Another Day Another Mess

The bankers have not gone away, they are still finding holes in their accounts and bigger holes in those of some of their customers.

Another trip to the payday lenders will be needed by those customers of Coutts who put their trust and more sadly, their money, into one of that banks wheezes.  Coutts in recent years has been one of the choicer properties of the Royal Bank of Scotland.

What my bank, the one that the government put my tax money into, I ask?  Why did it do that?  Possibly because with so many Labour members from Scotland then and in government they felt under pressure to do so.

What kind of men we might ask were running that bank in the past?  Who were the traders, the managers and the senior economists who shaped the decisions?  It is clear that they were men who offered false prospects on distorted data and perhaps were in a Celtic mist of blind optimism.

One of the fashionable areas of mathematical study allied to management and organisation is that of Game Theory.  I recall once a long time ago being acquainted with a poker school which had Game theorists pitted against neo-Keynesians all hoping for senior positions in business.  Guess who lost.

If money is all a game then according to this research, we humans might be better served in our financial needs by putting banks under the management of chimpanzees.  It is not just their skills, perhaps their morals and ethical responses may be better and more reliable.

And other things.