The Umbrella Men by Keith Carter

 

In The Umbrella Men, Keith Carter directs various characters in a plot to act out the financial crisis of 2008. The author specifically wants to highlight the role played by RBS, Royal Bank of Scotland, in a process that might be described as financial vandalism, wrecking things by financing them, but there are plenty of other actors who also get it in the neck in the fusillade of the author’s invention.

The Umbrella Men brings fictional characters into real-life scenarios. This is, of course, the basis of most historical fiction, which often goes as far as putting invented words into once real, living mouths. Keith Carter avoids this trap. Key actors in the financial crash, such as Sir Fred Goodwin of RBS, or the members of the Middle Eastern consortium who refinanced Barclays, appear occasionally in name only, but not as protagonists. This allows the author carte blanche to invent people who can act out his scenario. And this he does, and that is precisely what they do.

The Umbrella Men is the kind of book that ought to be described as plot led, in that if the “what happened” were to be removed, there would not be a lot left. Strangely, in this case, we also know the plot before we start, if we have been even mildly conscious at any time in the last decade. So what might there be left to say? Quite a lot it seems, certainly enough to run to more than 400 pages in the electronic version.

Nothing of the book’s plot will be revealed here, except that it deals with the 2008 financial crisis. This is merely an introductory description of the scenario. Characters names will also be omitted, because long before the end, it’s merely the roles enacted by these people - there are more relevant and accurate words - that flesh out the author’s plot.

There is a London resident director and part owner of a company called Rareterre. He is married. They are living beyond their means and they have a family. The company mines, or did mine, rare earths and has been operating in Oregon. Their facility there has been dormant for a while after a drop in the prices of their products. They succumb to a financing deal from RBS to bring the mine back to life. There’s a disaffected financier from New York who ditches her boyfriend and heads for a simple new life in Oregon, of all places. She joins an environmental group and meets in indigenous American, who has been pursuing his own personal campaign against certain corporate interests in the area. Their relationship develops improbably around a mutual interest in stopping, you may have guessed, rare earth mining.

And there’s the bankers, not only RBS but predominately them, a financial speculator outfit called B&B, that is also interested in consuming main meals. There are Italian girls in gymnasia, numerous boyfriends, estranged and current, mental break ups, bogus contracts, takeovers, market crashes and, of course, the Chinese, who effectively create a takeaway, pun intended.

The Umbrella Men is structured, if that be the word, like a box set of episodes from a TV drama. Each chapter contains an author-driven polemic, followed by numerous scene and location changes, so that these characters can issue dialogue, best described as strings of clichés to illustrate and justify what we were told that the start. The book thus sounds and feels more like TV drama as it progresses. The Umbrella Men will enthral readers who adore such TV dramas.

But these people do not live, except to live out the plot, a task they accomplish quite effectively. There are a few dilemmas, almost no contradictions, and, basically, very little conflict. The pieces move around and the game is completed. By then, this reader was left wondering whether this should have been a novel at all.

And, by the way, we know that Sir Fred Goodwin will survive at the end, though he seems to have achieved a suitable anonymity by then.

History Repeated - Globalization and its Discontents by Joseph Stiglitz

Globalization and its Discontents has now been around for ten years. In 2002 the book was published as the tech bubble burst. It was five years since the Asian financial crisis in 1997. It was the better part of two decades since the Third World debt crisis of the 1980s effectively removed the livelihoods of masses in Latin America and Africa. And it was also ten years since the demise of the Soviet Union and its bloc. Joseph Stiglitz’s book analyses the response of the world’s major financial institutions, especially the World Bank and the International Monetary fund, to these crises.

National aid programmes and commercial banks also figure in the discussion. His conclusions were clear at the time – and remain so today. The ideologically-driven policy orthodoxy promoted by these bodies has repeatedly proved to be counter-productive. I lived in Asia at the time of the crisis.

I remember arguing with a Malaysian colleague about the need to take the medicine, as the IMF’s prescriptions were described. Integrate fully, open your markets, remove controls and accommodate foreign interests: this was the orthodoxy. When Malaysia did the opposite, I scoffed. The Malaysian economy subsequently contracted less than others, its people suffered less pain and recovery came quicker.

Thailand in particular swallowed the prescribed pills and continued to suffer. And, by the way, during the debt crisis of the 1980s, a number of Western banks became insolvent and had to be rescued. In that era, however, most measures were put in place behind closed doors so we never got to know the lurid details. We did, however, notice the recession.

Joseph Stiglitz illustrates how the right-wing ideology of perfect, self-regulating markets, liberalisation and privatisation failed to deliver in the past. He repeatedly shows how ensuing liquidity crises were treated with adjustment loans that undermined their own goals. He repeatedly shows how a range of measures calculated to address several angles of the problem simultaneously tended to produce better results. The evidence he presents is compelling.

So why, in 2012, do we again seem to be in the same tightening trap? Wherever lack of regulation or deregulation has been applied, it seems to produce the same results. Couple that with the reality of imperfect markets where no-one feels they will ever have to answer for either greed or risk and, it seems, you finish with a crash and then recession. And those who suffer are rarely those who created the problems. Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it. And what about those who ignore advice? Why use again a treatment that kills the patient? Here we go again.