Carlo Giovanardi blames cocaine for the instability in the Italian markets

As trading in shares of France-Belgium bank Dexia tumble 36% as news of a £3.4bn bailout by French, Belgian and Luxembourg governments emerge, one Italian man has some ideas about what is causing the continued market volatility that we are regularly witnessing. Cocaine ladies and gentlemen.

Carlo Giovanardi is Undersecretary to Italian playboy/media-mogul/adulterer/sometimes President and master of all he purveys, Silvio Berlusconi, and as such he has been witness and heir apparent to some pretty monstrous ineptitude in his time. Now, after witnessing so much from his leader, he has thrown his own hat into the ring by blaming cocaine use amongst traders for the volatility affecting the Italian (and one supposes, global) markets.

On September 28th Italy extended a ban on short selling of financial shares until the 11th November. Short selling is far too complicated a financial concept for Take The Blame to understand, yet alone explain, but basically it is a concept which falls, almost perfectly, into the deranged hands of the cocaine freak. Because the cocaine freak is just that; a freak. A liar and a cheat who will prostitute the markets for their own gain leaving nothing but instability, volatility and confusion; the mirror image of the night before.

Short selling is the buying and selling of stock that the seller doesn’t own. Its like selling drugs that you don’t own on the promise that they will be there should your client actually want to get mashed. The stock is lent by the broker to the seller from a collection of his clients stocks. The stock is then sold and the money credited to the account of the seller. Now the crux of short selling is that at some point, as the stocks are not actually owned by either the seller or broker, the stocks have to be replenished back into the original account from where they were borrowed by the broker originally. Now, market drops and the seller can buy back the original stocks at a decreased price, thus making a profit on the difference of price. You borrow and sell at $10  then buy back at $6  and make $4 on every initial $10 investment and never actually owned any of it. By that end it is investing on the market falling, an investment in failure. Awesome. Rack up some lines and watch the market destabilise itself.

It is this availability of gambling with other peoples stocks that probably leads Mr. Giovarndi to his theory that there is a worrisome link between substance abuse and market flux. In a telephone call to Italian media, the undersecretary went on to say that Italians are trusting their money to people who are “not capable of making decisions”.

The idea is sound enough. Cocaine makes you confident, reckless, brave and full of your own ability to be a complete tool. Trading on the market gives you the opportunity to unleash these negative personality traits on peoples unsuspecting bank accounts. The problem is that, as almost every single financial institute has demonstrated over the last 5 years, you don’t need cocaine to royally screw things up.

The US government has paid out over 600 million dollars to dead people. Sometimes it pays to be 6-feet under

What a curiosity. It turns out that the best way to earn tax payers money these days is to be dead. In a tale of ineptitude that can be seen from the outer reaches of space, the US government has given out over $600 million to people who have been classified as having left this planet. Dead. Bereft of Life, bloodless, erased, expired, pushing up daises. They’ve met their maker, kicked the bucket. They are taking a dirt nap. They are toast, they are ice and they are rich people. Richer than you and me and they are D. E. A. D dead.

According to a report by the United States Office of Personal Management, over the past five years over $600 million in benefit payments have been paid to the aforementioned dead people by the federal government. The benefit payments are normally destined for retired or disabled federal workers but now dead federal workers can be added to that list.

Although the $600 million only covers the past five years, one case of incalculable ineptitude was unearthed that highlights the complete ludicrous incompetence of the benefit payment system. The case in point involved over $500,000 of payments to the son of a man who had died 37 years previously. That is not even close. The bungling impotence only came to light when the son died! Had the father still been alive to enjoy his payments, he would have been 138.

In a system of government which is currently sitting at $14.7 trillion in debt, $600 million accounts for a tiny fraction of the ineptitude. It takes a mighty fine amount of concentration to blow 15 trillion, so what’s a few hundred million between dead friends? But the problem is that this blundering hole in the distribution of federal payments was made aware to the government in 2005. 6 years ago. Have they managed to fill the hole? Having given away 600 million in 5 years, the answer would seem to be a resounding NO. Not only are the federal government made aware of a festering wound in the distribution of benefit payments, they fail to do anything about it. Take The Blame™ would like to point the finger at some pretty fearsome ineptitude.

Once upon a time the bank was the place for cash withdrawals. Now your money is safer here.

In all 6 attempts have been made to rectify the problem since an inspector general’s report revealed defects in the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund in 2005, and not one of them has found a way to figure out the, one would have thought, fairly obvious singularity between death and life. Apparently it is too difficult to connect the death records with the benefit records. “Is he dead? yes, stop payment. Is he alive? yes, continue payment.” Mark Zuckerberg has connected 700 million computers, why can’t the federal government connect two?

***** ***** *****

What can $600 million buy you these days? How about Foursquare? No, bit boring? OK, How about 1 week of intervention in the Libya crisis? Thats how much the first week cost. It is what Nokia received from Apple for patent litigation. It’s what a botox maker paid for illegal marketing.

“When we put 50 machines in, I consider them 50 more mousetraps. You have to have a mousetrap to catch a mouse.”

Gotta whole lotta money, ready to burn.

Their are two sides to every coin and depending on your view point in regards to gambling, you are either heads or tails. But do you call? Well, if you are visiting The Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh then the answer should most probably be yes. Because even if you are not a gambler, $25,000 sounds a lot better than $12, wouldn’t you say?

It never happens to you does it? We would like to Take the Blame™ for all the times you were not next to a cash machines as it malfunctioned. All the times the fruit machine kept your money. All the times you went into a casino and didn’t have a drunk croupier or a malfunctioning fruit machine that insisted on paying you even when you lost. For all the times you didn’t have a long lost relative who died leaving you $12 million in her will because when you were 6 you picked up her newspaper and she went senile and remembered this moment of pure generosity and decided that you and her cat were the only sane recipients of her $23 million fortune and didn’t leave a penny to her vicious, conniving family.

“Ocean’s Eleven, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid, Reservoir Dogs, Nick Leeson. Listen up. If you want to rob a bank, what you need to do is eat the f**king money. “ anon

Build your house on the beach and it will get washed away. Build your bank on a termite mound and the little blighters will eat all of the money you have piled inside. Common sense dictates this. Termites eat wood. Money is made from paper. Paper is made from wood. Lunch time for the local termite population. No bank is stupid enough to leave piles and piles of cold hard cash unguarded and unwatched except for the hungry eyes of 5 million termites. Are they?

For the customers of the Indian State Bank, Fatehpur branch in the Indian district of Barabanki, this is exactly what has happened. The bank has suffered the ignominy of having clients money digested by the wood munching insects. Reports are flowing from Indian of customers money being the main course in a termite buffet of hedonistic proportions.

How much money did the insect army get through? And did they leave a tip? The service in India is reputably very good. According to the bank,  over the last few months the silent army of money munching assassins has chomped its way through 10 million Indian rupees. If you haven’t been to India, to put that into a currency you might understand, it equates to around $225,000 or £137,000.

Who is to blame for the calamitous piece of ineptitude? The Termites? State Bank of India Chief General Manager Abhay Singh told the Press Trust of India that,

“Action will be taken against those responsible in the matter”

Those responsible. Is that the termites? Could be. If they do decide the termites are to blame, what will be there punishment? No wood? In fairness, action has already been taken. The termites have been sent home early and the branch manager has been charged with “laxity”. Whatever that it. As for the customers money?

“As it was the bank’s fault, it will bear the loss caused due to termites… there will be no loss to the public.“

Ineptitude runs through all walks of life and it shouldn’t be of any surprise that it incorporates the criminal underworld. Not the mafioso and the romantic image of criminal overlords but the dregs of everyday crime; the inept minority who steal cars, break shop windows, start bar fights, traffic people and burgle houses. These are not your James Bond overlords or your Pacino drug dealers. They are not Tony Soprano and they will never be anything approaching it. They work the housing estates of England and they are ridiculous in their ineptitude. So ridiculous that they deem it a good idea to call the police mid-burglary.

Everyone likes a good baddy. They are celebrated, coveted and idolised. If they commit their skulduggery in the right manner; with a balance of class and raging psychotic violence then they can transcend the evil they are capable of and leave the audience wishing death and failure to the good guys. This burglar didn’t succeed in ticking any of these boxes. Instead he achieved monumental, catastrophic, memorable, outstanding ineptitude. Stupidity to be laughed at.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1370498/Burglar-calls-999-rescue-falls-running-away-pursuers.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

Having botched the burglary in the first place, the 21-year old burglar from Halifax, West Yorkshire (not Nova Scotia, thats in Canada. Look. http://www.novascotia.com/en/home/default.aspx), fled the scene of the crime. Not such a catastrophe as yet, but in fleeing the crime the inept burglar then jumped a wall and fell down a 30-foot well. Just how many 30-foot well shafts there are lingering unnoticed in the West Yorkshire conurbations is unknown to science but probably rests at about one. This inept burglar found it, promptly ignored its presence and fell down it. Aha. Escape is escape, even if it is being stuck down a secret mineshaft. Unfortunately for this poor thing, the seal of ineptitude was stamped when he called the police – the very ones from whom he was fleeing – to ask for a helping hand in removing himself from the hole. Nice work burglar, that one didn’t go according to plan did it?

Our ethos is simple, we are here to take the blame. Apparently we live in a blame culture; and in a blame culture there needs to be someone who you can turn to when there is nobody else who will shoulder your blame. Whatever the reason, whatever the occasion, we are there for you. From the simple and the transparent – be it stubbing your toe or spilling your tea; waking up late for work or missing the bus – to the arduous, perplexing, intricate and convoluted – your dog died; you hate your boss; the IOC decided to oust you from your abode and build an Olympic sized Ice-rink in your back garden and erect an athletes village in your once pristine street-market turning a once thriving local community into a dull and bland advert for a hotch-potch amalgamation of too much glass, no class and student residents. We are there. Blame us.

Politics, science, philosophy, food, revolution, environment, education, celebrity, television, crime, animals, history, love, money, relationships, family, sport, technology, travel, war, weather, health, business, birthdays, parties, celebrations, drugs, employment, nature………….and breathe…………..cybercrime, nuclear energy, credit cards, pornography, computer games, graffitti, hollywood. Kitchen sink. There is blame.

If you have anything you want us to take the blame for. Tell us. Let us know. Post a link. Send a letter. And we will publish an apology, allowing you to sleep soundly, safe in the knowledge that the blame rests with us. Go on, don’t be shy.

Barclay’s  Bank has announced pre-tax profits of £6.07 billion pounds and is soon to be followed by the remaining top 5 banks of The UK – HSBC, Lloyds, Royal Bank of Scotland and Standard Chartered – pushing the annual profit of the Big Five up to £15 billion. This comes just a week after David Cameron successfully negotiated a £200 million charitable donation to his Big Society vision from these very banks. Assuming £15 billion is the watermark, this donation equates to 0.013% of the profit.

The sum of £200 million was, like an 18th century school bully, literally thrashed out between the government and the banks last week. A chicken feed sum in comparison to the gargantuan figures being offered up this week; inept in its petiteness.  That they are so proud of this achievement smacks of desperation and is bitterly in-keeping with the rest of the flowery Big Society ideal.

Originally championed before the outset of the 2010 general election, the Big Society has slowly escalated into the modus operandi of the current leader of the British Empire. As the words Big Society slowly fall victim to semantic satiation (the phenomenon where the continued repetition of a word strips it of all sense and meaning; a kind of repetition blindness) it is worth highlighting the original ethos. Over to you David Cameron.

“The big society is about changing the way our country is run… This is not another government initiative — it’s about giving you the initiative to take control of your life and work with those around you to improve things“

He goes on.

“People have the compassion, flexibility and local knowledge to help their neighbours and communities. Our approach will not merely enable them to build a stronger society, it will actively help them to do so”

A sort of Dad’s Army for government. Taking the power from government and placing it in the hands of volunteer groups, charities, neighbours and friends is such a nice idea. They can let little fluffy bunny rabbits dictate planning permission and leave the rubbish collection to the clean fairies. Perhaps flooding response units can be handled by the local school children and the public libraries can rest safe in the hands of the local prisoners, out on day release for good behaviour.

A nice round sum of £200 million should just about cover it. Or it would, if, as according to some, it wasn’t just a big fluffy buzz word dreamt up to pull the wool over the nations unsuspecting eyes; a cover-up for the monumental public spending cuts that are currently being unleashed across much of The UK. More than one labour cynic has labelled the whole idea as doomed. Ed Milliband, speaking in a Sunday newspaper last year he stated that

“No one can volunteer at a library or a Sure Start centre if it’s being closed down. And nor can this Conservative-led government build a Big Society while simultaneously undermining its foundations with billions of pounds worth of cuts to the voluntary sector.”

Cuts? Well such is the state of the record budget deficit in the UK at the moment that £80 billion will be cut from public spending over the next 4 years. Liverpool has already pulled out of the Big Society after having to cut 1500 jobs due to the cuts. So many cuts. At least they can all volunteer now. Local authorities, left right and centre, have been slashing grants to the very charitable and volunteer groups the Big Society hopes will keep the grass and hedgerows looking green and pleasant.

£200 million can barely buy you an injured footballer these days, let alone fixing the world. That such a small amount is deemed a success by the powers that be; that they feel it is the cornerstone to the ideal, is a sucker-punch to the very people whose shoulders The Big Society rests. We take the blame for this ineptitude and for the small sum that they think can bring about the change.

As the annual bonuses for Barclay’s bank top brass currently sits at £2.16 billion, the 0.013% is put into some perspective. Whether The Big Society is blind Utopian Idealism or a serious contender for the future remains to be seen, but it is going to take a lot more than peanuts to quell the monkeys.

The supermarket. Barren wasteland of the surreal and inept; a breeding ground of agitation and reckless stupidity; of time wasting and time expansion, where one fleeting second can feel like the eternal stretch of existence. Such is the capacity for the human being to be inept in a supermarket – the same capacity can be found in regular shops in a diluted form, but it is when food shopping that the condition can be found in its pure, concentrate form – that books, films and art have been dedicated to the strange condition that overcomes people the moment they step through the doors and into a place that has committed no other crime other than to sell food.

What causes the condition is yet to be determined by scientists but what is sure is that it exists, and whats more, no-one ever apologises for it. The lady who insists on paying for her groceries with a mixture of old silver coins from the Battle of Waterloo and an assortment of gift certificates and coupons from an old copy of Vanity Fair makes your choice of queue so wrong that the invasion of Iraq seems like an enlightened flash of inspiration by comparison.

The battle-axe on till 7 who, the moment you arrive at her isle decides she is now going to close. “I’m closed”, she bellows at you, unprovoked and contagious, a look of panic etched on her face. She needs to escape the country before nightfall. You are then left to crawl your way back to the isle that you know the little lady from hell is currently holding up with her coupons. (coupons – the most evil word in the English language.) You wield your misfiring trolley past the crying baby and the little  children who insist on staring or mocking you and eventually it is your turn.

Your food has past its sell by date and all you want to do is kill. But you cant because line 7 is in deep conversation with line 8 about her tearaway daughter and the price of an apple that has fallen out of the bag and cant actually be brought as a single item, only as part of a multi-pack. Finally she mumbles at you and slowly pushes your items over the infra red with the speed of a 3 toed sloth high on anti depressants. Any slower and she may as well be hanging upside down from a tree herself, slowly munching on a bamboo stick. Ten days later and its time to pay but you only have notes, which can be clearly seen by the checkout staff who still insist on asking you if you have 23 pence in loose change as it would really make their life a whole lot easier if they didn’t have to count out the correct amount of change, even though there is a flashing light beaming the amount directly onto their iris. You say no and they spit green blood at you through their eyes. The floor of the supermarket tries to swallow you as you make your way to the exit, all the while monitored by the glazed eyes of the soulless victims that are currently dying in the queues.

Taketheblame would like to apologise and until scientists find the real cause, take the blame for all your supermarket ineptitude.

Bright light city gonna set my soul, gonna set my soul on fire. I got a whole lotta money thats ready to burn so get those stakes up higher…..

So how high do you want them to be raised? The stakes I mean. How much do you have to loose? Las Vegas is a hot bet of mentalism and surrealism. The home to crazy bets and even crazier people. It doesn’t sleep and there is no time for there are no clocks. Time is an idea here. They know it exists but bear it no mind. A bit like Switzerland. As the hours wear on, the stakes get higher and losses get chased as small fortunes are won and giant fortunes lost. How high again?

At the Bellagio Casino on the main strip, tucked away at the back of the auditorium, is a small games room known as ‘Bobbys Room’, and it is here where you will find the really high stakes you are after. In the early part of the century a team of professional poker players, lead by Doyle Brunson, took on billionaire Andy Beal in what was to become the biggest card game on the planet. Blinds were set, and increased, until at one point in proceedings they were resting lazily at $100,000 and $200,000. That’s a car and a house every time you get dealt some cards. The players had to put 200k just to play their cards. Crisis? What crisis?

But all is not flowers and roses. Head for Vegas while you can, because it wont be here forever. Las Vegas is sinking, and not into the Nevada desert that surrounds it. Visitor numbers are down and gambling revenue is plummeting, the recession is hitting the ravaged, beating heart of America. The money is drying up and there is no-one to blame. In the first quarter of this year gambling revenue was down 4%, the biggest drop since 1970 and serious cause for concern for a city whose life blood is the constant ringing of the slot machine bells.

After the terror attacks on The World Trade centre when America seemed to hoard its money as if the sky was falling down, Las Vegas carried on regardless, a rolling freight-train, shackled by nothing. Something different is happening now though. The once impervious city is taking body blows as the global economic heat finally takes hold and the desert barometer is showing no signs of letting up. The stock price of the MGM Mirage, owner of 9 hotels and casino resorts on the famous strip, including the aforementioned Bellagio, have tumbled from over $100 before Christmas to under half of that now.

The same company has terminated the contracts of over 400 employees to save revenue. New hotels and Casinos are being half built and left to the birds as investors pull out and building firms go bust. A $6 billion replica of the New York Plaza has been shelved and the $3 billion Cosmopolitan resort is half built after the developers defaulted on a $760 million loan from Deutsche Bank.

But of course this is of no use to you. The part time American gambler, the dreamer and the steamer, the loser. Big or small, the amount is irrelevant, there is always only ever one winner and we all know who that is. But the casinos never apologise do they? They never take the blame for the bad luck, for the our draw, for the fish that got lucky. For the luck of the draw, the bad cards on the flop or the momentary lack of breath as the balls bounces from red, slowly slowly slowly into black. 22 is nearly 21. Oh so near. Just 1. For all the bad beats on he Vegas strip, Taketheblame holds its hands up and says sorry. The cards were dealt and we are to blame.

All you wanted were some cigarettes. Not a big ask considering you had worked 67 hours the week before and the huge pile of cash that should be sitting in your bank account goes someway to masking the sheer hell of the weeks work; the 59 cups of coffee, 246 cigarettes; the hell the neighbours gave you; your work colleagues who every day take a little of your soul, not to mention the nagging girlfriend and the flatmates whose eyes you want to cut out with scissors. The two thousand pounds that is nestling sweet and cold in your bank account will make it all, if at least not worthwhile, then bearable. Only it wont because when you hit the 4 digit key into the machine and ask it nicely for money, it tells you “insufficient funds’.

You can hear the machine laughing at you. You try it again, the infuriation rising in the pit of your stomach like the bowls of Mt St Helen’s, ready to burst into an exquisite ulcer. You know there is money there, or at least their should be, their normally is, its the 26th of the month, there is always money there ready to be exchanged for intoxication.

You haven’t been to the bank for a while but this time you sweep in like the north wind demanding to know where your money is. The clerk tells you to get in line – you hadn’t seen the 27 other sweating cicadas wasting their lunch hour queuing in the bank, now all staring at you as if you had just raped their children – so you wait and you wait and all you want to know is where the money that you worked your fingers to the bone for is, its your money, its your right. So the clock ticks down and finally its your turn and you demand a statement and you receive it and it turns out that you have no money. Your card has been cloned and a man in South Africa has spent all your money.

Card cloning is becoming big business and if you get caught in its vicious web, you are going to be experiencing a whole world of frustration. Your bank account will be frozen and your cards cancelled. You will then have to wait for new cards and pin numbers which will take up to 2 weeks. In this time, not one person will apologise to you. Not one person will say “sorry Mr/Mrs… I know you bank with us and under our watch somebody stole all your money, so we are sorry.” There will be no such apology.

The card manufacturers who have developed the Chip and Pin system that is being so easily violated will not take the blame or apologise – the chip and pin system has been used for a lot longer on the continent and criminals are learning how to corrupt and bypass the mechanism. In an extra kick-in-the-teeth victims are being denied reimbursement because as far as the computers are concerned, the correct card and pin number have been used in the crime. That you have never been to South Africa is of no concern to a computer.

Taketheblame would like to console the victims of debit card cloning and offer our apologies on behalf of those who are truly responsible.

David Li, a 32 year old billionaire from Shanghai who made his fortune when he sold his Internet company last year, visited the Na-pa Valley in California to buy some wine for his Sunday dinner last week. Obviously being a billionaire, money is not an object and seeing as though he already has over 100 thousand bottles of wine in his cellar, it probably wasn’t going to be like a regular trip to Bargain Booze for a bottle of rosé. And indeed it wasn’t. His purchase pushed up the price for the average bottle of French Bordeaux, that would have Jilly Gouldings taste buds trying to vacate her throat, by around £3000. Taketheblame would like to offer their apologies to the wine drinking community at large.

On 6 bottles of 1992 Screaming Eagle, a world renowned Cabernet Sauvignon, Mr Li spent $500,000. Or nearly 100 grand a bottle. According to the gospel of sommeliers the world over, only 125 cases of the vintage wine were ever made. Which seems like quite a lot. I mean, its not that rare if over 100 cases were created. There are less Pandas and White Tigers than that. On a panda to white tiger ratio it’s almost a can of Stella. After the showdown Mr Li was heard to say,

“I love Screaming Eagle. It’s the best wine in the world.”

Should hope so for that price. Wouldn’t want him to go out and spend half a million on a wine he wasn’t that keen on. For those that will never get the opportunity to taste such a drink – and lets be honest, who would be able to taste the difference anyway if your drinking it down with a chilli clocking 3 million scovilles – then look to wine guru Robert Parker who gave the vintage 99 out of his magic 100 scale and probably didn’t have to fork out half a million to do so.

In a rare turn of events not seen since Guy Fawkes tried to blow the lot of them up, a politician has apologised for a mistake the government made. Jacqui Smith, her of the Home Secretary role, has apologised for the governments inaccuracy over recent figures on the number of foreign workers currently plying their trade in the UK. The original figures released stated that there were 800 000 foreign nationals currently employed in the UK. The actual figure is closer to 1.2 million. And Ms Smith has apologised. Such apologies and admissions are so few and far between that when they do happen, we should embrace them. That the newly updated figures are probably still underestimated is not the point, the apology is what matters for now.

The press uproar over the figures that has had Jeremy Paxman and his cronies jabbering about “honesty” and the “public right to know” is due to the figures affecting another set of numbers. Since labour came into power in 1997 they have (business didn’t do it, they did) created 2.7 million jobs. Nearly 1.2 million of which could be taken up by foreign nationals. 8% of the Uk’s workforce is now foreign. The supply chain of figures is reliant on the previous being accurate, if it isn’t, all their graphs and pie charts are of no use what so ever. When immigration is such a talking point in society, it is perhaps in the interests of the nation that these figures be accurate, the last time such a mistake with numbers was made Bush jnr walked into the Whitehouse.

Speaking to the BBC Ms Smith said, “Of course it is bad that these figures are wrong and ministers have apologised for that. I am sorry about that.” See, an actual apology. They took the blame. Isn’t that something. This could be the first of many. Maybe apologies about Iraq will follow.