It has been a while since I picked up the metaphorical quill and uploaded some banter to this very forum. Why? Well, considering I still have job, I have been rather busy in the bank of late. Tempestuous times!

I returned late last night from a week spent at the company training academy; a 19th century castle set within a nature reserve, surrounded by lakes and in the middle of bloody nowhere! 5 days of cashflow modelling and a seminar to boot! Maybe it is just me, but I don’t seem to be able to gee myself up to enjoy the humour associated with circular references in excel spreadsheets, as some of my colleagues do. Alas, and this may just be the hidden geek inside of me; I do actually enjoy the hell out of them. They're like a game, or more a quest, where the solution is absolute. Moreover, the solution is not the result – it is the route to finding it. Essentially, there can be no mistakes in your formulae or every output is tainted. If you encounter these behemoth calculators upon your arrival at an institution, don’t be scared. I left A level maths behind me a long time ago, with great pleasure and retaining very little of what I’d “learnt”, only to discover today that the real life application of such mathematical and logical principles is very easily understood in context, rather than on page 685 of a text book full of Greek.

Apologies to all of you who did actually enjoy your P6 A level maths module! As a consolation prize you shall be the star students of such modelling seminars and probably auditing my models upon your arrival at the bank. That is, if you actually find a job, the banks can still afford to pay you and/or the Free Market Capitalist Democracy is still the “worst form of government except all the others” upon your graduation.

What a bollocks time it is for us all to have entered the rat race!
Apropos this statement I should probably elaborate:

From my point of view, the easiest way to describe what we are experiencing in the financial markets at the moment is perhaps via metaphor: Let’s imagine a city built around an industry. Up until a year or so ago this city was flourishing, the industry was going from strength to strength and everyone was “happy”, in spite of the fact they didn’t really know what they were doing because it was all going so well. The industry in question is of course: The circus. This city, known to most as The Big Top, is a concentration of the most successful circuses in the world. In testament to this fact, huge phallic tents have been erected in the most opulent and sought after areas of the city and the ring masters are enjoying an unprecedented era of return.

The circuses have attracted the brightest acrobats, clowns and tightrope walkers from around the globe to perform mind-boggling acts of a seemingly impossible nature that no-one outside of this elite band of brothers could possible comprehend. Furthermore, these ringmasters have developed and evolved “cultures” to which their “performers” adhere, live by and uphold without equivocation – the trained animals within each and every tent are dancing to the finely tune beat of the ring masters; the audiences are lapping it up!