Biden Beats Trump

 I don't mind admitting I wept this evening after the networks finally called the election for Biden. Yes, it wasn't the Blue Wave. Yes the Republicans may still control the Senate, and yes roughly half the country voted for Trump after having had four years of him. But the symbolism of getting him out cannot be overstated. Character matters. Doing the right thing matters. And doing the work matters. Twelve years ago I snipped the home pages when Obama won for the first time. Here's the clips for Biden and Harris. Also interesting to note the changes in webpage style now in the smartphone era, and the relevant sites.

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Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld

Speaking of Tea

WRITING a post when you haven't done so in a while is always difficult. Day to-day I am a journalist, so the thought of writing reportage, which I do for a living, does not appeal at all. Writing about myself won’t do either. Not because I’m not interesting, although people will probably say I amn’t, but because everyone on the ‘net seems to be writing about themself.

No, the first post in a while has to be something different. And for different, let’s have a look at the impending doom that appears to be getting ready to envelop the world on Tuesday, namely a default on its debts by the United States of America.

The debt ceiling is an interesting one. From an outsider’s standpoint (I’m Irish), it’s difficult to understand the logic of even having a ceiling to the national debt [More on this in a later post].

Yes a country needs to be fiscally responsible. If they aren’t you end up with a situation like Greece, Portugal or Ireland. But, unlike the European periphery, The US is the biggest economy in the world. It has natural resources that dwarf most countries on this planet. It has the world’s reserve currency. And it is the single most important plank in the global economy. People talk about China overtaking the States and how it now holds such a huge proportion of Treasuries. That is true, but the Chinese do not hold all the cards. There is an old saying: if someone owes you a million dollars, you own them, if they owe you a billion dollars, they own you. That is precisely the position China is in now. It holds so much US debt, it has no choice but to keep financing American spending, otherwise the value of its Treasuries would collapse overnight. Is it America’s creditor? Yes. Would it be as screwed as America if it called in its debts? Yes.

Which brings me back to the ceiling. Unfortunately it’s not just China that would be screwed if the US defaults on Tuesday. Every institutional investor in the world -you’re pension fund, my pension fund – carrys T-Bills as a matter of course. If a default comes then goodbye pensions.

And for Americans, once they default, they can kiss goodbye to services they take for granted. With nobody willing to buy American debt, the government runs out of money, and the subway, the buses, social security, all grind to a shuddering halt.

The 2.65m (estimated) federal workers will find themselves without paychecks, so they wont make their rent or mortgages, the local shop that lives off selling newspapers and coffee to workers in the morning is put out of business because his customers arent going to work, and so on.

In short, what happened in the credit markets in September 2008, happens in the everyday market of life. And all this when the US economy is barely avoiding a double dip recession as it is.

Shockingly, it seems one group will be pleased with this. The Tea Party appear to be placing intellectual and political purity above the future of their country. Through ignorance or something more sinister, they’re actions are the exact opposite of the patriotism they claim to represent.

Zuck steps back

THE FOUNDER of Facebook, which has over 1.5m users in Ireland, said yesterday that the website would simplify its privacy settings and give users more control over what information is passed onto third parties.

Mark Zuckerberg, who is also chief executive of the social networking website, said that new, simpler, privacy settings would be rolled out across the site "in the coming weeks". The move comes after criticism from privacy groups and politicians across the world that Facebook's privacy settings were too complicated and accusations that the website shared private information with third party websites.

Writing in the Washington Post, Mr. Zuckerberg, admitted that Facebook had "moved too fast" in loosening its privacy settings and that "people want easier control over their information" and vowed to right the system.

"Many of you thought our controls were too complex. We…missed the mark," he said. Mr. Zuckerberg also said that the new privacy settings would make it easier for users to turn off all third party services and applications such as the well known "Farmville" and "Mafia Wars" 

"Many people choose to make some of their information visible to everyone. We already offer controls to limit the visibility of that information and we intend to make them even stronger," he added. 

Mr. Zuckerberg's mea culpa may be seen as a significant climb down from his long time position of making as much information as possible freely available on the web. 

At the launch of "Web Graphs" (an application that allowed users to "like" content across the web), the 26-year-old billionaire said, "we're building a web where the default is social". 

Web Graphs and the ensuing changes to the website's privacy policy led to outrage across the world, however. Four US senators called on the site to reverse the new policy of sharing users information more widely with third party websites while privacy groups also raised concerns. 

At the end of last year a change to the privacy settings made everybody's personal information available to search engines unless they changed those settings to prevent it. The move resulted in an angry letter from the EU calling the move "unacceptable", and resulted in some users quitting the site. 

Facebook's latest controversy has also led to an online campaign for people to delete their Facebook profiles. 

Quit Facebook day has been set for May 31st. An accompanying website, QuitFacebook.com claims to have 14,382 members committed to removing their account. 

Ireland team leaves a lot to be desired

It was one of the many images we were left with in Paris. Tomas O'Leary (for once) had quick ball too work with and he had Ronan O'Gara flat on the gain line. An attack was ready to be launched. And then Jerry Flannery arrived, and O'Leary decied to let Flannery pick and go. The ensuing ball was so slow as to be unusable, and the attack petered out.

It was symptomatic of Ireland, and O'Leary's, performance all day. After the game, the general consensus was that changes would have to be made for Twickenham, and changes have been made.

But they are the wrong ones.

Geordan Murphy in for the injured Rob Kearney was expected and is right. Johnny Sexton for the out of sorts Ronan O'Gara was inevitable as was Rory Best coming in for the suspended Jerry Flannery. The decision to retain Tomas O'Leary ahead of Eoin Reddan and to drop Leo Cullen for a fit again Donncha O'Callaghan however beggars belief.

O'Leary two weeks ago was slow, indecisive and lacked urgency. His delivery to O'Gara was too slow and innaccurate. To be sure, O'Gara had a stinker, but it was not all of his making. When he has to reach for a slow pass as he had to too often in Paris, it makes it all but impossible for him to run a backline effectively. O'Leary's decision making was not of international standard and he seemed almost cowed by the French pack. Too often he called for a pick and go or just let the forwards do what they wanted. A scrum half must boss his pack. He must be vocal, he must give direction, and he must be willing to have a go at his pack if they are in the way. O'Leary demonstrated none of these qualities. Eoin Reddan is by nature a more vocal character and his delivery was demonstrably faster when he came on. As well as his physical skills, his inclusion would have ensured that Sexton had his regular Leinster team mates either side of him, this could only improve the understanding amongst the backs.

As for the decision to include O'Callaghan instead of Cullen, well, it is hard to credit. Cullen was probably the stand out Irish forward against France. He repeatedly won lineouts against the throw and was far more noticeable around the park than Paul O'Connell. Indeed, when he was called ashore in the 65th minute, it is fair to say that it should have been O'Connnell who was taken off.

Donncha O'Callaghan is an honest to god player who has been a fixture for Ireland the last four years. He's also a limited player who has not played a competitive game since injuring knee ligaments on January 22nd.Will he matchfit? Is he a better bet than Cullen on Saturday?

England may have played poorly but they are slowly building momentum and are still unbeaten in t he tournament. Ireland are coming off a first defeat in a year and need to make a statement at Twickenham this Saturday. declan Kidney needed to make changes but two errors could be costly.

Old Master?

Nicos has been a fixture on the Dublin restaurant scene for decades. Peter Flanagan finds out if it still has the genius of old.

Restaurants are ten a penny these days. It seems that they appear and disappear with disconcerting regularity. In the New York of the book American Psycho, a restaurant that Patrick Bateman (the main character) simply must have a table in at the start, is a vacant lot by the end. Dublin is getting a bit like that, albeit without the psychotic serial killer.

Fortunately, in a restaurant world of “here today, gone tomorrow”, Nicos is the exception. It has been around for years and although a recent refit has changed the décor dramatically - the red velvet is gone and replaced with a modern mixture of brown and white - the ambience has changed little, and that is a very good thing. Therefore it’s a real pity that the food does not seem to be quite what it was.

Our coats were taken by a polite young waiter and we were seated in what was a practically empty restaurant, but it was early on a Monday night, and it would fill up later on. Very few restaurants can pack them in on a cold Monday night but Nico’s does a pretty good job of it.

Our starters arrived promptly and they were excellent. My minestrone soup was packed full of flavour. It’s easy to make a decent bowl of minestrone but hard to make a top class one. This was near top class. Plenty of vegetables and the soup was just the right thickness. It probably helped that it was freezing outside. The paté on the other hand was very average. Too much of it and very garlicky, it is something to be avoided.

The main courses arrived a short time after – a pheasant breast drowned in a tomato sauce and a fillet steak. While the steak was excellent, it soon became clear why there was so much sauce on the pheasant. It was dry as a bone and had little flavour. Think Christmas turkey three days later and that’s the level of dryness you are talking about. Fortunately the steak was excellent – almost burnt on the outside but fabulously juicy on the inside. When I order a steak medium this is what I’m talking about. The vegetables – green beans and cauliflower au gratin – were overdone and the gratin dominated the flavour of everything it touched. Lashings of thin cut chips made up for the vegetables though and when the meal was washed down with a fabulous valpolicella, the problems with the pheasant and the cauliflower were almost forgotten.

By now the restaurant had filled up substantially and the piano that sits just inside the main door had been opened. This is the part I usually enjoy most about Nico’s. The soft, unidentifiable, music is perfect for a relaxing meal for two. Unfortunately tonight we were greeted with such classics as the Toploader’s “Dancing In The Moonlight” and “Are we Human” by The Killers. While the music was well played as you’d expect, when you spend more time trying to identify the tunes than enjoying your meal, it certainly detracts from the overall experience. In any case, pop songs did not seem to fit with the mostly middle aged clientele. It was the kind of music you’d expect in a Burger King, not the venerable Nico’s.

The waiters left us to our own devices for just the right length of time before offering us dessert menus. Gateau Nico’s is a sponge cake with custard and chocolate cream and it is magnificent. The custard and chocolate combine perfectly to produce terrific flavours. I can’t recommend it enough. Coffee is, as you’d expect from an Italian restaurant, superb.

When the bill came, as expected, it wasn’t cheap. €137 for two people is a little on the high side but we didn’t hold back. The steak and the pheasant were two of the most expensive mains on the menu while our bottle of wine was at the higher end of the scale.

Overall Nico’s has definitely slipped in quality. It gives the reputation of a place living of its reputation rather than trying to maintain excellence. It is still worth going to but don’t expect it to be a life changing experience. This is no longer a place Pat Bateman would kill for a table in.

Nicos, 53 Dame Street, Dublin 2. Telephone: +353 (0)1 677 3062

The Other Side of the Wall Street Recession

“Why isn’t the report ready yet? I need it by one!”

Jamie Richardson comes out of his boss’s office and returns to his three computer screens. He doesn’t say anything but the look of exasperation on his face says more than any words could. It’s 12.45 and five hours since he arrived at his desk, Jamie still hasn’t had breakfast. He sits down in his Aeron chair, and glances at his inbox. Sixty five emails are sitting unread. There are 3 voicemails waiting on his phone, and he’s a pile of bank transfers to authorise. Such is the life of the underling.

Jamie works in Dublin for a top Wall Street investment bank. Once one of the most prestigious banks in the world, It was taken over when on the verge of collapse in during the meltdown of 2008. Like the vast majority of Wall Street employees, his is not a glamorous job. He does not make the million dollar bonuses. In a world where the term “wall street bonus” is a dirty word, Jamie represents the other side of the argument. For every one of the traders who nearly destroyed the global financial system and then picked up a multi-million euro bonus, there are thousands like Jamie who work for an average wage, and get a very average bonus, if any. It’s a side of the bonus row that has not been heard, until now.

Like most people working on The Street, as Wall Street is known among its drones, these days, Jamie does not have an MBA from Harvard or Wharton, or Smurfit for that matter. After a degree in medicinal chemistry from Trinity College Dublin, he realised that he would have to pursue a PhD to go anywhere in the science world, and after four years of slaving over Petri dishes and Bunsen burners, he knew that wasn’t for him. He also knew that he wanted to get out into the “real world” and start earning. €80 a week from the local Spar was no longer enough. At the height of the boom in 2004, banking was the obvious career. After speaking to a recruitment agency he was put forward for a handful of interviews. None were quite like the interview he did for this firm.

“When they called me for an interview, they asked me to come in at 6.30 in the evening which seemed a bit odd to say the least. When I arrived in, the first thing I was asked was what I liked most about golf (he is a keen golfer). The role I was being interviewed for and the talk through my CV all came later.”

He survived the interview and was made an offer. It wasn’t the only one he got, but it was certainly the most intriguing. He jumped at it.

Day 1 in a new office job usually follows a fairly simple structure. Arrive in the office, be met at reception by your new boss, get shown around the office, shake a few hands, drink some coffee, go home around 4.30. Jamie found himself sitting at a desk with more computer screens than he knew was possible to hook up to one computer and the phone ringing. It was 8.30am. He finally got out around seven that night.

“The attitude in there was really ‘sink or swim’. There was little on the job training as such. I basically had to work things out and ask questions as I went,” he said.

“Survival of the fittest” is the way another employee describes it. “It’s a tough job and not everyone can hack it. I know of at least 3 people who were gone within 2 weeks. They (the firm) put a lot of pressure on you and you have to deal with it,” said the employee.

Jamie did deal with it, and still does. The day starts at 6am, he’s at his desk by 7.30 – 7.45 every morning.

His job is to complete the trades a company trader executes. For example, a trader might sell 5,000 shares in Apple with a delivery date of January 2nd 2010. Jamie’s job is to deliver the 5,000 Apple shares to the person the trader is selling the shares to (the counterparty) on January 2nd 2010 (the value date). It sounds like a relatively straightforward task but the deal described above is replicated thousands of times a month, as are much more complex trades. The deal above is about as “vanilla” as it gets.

After he checks his email, he usually goes downstairs to get breakfast which he brings back to his desk (everyone’s desk has some sort of cup or plate on them, lunch at your desk is the norm). This morning though is one of those days when breakfast is an afterthought. A mail came in from Tokyo during the night. A senior manager over there wants a trade report for the last quarter ASAP (nobody says “as soon as possible” – it’s too long), and they copied his manager on the mail. This means his boss will want the report long before it is sent to Tokyo. These kinds of things tend to be relatively common occurrences. That doesn’t make them any easier. The “big dogs” in investment banks tend to want the world yesterday. That is the nature of the business at their level. People at Jamie’s level provide the info that allows one big dog to eat another. They just hope they aren’t eaten too.

Jamie and his team produce a stream of reports for management as a matter of course. The report the man in Tokyo wants isn’t one of them. Trade details have to be downloaded, value dates have to be correlated and the data has to be sorted. The report should include “Vanilla Interest Rate Swaps” but not “Butterfly Interest Rate Swaps”. “FX Forwards (G10)” should be included but “FX Forwards (emerging)” should be excluded. The only way to do this is manually on the biggest Excel Spreadsheet I’ve ever seen. Actually 3 spreadsheets totalling 180,354 lines of gibberish. Numbers are interspersed with dates, company names and currency signs. Finally the report is cut down to a mere 65,000 lines. After he goes through it with his manager, Jamie emails the report to Japan. A one word “thanks” which has been “sent from a Blackberry © wireless handheld” is received back almost before the mail had left Jamie’s screen. It’s now just after 1.30 in Dublin – 10.30 at night in Tokyo.

Lunch is a sandwich at the desk. While eating Jamie cleans up his inbox (Outlook is permanently on the screen on the left), checks for any news on Tiger’s sabbatical from golf (middle screen), and ignores the trade data on the right hand screen. After lunch the golf news is replaced by an excel spreadsheet.

The day ends around 7.30. Jamie’s team works mainly with the London and Tokyo markets so he doesn’t have anyone in the States on the phone in the evening. He is going home for a pizza or something similar. And a beer. Before he leaves I ask him if this was a normal day. He breaks out into the broadest grin I’ve seen from anyone in the building all day.

“Normal? There’s no such thing as ‘normal’ in this world.”

Last year Jamie took home €27,000 gross, plus a bonus of €16,000. This year his base has been reduced to under €25,000. He pays rent of €500 a month plus bills. He is like a lot of people getting through the Great Recession as best they can, holding onto their job for dear life and keeping out of trouble. Unlike most people though, he is working for a firm in an industry which has been hung upside down from a lamppost by politicians worldwide.

In the UK, Lord Myners, the city minister has called on bankers to “return to the real world” on bonuses. The Labour government will introduce a 50% super-tax on City bonuses at the next budget. The move has been widely welcomed. In the US President Obama has rounded on Wall Street for its bonus culture.

The argument is simple: the banks brought the world to the verge of financial meltdown last year and had to be saved by the government. They plunged the world into the worst recession since the 1930s. Therefore everyone in the business should be punished.

It is a perfect argument. Cogent, easy to understand, and populist. No politician would dare to go against it.

People in the business take a different view. Lord Griffith is a former economic advisor to Margaret Thatcher and now works part time for Goldman Sachs. Speaking at an event in St. Paul’s Cathedral about morality in the marketplace, Griffith said that bonuses were a good thing.

“If we said we’re not going to have as big bonuses or the same bonuses as last year, I think you’d find that lots of City firms could easily hive off their operations to Switzerland or the Far East.” The comments set off a wave of disgust amongst the press and people not working in investment banking.

Jamie doesn’t necessarily agree with Lord Griffith, but he heartily disagrees with the public anger as well.

“What people forget is that we (bankers) aren’t all multi-millionaires. The vast majority of us are working long hours for not much money. There is a myth that we all get bonuses of 700k (the average bonus in Goldman Sachs) and above.

“The bonus isn’t something that allows most of us to buy a new yacht. It’s something that allows us to pay the rent every month. A friend left here after two years to go back to college. She is working as a waitress at weekends. She told me that per hour, she’s making more as a waitress than she was here.”

It sounds absurd, but Jamie does have a point. As he logs off his computer and turns off his three screens, I glance around the floor. At least half of the desks are still occupied. Most would be on a wage comparable to Jamie’s. If the money isn’t what we are all supposed to think it is, if the stress is so high and he has a boss that has no hesitation in chewing him out in public, why do it?

He shrugs. “You know, I’ve asked myself the same question, and I honestly don’t know. I guess it’s just what we do.”