THE CHIMERA OF THE CITY.

So, what has changed, amongst all this blather about a new type of politics ? At one point during this election campaign I was listening to Nick Clegg being interviewed on the radio, and there was something about his voice and the way he was speaking that was reminding me of someone else, and then I realised, it was David Cameron. It is that earnest but empty rhetoric that is managerial rather than rooted in any commitment, any actual belief or developed argument, it just floats, being reasonable, not scaring the natives with anything resembling an ideology, a critical concept that might challenge the orthodoxy that is accepted as a given : that this thing called ' the market ' exists and functions of and for itself and is not a construct and a concept that was created by and is maintained by those in political power.
Whenever I hear that cliche of 'difficult decisions' it is clear that is ment is ' we are about to make life even harder for those who can least bear it. '
The more I attempt to understand this monster called the financial services sector, the more clear it becomes that it is based on fictions and duplicity, it is not operating according to a natural law, it could be swept away entirely if there was the will to do it. That euphemism ' The City ' gives the whole dark and dirty business of making money out of money a completely false image of being a physical reality, a unitary, bricks and mortar entity when it is in fact the opposite : it is a Chimera.
The Chimera was a mythological beast composed of parts of other animals, a fitting discription of what these banks and their offshoots realy are. It was the sibling of further hybrid monsters such as Cerebus and Hydra, read LIBOR and CDO's, ABACUS or something called BISTRO, Broad Indexed Secured Trust Offering, if I am not mistaken.
The City has its Griffins to guard its boundaries, another mythological creature, but this is again a fantasy, the gold is no longer there, it has been spirited away. Once upon a time there were actual warehouses of goods that were traded in the Exchange, but now it is capital, and the arcane mysteries of how it is traded, as ' futures ' notional values speculatively traded, all the time trying to create more money from existing blocks of money, without any connection to anything back in the real world.
Spotlights need to be shone into this self-perpetuating world and if no one has the temerity to actually curtail it altogether then at least put down some serious controls as appears to be starting to happen in America.
I heard some bankers talking yesterday in a pub, blithely saying how London remains a tax haven for the rich, and saying how the British don't go in for riots. Well, not too often, but if this situation is not addressed I would not be so sure.