Credit means Trust

As I sit here listening to the 10 o'clock news about bankers' bonuses, last night's play, The Power of Yes, seems so poignant. 


It's a funny play, actually funny at times, but just slightly odd and quite serious at others. It's quite an aim: to write a play charting history that is so recent and ongoing and, most significantly, about financial markets. The play tells the story of the credit crunch through the principal commentators of it, including "hedgefund manager and global philanthropist and philosopher" George Soros; journalist, business man and welfare adviser, Sir David Freud; the former and current head of the FSA; headhunter Paul Hammond; a city lawyer; FT journos; a former Lehman's banker and so on. Starting in the summer of 2007 when the first rumours of city discontent began and covering the whole ghastly affair with lowlights such as Northern Rock, Lehman's, Iceland and Fred the Shred.


Even a masterful playwright like David Hare struggles to make financial markets exciting and engaging the whole time. Clever production helps him, but some of the novelty wears off, as we go for yet another financial lesson about securitisation, credit derivatives and sub prime.


However, the key messages are clear. Greed and hubris led us to this situation and to a greater or lesser degree, most of us are responsible to a point. We all lived beyond our means in the good times, whether thanks to our mortgage, credit card or cheap loan. I would like to discount myself largely from the greed, but then I know I eyed up Iceland bank accounts because their interest rates were so high and I didn't associate that with risk. I'm materialistic. I see people with lots of money and I want to be a part of it. I hope and believe I wouldn't do anything too reckless to achieve it, certainly not to the detriment of others, but I'm a product of the booming 90s and noughties, as are so many of my generation.


The bankers don't come off well in The Power of Yes, but they don't come off terribly. Their portrayal is not gratuitous and it is accurate. One 24 year-old banker bemoans the disappearance of the bonuses just as he has started work and proclaims that he's off to Hong Kong. Virtually all my friends in banking (who are in their mid-twenties) feel like this. I find it hard to stomach. As someone earning considerably less than them, bonus aside, I have a real sense of "they just don't get it" (oft-quoted, including in this play). In an attempt to be understanding, I suppose that they feel they have worked very hard to earn as much as people have in previous years and they resent that they're not. What I resent though is that they can't associate their banks' astronomical losses with their bonuses. Why should you get a bonus if the company you work for has lost £17 billion? How does that make any sense? Nor does it appear to occur to them that those people who have helped keep them in work and back up their employers' shortfalls, are ordinary taxpayers who earn nothing like them.


I also find it hard to stomach that, as the current bonuses scandal demonstrates, the bankers have emerged from this whole terrible situation - of their collective making - unscathed. Meanwhile, some people close to me have lost their jobs, are struggling to find jobs and are worrying about their precarious financial situations. 


As Hare concludes, when the market collapses, it isn't the makers of the collapse who feel it. This is unfair. Well, people may say that life's unfair, but, to coin a phrase from the play, we now seem to have a system of socialism for the rich. How much more unfair can you get? How much more do the rest of us have to put up with?


And now it seems, as so often when thinking about the credit crunch, I've become angry and this is probably a good time to go. In conclusion, The Power of Yes is not a play's play, the credit crunch doesn't "become" a play, but, as with all good theatre, it certainly provokes a response.