Clancy was a peaceful man…

I am taking a short break from my Obelisk series to celebrate the achievement of a lifetime for the career Irish soldier Lt. General Sean Clancy. The Chief of Staff of the Irish Defense Forces has been appointed to the Chair of the European Union military committee.

Founded in 2001 the EUMC is the highest military body within the EU. The committee directs all military activity by the EU with particular attention on European union military activities with the Common Security and Defence Policy.

There is a strong overlap between the EU and NATO with 23 of the 27 members of the EU being members of NATO. Being a neutral nation within the EU is a positive when it comes to representing the EU defense policy. Ireland takes over the Chair from Austria, another EU neutral member.

General Clancy joined the Irish Defense Forces as a cadet in 1984, one year after I started my first permanent job. He trained as a pilot in the Air Corps. In other circumstances I might have served with him because on leaving school I applied to be a military cadet. My own Grandfather, Jerry Clancy, was a lifetime soldier. Originally a volunteer, who served jail time for subversion agaist the British Crown. When I applied for the Cadets Ireland was in deep recession and jobs were thin on the ground. A career in the military was very attractive and there were literally hundreds of applications for each and every available place.

Having a serving officer in the family was a bonus in that situation, and I didn’t have one. My father was a career civil servant. When any of my family went to civil service interviews we aced them. My father knew the trigger words and phrases that would impress the interview board and he coached us in them. But we did not have the inside track on military interview boards neurolinguistic programming.

This post is a massive congratulations to General Clancy on crowning his career with a massive and important commission. The title of this post is extracted from the song below, which used to be a party piece of my own family. And what advice can I add to that but of Polonius to Laertes (Hamlet I, iii).

Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
of each new-hatch’d, unfledged comrade.
Beware of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
bear’t that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.

Clancy lowered the boom; by Dennis Day

Now Clancy was a peaceful man
if you know what I mean,
the cops picked up the pieces
after Clancy left the scene,
he never looked for trouble
that’s a fact you can assume,
but never-the-less when trouble would press.
Clancy lowered the boom!

Chorus:
Oh, that Clancy, Oh that Clancy
Whenever they got his Irish up,
Clancy lowered the boom!

O’Leary was a fighting man,
they all knew he was tough,
he strutted ’round the neighborhood,
a-shootin’ off his guff,
he picked a fight with Clancy,
then and there he sealed his doom,
before you could shout “O’Leary, look out!”
Clancy lowered the boom!

Chorus

O’Hollihan delivered ice
to Mrs. Clancy’s flat,
he’d always linger for a while,
to talk of this and that,
one day he kissed her,
just as Clancy walked into the room,
before you could say the time of day,
Clancy lowered the boom!

Chorus:

Now Clancy left the barber shop
with tonic on his hair.
He went into the pool room
and met O’Reilly there.
O’Reilly said “For goodness sake,
now do I smell perfume?”
Before you could stack
oyur cue on the Rack
Clancy lowered the boom.

-=o0o=-

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Dow Jones 40,000

Back in the Summer of 1999 I was on a train talking to some American tourists when the Dow Jones hit 10,000 and they were really excited. It was my first time to realize how deeply embedded the Dow Jones index is in the USA as a bellweather for prosperity. It is an idol they worship. It is the American equivalent of a moving statue.

In 18th Century Japan it was Munehisa Homma who spotted the irrationality of the behaviour of traders in the rice futures market. He invented the candlestick chart to logically analyze the movements in the market. But he realized that most traders were acting on hunches and instincts, and chasing the market in a herd manner.

A market threshold such as 10,000 or 40,000 index points is pretty meaningless in real terms. But these thresholds are anticipated in awe by traders and investors alike. The political world makes capital on the thresholds. If the Dow hits 40k Joe Biden will bask in reflected glory. He will be seen as the president who made it happen. This will secure his bona fides as a leader who looks after the economy. The Trump supporters will hate it.

The NASDAQ and the FTSE and the S&P 500 are all demigods to be worshipped and prayed to, but the Dow is the granddaddy of them all. Dow Jones is God the Father, Zeus, Jupiter, Odin. Founded in 1885 it is a composite of only 30 large companies and is focused only on the USA. But as a barometer of global economics it remains top of mind. Rational traders will tell you it is out of date and does not represent the globalised finance world. The Faithful are those who don’t read their holy books too critically because religion is an act of faith. A rational trader can make a solid living on the market. A true believer might be a millionaire next year.

How to Cook Rice; by Koon Woon

Measure two handfuls for a prosperous man.
Place in pot and wash by rubbing palms together
as if you can’t quite get yourself to pray, or
by squeezing it in one fist. Wash
several times to get rid of the cloudy water;
when you are too high in Heaven, looking down
at the clouds, you can’t see what’s precious below.
Rinse with cold water and keep enough so that
it will barely cover your hand placed on the rice.
Don’t use hot water, there are metallic diseases
colliding in it. This method of measuring water will work
regardless of the size of the pot; if the pot is large,
use both hands palms down as if to pat your own belly.
Now place on high heat without cover and cook
until the water has been boiled away except in craters
resembling those of the moon, important
in ancient times for growing rice. Now place lid on top
and reduce heat to medium, go read your newspaper
until you get to the comics, then come back and turn it down to low.
The heat has been gradually traveling from the outside
to the inside of the rice, giving it texture;
a similar thing happens with people, I suppose.

Go back to your newspaper, finish the comics, and read
the financial page. Now the rice is done, but before
you eat, consider the peasant who arcs in leech-infested
paddies and who carefully plants the rice seedlings
one by one; on this night, you are eating better than he.
If you still don’t know how to cook rice, buy a Japanese
automatic rice cooker; it makes perfect rice every time!

-=o0o=-

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Old Old Money

JP Morgan was born on this day, April 17th in 1837. He was one of the most powerful and wealthy tycoons of the gilded age. When the US banking system faltered he stepped in to rescue it in 1907. He founded or had a role in financing many of the largest and most successful companies in US history; US Steel, General Electric, Western Union, the Pullman car company, a slew of railroads and he left the legacy of the worlds biggest bank JP Morgan Chase, and also Morgan Stanley which was co-founded by his grandson Henry Sturgis Morgan.

JP Morgan is often associated with Andrew Carnegie (railways and shipping), John D Rockefeller (Standard Oil) and Cornelius Vanderbilt (steel) and collectively branded the “Robber Barons” due to their aggressive behaviour in creating monopolies. The character featured on the logo of the monopoly game is a caricature of JP Morgan. Cartoons of the day depict the small men of the US Congress being bullied by the Robber Barons who used their wealth to lobby for the laws they wanted. More right-wing commentators label them more positively as “Captains of Industry”. They invented the concepts of horizontal and vertical integration of industry.

JP came from money. Old money. His parents made a fortune in dry goods. So did his grandparents. His Pierpont middle name comes from the poet John Pierpont on his mothers side (also dry goods) who wrote the poem and song below, which is sung to the same air as the British Anthem “God save the King”. He was born in 1785 and wrote a lot against alcohol and against slavery. John Pierpont graduated from Yale College in 1804 and that is hardly a surprise because his Great Grandfather, also John Pierpont was a founder of Yale.

It is funny to read how they all started in dry goods and ended running finance and insurance companies. Financial expertise in the Morgan family is multi-generational. I guess I can’t but be thankful for the legacy of this colossus, since his name is on my paycheque these days.

My country ’tis of thee; John Pierpont

My country! ’tis of thee,
sweet land of liberty
of thee I sing,
land where my fathers died;
land of the pilgrim’s pride;
from every mountain side
let temp’rance ring.

My native country! thee
land of the noble free
thy name I love:
I love thy rocks and rills,
thy woods and templed hills;
my heart with rapture thrills
like that above.

Let music swell the breeze,
and ring from all the trees,
sweet freedom’s song;
let infant tongues awake,
let all that breathe partake,
let rocks their silence break,
the sound prolong.

Our fathers’ God! to thee
author of liberty!
to thee we sing:
long may our land be bright,
with temp’rance’s holy light;
protect us by thy might,
Great God, our King.

-=o0o=-

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A Grand Day Out

April 5th 2024 was the Spring Graduation day in DCU and the whole family took the trip up to Dublin to celebrate Dr. Jerry Hourihane Clancy receiving his PhD parchment.

As it turns out it was a very multifaceted celebration and a nostalgic return to my Alma Mater. Jerry and his colleague Emma Markey were only the tip of the iceberg. My current colleague in sustainability Meaghan Browne received her Masters in Ethics (Corporate Social Responsibility). My former colleague from DCU Business School Marketing Group, Joanne Lynch received her doctorate in Education.

Louise and I also got to catch up with James Corcoran our DCU Business Studies classmate (class of 1990) who is Chair of the college alumni council and is a regular fixture on the podium at the graduation ceremonies. He warned us to be ready for a 35 year celebration invitation next year.

We also grabbed a moment with Professor Caroline McMullan who was good enough to make it down to Tipperary for the funeral of Louise’s dad back in 2013, the year after I stopped teaching in DCU.

Martin Molony was MC for the event and managed to elude me due to his hectic schedule. We worked together to build the Post-Graduate Certificate in Digital Marketing back in 2009/10. But I did manage to grab 10 minutes with Professor Theo Lynn who also collaborated on setting up that program, and was also on the DCUBS Marketing Group.

We bumped into another former colleague of mine in the Business School; Dr. Paul Davis. Bizarrely Paul’s daughter is a post-graduate researcher in the team supervised by the newly minted Dr. Jerry Clancy.

Then we ran into Sally Doyle who received her Masters Degree in Refugee Integration, and her Sister Ellen who were in primary school with Esha in Belgrove. We had a great catch up with our former neighbours from Clontarf. It truly is a small world.

We caught a moment with the college chancellor Brid Horan at the end of the ceremony and commented on the strong Academic turnout on the podium and the healthy number of Doctorates being awarded. She acknowledged that this is the largest Doctoral Award ceremony she has experienced and this can only be a positive for Dublin City University. It is wonderful to see the University doing so well from it’s humble beginnings as NIHE Dublin in 1975. The college, which was on the doorstep of my parents family home in Glasnevin enrolled the first students in 1980. Louise and I were in the college in 1989 when we celebrated the elevation to full university status.

I returned to DCU in 1997 to undertake a part time Masters degree. Esha was born in 1998 and I remember bringing her to an open night to recruit the intake for 1998 at the request of Dr. Michael Gannon. It was Michael who asked me to take up teaching in 2007 when he learned I was working in Leo Burnett’s Ad Agency. DCU has always valued real world experience in program delivery.

After doughnuts in DCU we checked in to the Herbert Park Hotel, strolled round to Roly’s Bistro for a fabulous dinner, and into the Bridge bar for drinks. I was an early casualty of the night but Louise, Jerry and Esha kept going in the Hotel residents lounge until the wee hours.

Theme for English B; by Langston Hughes (excerpt)

The instructor said,
“Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you
then, it will be true.“

-=o0o=-

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The Moneychangers

Jesus famously cast the moneychangers out of the Temple in Jerusalem. The moneychangers of ancient Byzantium were famous and I am interested to see that today the business is still thriving. In ancient days they set up their tables in the marketplaces and helped visitors from all over the Roman Empire and beyond exchange local currency for the wierd and wonderful coins of their home countries.

The argyramoiboi (silver changers) used a βάσανος (basanos) or touchstone to determine whether gold was genuine or counterfeit. Silver changers is a bit of a misnomer in the Roman Empire as the Gold Solidus was the standard of the currency. The greek name is a hangover from the days when Athens was the centre of Greek trade.

The money changers of Byzantium also had access to the archemedian jug to determine the purity of metals. In general they used weighing scales to measure coin in bulk. Byzantine history records the argyramoiboi being ordered by Justinian to reduce the price that they paid for a solidus from 210 folles to 180. It is an indication that they had the power to affect exchange rates not only in the city, but potentially all over the empire.

Much of Roman History is punctuated with the actions of Barracks Emperors needing to issue coin to pay their troops, and debasing the currency with silver or base metals for lack of gold. Money changers were well aware that the heads of some Emperors were bad news when they appeared on a coin. I imagine they were pretty fast at sorting the wheat from the chaff when a bag of mixed coin landed on their table.

The coin collection in the Istanbul Archeological Museum gives a sense of the broad variety of specie that was exchanged in the city.

Just as it is today Byzantium was a magnet for travellers from all over the world. In such an international city the job of assessing the value of foreign money and correctly exchanging it is big business. In Turkey today the process is exacerbated by runaway inflation. The value of the Turkish Lire is hugely depressed. If you need to buy anything large the wads of cash you need to carry are ridiculous.

These days in the world of electronic banking many people use their bank cards to withdraw cash. An interesting phenomenon of Istanbul are these ATM areas all over the city where all the banks are represented in the same site. It brings a “market overt” feel to the competition for your money. The ATMs offer language translations and give you the option to withdraw Turkish Lire, Euro and US Dollars.

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Greenwashing

Why the voice of the people is a powerful tool in the fight against Climate Change.

I work for a major bank which funds businesses that are destroying the planet, They lend money to fossil fuel companies, chemical companies, big pharma, big tobacco and so on. Recently I elected to set up a Sustainability Group within the office, but it took some really hard thinking on my part. I am not prepared to be greenwashing window dressing for a business that is behaving badly. So let me break down my reasoning process here.

Many years ago I worked for a government energy agency. Our primary brief was national energy security, but there was a growing realization that we needed to develop policy on energy sustainability. From my research into the cold hard statistics I rapidly came to the conclusion that the serious decisions that lead to significant change are made at government level. Telling the ordinary citizen to turn down their thermostat one degree and pull on an extra jumper is a drop in the ocean compared with a decision to cease using fossil fuels for electricity generation.

The job of business is to generate long term value for stakeholders while behaving within the law. In my view there is no such thing as “Business Ethics”. There are laws and there is competition. Businesses who compete in a market must use whatever tools are available or the competition will win. The bank I work for is highly focused on compliance. It is a primary responsibility of every staff member to comply with laws and regulations and clearly report any wrongdoing.

As long as the law permits the bank to lend funds for Oil exploration they will continue to do so. The day the Government passes a law banning the funding of oil exploration in this country, the bank will cease lending money for that purpose in this country. Real change comes from Government, not from Business.

With this dynamic in mind lets look at what has been happening across Europe in recent weeks. We see farming organizations turn out in their thousands, driving tractors through city streets and causing widespread chaos. The farmers are protesting that they are victims of soulless unelected bureacrats in Brussels who are blaming farmers for climate change.

But let’s have a think about the broader landscape behind the farmer and his tractor. Back in the 1960’s my father worked for a now defunct government department called the Land Commission. The job of the commission was to alleviate poverty in the Irish countryside. We had many large families of eight or nine kids running barefoot around twenty acre farms that could barely support a cow and a pig. The job of the land commission was to buy large estates, break them up, redistribute the land, and deliver a farm of no less than 40 acres. That was successfully done.

Many older voters today grew up on those small farms, and have huge empathy for the hardship and poverty that their parents faced. They see the family farm as an essential foundational unit of this nation. But they are living in the past and those farms are long gone. Fifty years of membership of the European Union have transformed the agricultural landscape of Ireland. Successive CAP policies have rewarded intensity, efficiency and LEAN production practices. Irish farmers today are business managers and sadly the businesses they operate are dirty polluters that are destroying the environment. But the farming industry is quite cynical in using the image of the farmer on his tractor as a symbol for that long past simple country life. Nostalgia is a powerful marketing tool.

The Government is not blameless in this outcome. They pushed hard for intensity of agriculture. But the government were also pushed by lobbyists. Behind the farming practices are the mega companies who produce chemicals. Monsanto, Bayer, BASF, Dow, Dupont and so on. These companies produce the chemicals that make intensive farming possible. They produce nitrate fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides, insectisides, glycophosphates, neonicitinids and so on. These companies make a fortune by getting farmers to spray poison on the land. Poison that leaches into our groundwater, streams, rivers and lakes. It causes algal blooms in our inland seawaters. 

What limits the spraying of chemicals is the law. National law, and within the EU the law originating from Brussels. The large chemical companies want freedom to spray, and the people of Europe want to be able to drink clean water and swim at the beach. Have no doubt there is a lot of chemical company money funding the farming protests all across Europe.

Every five years or so a politican has to go back to the people and seek reelection. The politician is paying attention to the mood of the people and that will shape how firm or loose that politician will be when it comes to environmental policy. When all they see is tractors and angry farmers on the streets they are motivated to go easy on the laws that conrol the chemicals sprayed on farms. If all they see on the streets are farmers, then your day at the beach is coming with raw sewage flowing off the farmland.

The individual citizen dutifully recycling their cardboard and wine bottles is a powerful symbol to politicians that we also care. We send a powerful message to the politician when we pick up litter, or install solar panels. When we spend our money in an environmentally responsible way we demonstrate that we support tighter legal restrictions on pollutors. 

Today I am making an argument why we, small citizens with our single vote once every five years need to stand up to big farming and big chemical. I could as easily make this argument about big tobacco, big automobile, big sugar, big food. Farmers just happen to be the flavour of the month. The important message is this, if we don’t speak and act for the planet we give free rein to big money to do as they will. Based on their behaviour in the last century that is not a good strategy for us, for our children and for our grandchildren.

So when you question if it achieves anything to put the cardboard in the cardboard bin in the greater scheme of things – I say yes. We make a difference.

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The Titanic Priest

Father Frank Browne was born January 3rd, 1880. He was gifted a camera by his uncle, Robert Browne, Bishop of Cloyne. He caught the photography bug. He embarked on a tour of Europe in 1897 prior to joining the Jesuits. His Uncle also gifted him a ticket on the Maiden Voyage of the Titanic in April 1912 from Southampton in England, to Cherbourg in France and then to Queenstown (Cobh) in Cork. 

On board he made good use of his camera to capture the now iconic images of the ship itself and life on board. The photo above is of the first class gym. In addition to horse riding the Titanic had Camel riding simulators! The photos of Father Browne were used by James Cameron to re-create life on board for his movie Titanic.

Browne befriended a millionaire on board, who offered to pay his onward passage to the USA. He telegraphed his superior asking permission to travel. The response that arrived said “GET OFF THAT SHIP – PROVINCIAL” the latter being his title in the Jesuit priesthood. As a result of that order both Browne and his photographs survived the fateful encounter with the Iceberg.

Browne was ordained in 1915 and travelled to France as Chaplain to the Irish Guards in 1916 where he first saw service during the Battles of the Somme. Later he moved north towards Flanders and saw service at Locre, Wytschaete, Messines Ridge, Paschendaele, Ypres, Amiens and Arras. He was wounded five times and for conspicuous bravery was awarded the Military Cross and a bar to the cross as well as the Croix de Guerre by the French.

Gas damage to his lungs meant that his health suffered in Dublin, and he was advised to travel to warmer climes. On an extended voyage he compiled a unique collection of thousands of photographs. He had a free lifetime supply of Kodak film, awarded to him for his Titanic photographs. Cape Town, Australia, Sri Lanka, Suez, Greece, Italy, France, Spain and Portugal all received the Browne gaze as a result.

He passed away in 1960, but a trunk of his negatives was found in the Jesuit archives 25 years later, and it represents a goldmine. A staggering record of the first half of the 20th Century.

War Photographer; by Carol Ann Duffy

In his dark room he is finally alone
with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.
The only light is red and softly glows,
as though this were a church and he
a priest preparing to intone a Mass.
Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.

He has a job to do. Solutions slop in trays
beneath his hands, which did not tremble then
though seem to now. Rural England. Home again
to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel,
to fields which don’t explode beneath the feet
of running children in a nightmare heat.

Something is happening. A stranger’s features
faintly start to twist before his eyes,
a half-formed ghost. He remembers the cries
of this man’s wife, how he sought approval
without words to do what someone must
and how the blood stained into foreign dust.

A hundred agonies in black and white
from which his editor will pick out five or six
for Sunday’s supplement. The reader’s eyeballs prick
with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers.
From the aeroplane he stares impassively at where
he earns his living and they do not care.

-=o0o=-

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A great year

The images above depict the Roman God Janus, who has two faces. One faces forward and one looks back. As the God of doormen and watchmen this may represent the need to have eyes in the back of your head for any trouble. He is the God of doors and gates, arches and passages. He is also the God of January, as this month was seen by the Romans as the gateway to the new year. New Year’s Eve is a good day to reflect on the year past and the hopes and dreams for the year to come.

A decade ago I reflected on the year 2013 as a year worth forgetting, for a variety of reasons. Following the recession of 2007 was not a great time for many reasons and it all seemed to come to a head for me in 2013. Gradually things got better, in my career in particular. I changed direction in 2015, I got out of Dublin in 2016 and I moved out of contracting and into a permanent role in Cork City in 2021.

We also bought ourselves a home in Cork in 2021 after some disappointing let downs in the prior year. In 2022 the company I joined was bought out, so my shares came good. The new owners ramped up our pension fund contributions in March 2023.

This year I hit my 60th birthday and was treated to some great Rugby in Paris as a result. I passed through 10 airports in 2023: Cork, Birmingham, Lanzarote, Manchester, Beauvais, Paris-Orly, Paris – Charles de Gaulle, Amsterdam – Schiphol, Tenerife South and Tenerife North. I also made the effort to motivate myself and to share good will with others. A symbol of this was Chinese New Year 2023 when I wrote and sent out good wishes and red envelopes to family and friends. Joining the Knights of Munster was another affirming step. We Knights have some great things coming in the month of January. In January 2023 I signed up in work for the 100 days walking challenge, to log 10,000 steps per day. When the 100 days ended I kept up the discipline. In this week I was ill from Chrismas day and logged nothing, but despite this blip I have, on average, logged 11,160 steps per day in the entire year of 2023.

Fixing my hearing was another big step for me. The right ear has not worked properly since I was run over by a car at age 7. In 2023 I had a Cochlear implant installed to bypass the damaged middle ear and I am hearing sounds that were lost to me a long time ago. Emerging research on hearing and balance show they are crucial to extending active ageing and avoiding dementia or alzheimers.

For the first 23 years of my career I worked in the Public Sector and my (partial) pension matured on my 60th Birthday. I have no immediate plans to retire, but I can bank that money in a tax efficient manner for the next five or six years to pad out my company pension fund. That will make retirement a lot more comfortable when I am ready for that step. More importantly it represents a security blanket that removes any anxiety around money should anything go wrong. This must be what it feels like to grow up as a trust fund bunny. You don’t need a lot of a cushion to eliminate fear, and this reinforces my belief that our social welfare system is a broken victim blaming Victorian workhouse model. It should be replaced with a system of Universal Basic Income.

Just over a year ago Esha graduated with her Masters in Engineering from UCC. She has been working in a well paid job here in Cork. This year Jerry passed his Viva and next April he will officially become Dr. Jerry. His income level has been rising bit by bit but in the new year he will at last be earning a proper salary. Louise also moved role in 2023 and instead of opportunistic piecemeal contracts has been working in a steady role with the associated regular income. All of these elements combine to provide us with a far more comfortable household income and the ability for all of us to enjoy a bit of retail therapy. For Louise it provided the opoportunity to fully reskill in the workplace, a social existence outside the immediate family and the self respect that comes from earning your own income.

Gavin passed his 3rd year Engineering exams and is working now towards his degree. There is a very real possibility all five of us will be earning decent salaries by the end of 2024.

All in all I can say that the view of 2023 from the couch where I now sit is that it was a great year. One of the best.

Now here is a poem from one of my favourite poets; Brian Bilston

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Avocado Toast

Bill Granger passed away today at the young age of 54. The self taught Aussie chef opened his first restaurant in 1993 in Darlinghurst, Sydney, Australia. He focused on simple, clean, healthy dishes and he popularized avocado toast.

Little did he know this would make him a symbol of all that is wrong in the global housing market. I married my wife Louise in 1993, and we lived in a house that I bought on my salary alone. That’s not to say it wasn’t a struggle, it always is. But the truth is housing was affordable, and not only in Ireland. It was affordable all over the world.

We moved from our first house in Santry to our second one in the leafy seaside Dublin suburb of Clontarf in 1995. That was the year when things went crazy in Ireland. A combination of population pressure from our baby boom of the 1960’s and the availability of cheap credit in the European Union drove a scramble for property. By spring of 1996 our house had trebled in value. We rode the tsunami of inflation and were lucky to be home owners when it began. Between 1995 and 2007 the value of that house increased tenfold.

By May 2017, despite a massive correction following the financial crash of 2007/2008 housing remained unaffordable for many salaried people. Australian millionaire property developer Tim Gurner said on 60 Minutes Australia that when he was saving for his first house he was not shelling out €22 a pop for Avocado Toast, This angered a generation of millennials who found themselves excluded from the housing market, and paying extortionate rents which contributed to Tim Gurner’s millions.

The truth is not that Bill Granger took your money, it is that Tim Gurner took your money. Well, Ronald Reagan took your money and gave it to Tim Gurner – it’s a little more complicated than that.

In 1971 the US Government abandoned the gold standard which had kept currency stable since the end of WW2. The “suspension” of the Bretton Woods Agreement made the US Dollar a Fiat currency, so it could be whatever value you wanted it to be. This allowed a government to print paper money at will, with no precious metal to back it up. It was the first stage in a process of financial deregulation that made billionaires possible.

Ronald Reagan introduced a number of financial reforms which are collectively termed Reaganomics. The most important of these was eliminating wealth taxes which fed money from the wealthiest to the poorest. He sold this on the great lie that is called “Trickle down economics”. We now know for sure money trickles upwards if you give it to the poor, but never trickles down if you let the rich hold it.

Reagan famously smashed the power of unions and deregulated the market to permit hostile takeovers, the pillaging of company assets, such as pension funds. ”Greed is Good” was the mantra of Gordon Gekko immortalized in the 1987 movie Wall Street. The world became a place for mergers and acquisitions. In the UK Margaret Thatcher happily embraced the American model and smashed the miner’s strike in the winter of discontent of 1984/5. She spearheaded the breakup of state organizations that took hundreds of years to assemble; British rail, British gas, Water companies etc Within a decade she had sold off the family jewels and a small group of close confidantes, the Mayfair set, trousered most of the cash.

The graph of productivity decoupled from that for wages. At first it was barely noticable. I could still afford a house on my salary in 1990. But it changed radically in the late 1990’s. The massive escalation in the price of property led to riskier and riskier behaviour as millions were made on speculation. The Irish Government had an opportunity in 2002 to take the heat out of the market. They introduced stamp duty for speculators and immediately the inflation rate stagnated. Howls of anguish went up from builders and developers all over the country. Chequebooks were firmly snapped shut in the Fianna Fáil tent at the Galway Races. The lobbiests won out and the sensible heads in the Fianna Fáil government were forced to backtrack and take the leashes off the market. The market promptly went wild. We are still paying for that failure of continence.

History does not repeat itself, but patterns in history certainly do. The pendulum has swung firmly in favour of the billionaires. We are now approaching a swing point in Economics. The key here is you can reform or you can dig in your heels. When the wealthy dig in their heels you get moments like the French Revolution. Reform is painful, but if you embrace it you are less likely to lose your head. Each year the movers and shakers of the world jet in and out of their exclusive think-tanks to agree the direction of economic policy. Around tables in private sessions at Bilderberg, Davos, COP and G7 the top nations make the decisions that effect issues like how many servings of avocado toast it takes to buy a house. People who own houses have something to lose. When you create a “generation rent” you create a critical mass of people with little to lose and much to gain in a revolution.

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Show me the money

One of the largest impacts from the Covid 19 pandemic for me is how I pay. I moved from withdrawing, carrying and paying with cash to almost exclusively tapping on my phone to pay. This has raised some interesting issues for me.

I have noticed a certain “breed” of business that refuses electronic payments. Before the pandemic taxi drivers were in this grouping, but the switch to taxi apps – combined with pandemic behavior has modernized the taxi industry. Barber shops and takeaway food shops are two key business areas that remain strongly cash only.

If I worked for the Revenue Commission (Irish Tax Man) it would set off my alarm bells if any business, let alone the sector, remained a pure cash enterprise. I know there are costs to electronic transactions, but there are also costs in time, effort, fees and security risks to handling large amounts of cash. As a tax official I would have a naturally suspicious attitude and assume people with a lot of cash are under-declaring income for tax purposes, and are paying for as much of their day to day expenses as possible directly from their till.

Then there is the more nefarious reason for using cash – money laundering. One of the running themes of the TV series Breaking Bad is how you get to keep the money you make from crime. And increasingly how you get to spend that money.

Internationally financial institutions face increasing responsibilities in the areas of KYC and AML: Know your customer, and Anti-Money Laundering. The cross checks and risk profiling activities make it harder and harder for criminals to turn filthy lucre into spotless specie.

In a society that is becoming increasingly cashless this presents real problems for the crooks. Recently a West Cork restaurant announced its intention to move fully away from handling cash to accepting card only payments. The local drug lord can no longer eat there, because they won’t take his cash, and he can’t move his money into a bank account.

In Ireland we have an organization called the Criminal Assets Bureau which is like our mini version of the FBI. They combine a mixture of old fashioned police work with legal and finance industry expertise to track down the proceeds of criminal activity. If I worked in that area I would be interested in cash businesses for a reason other than under declaration of tax. I would be interested in businesses that might be used as a front for laundering money. Food shops where all the food is beyond the sell by date, or where they sell strange foods that nobody seems to buy. The proliferation of vape shops and phone repair shops, and even sweet shops that trade in cash only. I always wondered about the real purpose of that famous Monty Python cheese shop which does not appear to have any actual cheese.

Victims of muggings, burglaries or pickpockets rapidly learn that their money is safer embedded in a debit card or on a phone. But then victims of cyber crime will point out that the digital cash world is just as dangerous. You may not be pushed to the ground by a junkie looking for a fix, but you could lose thousands to a cyber criminal or a sophisticated scam.

Beggars in the street are finding it increasingly hard to scrounge a few coins from passers by because nobody has a pocket full of loose change anymore. Yesterday I saw for the first time, Christmas charity chuggers holding out a card payment machine to accept tap donations. It can’t be too long before I see a busker or a beggar hold out a payment machine.

As always the older generations fear the relentless move away from warm friendly cash to cold electronic payments, while the younger generations don’t see the hassle or the danger and opt for convenience. A month ago I would have said that we could be cashless within a decade. Then, in early December we were in Lanzarote on holiday. There was a large scale power outage. The ATMs switched off. The card machines in restaurants and bars stopped working. For one night ready cash became king again and I realized it might be no harm to have a €50 note in my wallet for emergencies.

Money; by Philip Larkin

Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:
‘Why do you let me lie here wastefully?
I am all you never had of goods and sex.
You could get them still by writing a few cheques.’

So I look at others, what they do with theirs:
They certainly don’t keep it upstairs.
By now they’ve a second house and car and wife:
Clearly money has something to do with life

In fact, they’ve a lot in common, if you enquire:
You can’t put off being young until you retire,
and however you bank your screw, the money you save
won’t in the end buy you more than a shave.

I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down
from long french windows at a provincial town,
the slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
in the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

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