Greensill, Pigswill and Troughs

According to Mr Deasy, the proudest boast of an Englishman can be summed up in this sentence: I paid my way. A fictional remark, and now 99 years old, for in the intervening years, the proudest boast of an Englishman might have become: Someone else has paid my way.

The Greensill scandal may appear, like the collapse of Carillion, to be just another financial mess that doomed a company, in this case one devoted to the arcane world (to most people) of financial management.

In reality it is not so arcane, as the link below explains.

You and I are expcted to pay for a good when we buy it. I am not able to walk int PCWorld and select the most expensive 27" IMac and when asked to pay for it, defer payment on the basis that it will be paid for when I die, as I have inserted a clause in my Last Will and Testament that instructs the Executors of my Will to sell my little Library and use the receipts to pay PCWorld what I owe them.

Companies large and small need not pay bills on time anymore, as the invoice can be purchased by companies like Greensill. The model on paper appears to be a convenient arrangement for companies that need to buy goods but don't have the liquidity. Over time, the assumption is that the debts are settled.

As has happened before, Greensill took on more than it could handle, failed get the NHS contract that was supposed to anchor the business in substantial annual profits, and guarantee David Cameron £60m+ or whichever noddy sum it was, with the result that investors are now licking their wounds, while in the UK enquiries begin into the links between Greensill and serving members of Her Majesty's Government.

There is a trough, and into it goes the swill, aka taxpayer's money. The billions that flow through the NHS are irresistible to the financial pigs of this world whose idea of a day's work is shifting dosh around a computer screen, while planning their next weekend break in Corfu or Positano, pre-Covid.

Yes, capitalism has found ways of innovating financial services. Gilliant Tett in her rivetting account of the origin of the crash (Fool's Gold, 2009) presents, in The Derivatives Dream (Chapter 1), the rational basis for mechanisms that were legal, flexible and beneficial to the financial world. Until the smell of swill made bankers brokers and chancers dizzy and their greed got the better of them, forcing us to pay for their mistakes.

The link is a good explanation of how the system worked -or didn't as was the case with Greensill.

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...al-actually-do

The nature of business in terms of manufacturing is that substantial amounts of dosh are required to set-up and run through the initial years and they will contribute back to the public purse through taxation. Money will only be lent against a business plan. You fancying a top of the range iMac is primarily for you to satisfy your leisure needs - granted these days it may be a work tool as well (although they were the choice of the graphic design and publishing world years ago now).

You have to pay for your consumer item now or use credit via credit card, overdraft, spread payment or loan. This gives you the satisfaction of saying ‘I paid my way’ in a known realistic timescale. If you are naive you could end up paying far too much through compounded interest and even lose the item. The future value of your little library may be less than the value of the item since the library could be destroyed or devalued for many reasons. Selling on debt also occurs in the consumer market of course not just in commerce.

Peering into other worlds gives you a glimpse not the whole picture -though as far as Cameron is concerned and I did watch his performance in front of the Committee last week - he believes himself to be better than you or I or anyone else for that matter.

I agree with your points, Rodinuk, I would just add that the greater the sum of money involved, the more willing the banks seem to be to either lend, or having done so, be flexible with regard to repayments, and that is how people like Trump, and I don’t doubt, Greensill have survived, or not as in the latter case. What I don’t quite get is the idea that at any one time, the NHS cannot pay its bills. Is it permanently bankrupt? I doubt the Treasury would allocate funds to the NHS if it was not solvent. So it seems to me an accounting procedure from which intermediaries make, or can make substantial profits. As for Cameron, he is as slippery with the truth as Tony Blair, with fewer achievements to his name. My last and more general point is that there are people who understand what money is and how it works, and can work, and they are not commonly found among the general population.