Miscellaneous madness
Underpinning the talk of “increasing the longevity of wholesale funding”, and righteous anger over disgraced executives disappearing in private jets with their underperformance-related bonuses, is the sound of otherwise intelligent people behaving as though they’re the Witch-Finder General. Listen to Justin Urquhart Stewart of Seven Investment Management, quoted from a TV interview in The Guardian Weekly (20 February), talking about the rushed takeover of HBOS by Lloyds TSB:“We now know that while they were working on this shotgun marriage last autumn, HBOS was already pregnant with the spawn of Satan.”Meanwhile, in an extended interview, NZBC friend Michael Silverblatt of KCRW Bookworm reveals that 1970s pop legends Sparks have made 21 albums and are still going. I vaguely remember their 1990s collaboration with French act Rita Mitsouko, but I’m embarrassed to admit I lost track of their music before the beginning of the 1980s. High time I bought ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For the Both of Us’, I thought. So I did.
For an inveterate pessimist it’s even more wonderful to read, again in The Guardian Weekly, about new GlaxoSmithKline boss Andrew Witty decreeing the company will slash prices on medicines in the poorest countries, spend profits on hospitals and share IP knowledge about currently protected drugs in a “patent pool”.
With so many corporate entities doing truly stupid things at present, such groundbreaking decisions should be applauded extremely loudly by even the most reluctant global citizen.
posted by Chris Bell at 8:02 PM
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