Politicians and the press are becoming tired of repeating the mantra that the bankers have not yet 'got it'; but the point is that the bankers have got the lot!
They have mostly kept their jobs, they had banked their earlier bonuses before the crunch struck the system; and now they can threaten to walk away from London if they don't have their way into the future.
The politicians have not begun to 'get it'.
Their analysis of the events of the past couple of years is superficial: even the better onces, notably Vince Cable, are much stronger on description than on dissecting the causes of the crisis and making policy for the future on that basis.
The inter-party mudslinging is approaching election pitch, and will increasingly alienate voters.
The announcement by NHS auditors that 'international accounting standards' REQUIRED them to aggregate charitable giving to NHS-related causes within NHS accounts was rightly seen as an attempt by government to enable them to pretend that NHS funding by them was much greater than it is.
International accounting standards were a major factor in the exaggeration of the crisis in banking.
International accounting standards are an ego-trip for would-be masters of the universe; who depend on the same, nonsensical Economics that sanctioned the excesses of 'rational markets'.
This may seem a trivial matter, but - like the recent resurgence of the spurious authority of the rating agencies - it shows that the Economics establishment that bears huge responsibility for the global crisis is still wreaking havoc. Keynes wrote that most politicians are in thrall to some dead economist: the tragedy of our day is that the whole system is in thrall to living economists!
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