Edward Lear

On 12 May Google celebrated the bicentenary of the birth of Edward Lear.

Google Lear

Edward Lear

Apart from that, Mr Dimon ...

"We made a terrible, egregious mistake," Dimon said in an interview on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday. "There's almost no excuse for it."

He said bank executives were completely wrong in public statements made in April after being challenged over the trades in media reports.

"We got very defensive. And people started justifying everything we did. We told you something that was completely wrong a mere four weeks ago."

Dimon added: "In hindsight we took far too much risk, the strategy was barely vetted, it was barely monitored. It should never have happened."

... how is the teapot?

Bankiest

…the balance sheet of the euro system, isn’t only gigantic in size but also shocking in quality.

former European Central Bank board member Juergen Stark

the idea is to get two cripples to lean on each other. As long as the two cripples stay very still you can see them as propping each other up.

Bankia and bankia

Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy looked ready to backtrack on pledges not to use more public money on banks. "The last thing I would do would be to inject or lend public money, but if it is necessary I would not hesitate to do it, just as other European countries have done," Rajoy told a radio interviewer.
 
Yet it never is the last thing.

New Franco-German axis

She comes! she comes! the sable throne behold Of Night primeval, and of Chaos old!

Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine;
Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restor'd;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries All.

Maybe now

 "In 2007, the final year before the meltdown, shareholders received £2.23bn and BarCap's 16,200 investment bankers took home £1.3bn in bonuses. By 2009, bonuses had reached £2.2bn but shareholders received just £285m".

But let's not get too excited about the 'shareholder spring' with some of them waking from their long slumber. Shareholder Value Maximisation with its inevitable pressure towards short-term priorities can drive companies and wider concepts of social wealth into the wall as much as executive looting.