see me homeless and destitute again. However, I do anticipate a time when I will be faced with a true test of my morality: when I am able, will I quit the rat race and try to do something that is more in line with my values?

I have massively impoverished myself, trying to take an ethical stance, and I would do it again. It's the right thing to do.

Tags: #politics #banking #capitalism #career #computing

This is a story about the debt spiral...

When the burden of debt in society is too great, and lenders are unwilling to forgive - to take a debt haircut or even write off debts - then there will be popular uprisings.

It's not that people don't want to repay their debts. In fact, most people accept that debt is a necessary evil in order to get the things they need when they need them, rather than towards the end of their life, in senile old age and infirmity.

And so, we become burdened with a mortgage, in order to give our family a stable roof over their heads. We become burdened with a car on hire purchase, so that we have a reliable and safe modern vehicle to be able to take the kids to school, and to get us to work without breaking down. We put our holidays and special occasions on credit cards, and pay back the debt when we get back, or after the festivities are over.

Most people diligently repay their debts.

In free-market economics, prices are able to fluctuate to find the point where affordability meets maximum profit. Do you think the cost price to the producer or supplier of the goods and services that you purchase, bears any relation to the retail price that you pay? Of course not. That's why a designer brand T-shirt costs at least 10 times as much as an unbranded garment, even though they come from the same sweatshop in the developing world.

In our consumer society, you are 'free' to select the goods and services that you want. However, in order to fit in with your buddies who are in a similar socioeconomic group to you, you will select the brands that they do. If you're rich, you'll do your supermarket shopping at Waitrose. If you're poor, you'll do your shopping at Asda/Walmart. However, the food you buy will have similar calorific content.

The brands become better and better at pricing their products so that you are just about able to buy everything you need, but won't have much spare cash left over. The brands know the income bracket that they're targeting, so they know the level where their consumers will become price insensitive. I literally don't care whether my coffee costs £2 or £4. If my coffee cost £5, then I'd think "blimey! that was expensive, I'm not going to go there again" but the £2 coffee shop could literally increase their prices 100% and I wouldn't even notice.

Once everybody has maxed out their budget, on the mortgage, the car finance, the credit cards, the overdraft, the store cards and some personal loans, where do you really go from there?

We demand that our corporations make increasing profits, but yet in order to do so they must hold down wage inflation and the cost of raw materials. We demand that our economy grows, but in order to do so, people must use increasing amounts of their limited pot of disposable income to drive consumption. What happens when everybody is just maxed out?

We're living in the age of low growth, high borrowing and low wage inflation. In order to sustain corporate profits, the cost of goods & services continues to increase. In order to prop up the capital growth of the pension funds, asset prices - such as house prices - have continued to be overvalued. However, the only way that the general population have been able to maintain their standard of living is through borrowing.

Ordinary people have not been profligate and stupid. People were promised pay rises and promotions, and instead they've been given job insecurity and wage cuts in real terms. If your wage increases just a few percent, but the cost of your housing, bills, food and transportation all increase in double-digit terms, then you're actually getting poorer.

If the headline rate of inflation - which is pretty much just concerned with wages - is low, then the value of your loans & mortgages is not getting inflated away. The baby boomers might complain about interest rates reaching over 15% in the late 1970s, but they forget that their wages were also increasing too. By the time the 1980s came around, people's mortgages were a tiny fraction of what they were earning.

What we see today is people's cost of living skyrocketing, but their wages are the same, which means they're earning less and less in real terms. If your wages stay the same, and your cost of living is increasing, that means you have less and less money to service your debts. So, you tighten your belt and cut back on your consumer spending, which in turn hurts an economy that is so dependent on spend, spend, spend!

What we see today is far worse than the Japanese stagflation that meant that the price of goods and services was getting cheaper, which encouraged people to become thrifty because they could buy things more cheaply if they waited. Instead, what we are seeing is people who have been promised growth, completely screwed over by a system that robs them of their wealth with no opportunity to do anything about it.

In a zero growth world, debts need to be forgiven or else ordinary people will become so unhappy that they will overthrow their idle creditors.

Tags: #banking #capitalism #politics

This is a story about worthless paper...

Do you want to know how to make an infinite amount of money? First, you should obtain a boat. Then, take out as many insurance policies as you can afford the premiums of, on the boat. Then, sink the boat and claim on the insurance policies.

Why can't you do this? Well, because it's illegal to insure something more than once, for the very reason that it creates a financial incentive to go around sinking boats. People respond to economic incentives.

However, it is possible to take out as many life insurance policies as you want. The reason being, that it is assumed that because murder is illegal and suicide used to be (now it's decriminalised) then there is some protection from those who wish to profit from death.

But what about a company? Is a company a person-like entity? Should it be possible to buy life insurance policies for a company?

What is a Credit Default Swap? Well, the simplest explanation is that it's a life insurance policy for a company. If a company gets into a financially distressed situation where it can no longer repay its debts, then the Credit Default Swap will pay out. This is called a credit event. Basically, a credit event normally means the company is dying, because they can't pay their debts. A company that defaults on its debts is never going to be able to refinance themselves after a credit event, because their credit rating will be junk. Game over.

So, if you allow people to take out an infinite amount of Credit Default Swaps, betting that a company is going to go bust, aren't you economically incentivising that event to happen? If there's a bigger and bigger pool of money that is hoping that a company goes bankrupt, that is far bigger than the pool of money who want to see the company rescued, isn't the market going to quite naturally want to push that company under, so that almost everybody gets a big payday?

We know that markets can be manipulated, and because Credit Default Swaps are an Over-The-Counter (OTC) product, there is no market regulation. It's not possible to know who is dealing in these financial instruments, and who stands to benefit. They're kind of ideal for insider trading, because they just don't have the same kind of traceability of equities that are traded on stock exchanges.

The other un-nerving thing about Credit Default Swaps, is that there is no underwriter, and no need to prove that you have sufficient collateral to cover the paper that you have printed. It's possible for organisations to sell vast quantities of Credit Default Swaps, and have nowhere near enough money to cover the losses if the credit events happen.

In the insurance market of Lloyds, there are wealthy names who provide the collateral - cash, precious metals, priceless artworks, property, liquid assets (like shares) etc. etc. - to make sure that the money is there in the event of an earthquake, flood, fire or whatever massive disaster might affect the insurance industry in a major way.

However, in the derivatives market, only the mature products like Futures and Options would have margin calls and require collateral to make sure that losses never exceed one counterparty's ability to pay. Credit Default Swaps have been allowed to be printed completely without regulation, which is concerned with making sure that a credit event wouldn't totally wipe out the risk holders.

Some measures put the Credit Default Swaps market at about $16 trillion, however, when all the contracts were entered into the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation's central system in 2008, the aggregate notional value of the contracts was closer to $2 quadrillion ($1,700,000,000,000,000). That's a shit tonne of worthless paper.

But is it worthless? Well, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers triggered a credit event, the money that was demanded by those looking to cash in their Credit Default Swaps would have brought down massive companies like AIG as well as putting a deadly dent in the balance sheet of just about every investment bank with a proprietary trading desk (i.e. all of them) who had been foolishly dabbling with these stupid contracts.

Why stupid? Well, the whole idea of being able to make unlimited bets against a company is market manipulating beyond belief. Who's going to recapitalise a company and save it, when you can bet against it in secret instead? Why wouldn't anybody who gets the vaguest whiff of a company in financial trouble not rush off and place large untraceable wagers that it's going to fail?

Naked short selling is pretty bad, but there's only a certain amount of leverage that you can get, and you have to have the collateral to cover your exposure to the risk that the market might go against you. When you're talking about naked Credit Default Swaps, you're looking at the ability to get leverage of thousands of times the amount of money you're actually risking. That kind of potential profit has the ability to move the market, and collapse a company.

It's a simple moral question: if companies are like people, and therefore allowed to be 'life insured', should we be allowed to murder them so that we can cash in on their death?

Tags: #banking #capitalism #jpmorgan #derivatives