A FAT LOT OF GOOD

One of the many scandals of this modern world is the disenfranchisement of the Fat. In the US about 60% of the population is overweight, many indeed are quite evidently obese, and yet there is no chance that this majority will be able to elect one of its own to be President. All the current serious candidates for President are from the lean and hungry minority with ne’er a fatty to be seen. It is all very odd and I scent a skinny conspiracy.

Grover Cleveland

Howard Taft

  It was not ever thus. Resolute Grover Cleveland, 22nd and 24th President, in H L Mencken’s phrase “sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite”. Grover tipped the scales at a solid but hardly excessive 250lb (17stone 12lb to us Brits) and the Americans embraced judicious 27th President Howard Taft, a colossal 332lb (23stone 10lb). 31st President Herbert Hoover was no stripling either but his texture was (Mencken again) “not that of the Alps, but that of chocolate éclairs” as the Depression struck. If politically the Americans have slimmed down, here in Greece we have two notable fatties: Evangelos Venizelos, erstwhile finance minister and new leader of leftist PASOK, must be 22 stone and has the mien of an ill-tempered toad. Yet he is tiny beside the gargantuan veteran Deputy Prime Minister Theodoros Pangalos, who has no discernable duties but who terrorises his colleagues because he knows where the bodies are buried. Pangalos always reminds me of the huge diner Mr Creosote, played by Python Terry Jones, who stuffed himself  gluttonously before messily exploding; whereupon maitre d’ John Cleese presented the bill. If you hear a loud bang outside the Greek cabinet room, you will know what has happened.

Evangelos Venizelos

Theodoros Pangalos

              

               

In Britain we have our fatties too. Winston Churchill himself was pinkly rotund and liked the good things in life. Accosted by, some say Bessie Braddock, but more likely Nancy Astor, with “Winston, you are very drunk!” he replied “Possibly I am. But you Bessie/Nancy are very ugly. Tomorrow morning, I will be quite sober, but you will still be very ugly!” Bessie Braddock was a Liverpudlian socialist firebrand and was one of those sizeable and formidable political battleaxes once common in Britain like Dame Irene White and Gwyneth Dunwoody. Of the current generation, my best fatty hopes used to reside in well-upholstered Nicholas Soames, grandson of Churchill and hate-figure of lady Labour MPs for his sexist banter, but an amusing fellow nonetheless. Sadly his first wife has damagingly revealed that making love with Nicholas was “like having a large wardrobe falling on you with a small key still in it!”

Bessie Braddock

Nicholas Soames

    

There have of course been some less-than-admirable fatties. The Emperor Vitellius insisted on at least 4 large meals a day, podgy and begloved Cardinal Wolsey was lucky to escape the axe; pot-bellied Napoleon Bonaparte threw Europe into chaos, even if the French unaccountably revere him. The less said the better about boasting Benito Mussolini (“the bullfrog of the Pontine Marshes”) or sinister Herman Goering - he who had two but they were very small, as the rude wartime song went.

Billy Bunter

I much prefer the genial fatty of fact and fiction. Billy Bunter, the Fat Owl of the Remove, always raises a laugh and most Scots will recognise Fat Bob, bosom pal of Oor Wullie, cartoon mainstay of Dundee’s Sunday Post. Fatty Arbuckle became a byword for plump good nature on the silent screen and monocled Charles Coburn was a splendidly florid feature of 1940’s comedies. Best of all, the world laughed with gentle Ollie Hardy in his madcap adventures with Stan Laurel.

Oliver Hardy

                   Back to the real world, there is a wise adage that you should never borrow from a thin banker and I have always been, er, um…a well-fed customer. My ideal bank manager would resemble Germany’s former Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, a flop at the top job, but a brilliant Economics Minister for the first 14 years of Germany’s renaissance, with just the right mixture of generosity and prudence, in short an admirable fat man. I believe the Fat are the life-enhancing Salt of the Earth. 

Ludwig Erhard

                   

SMD
23.03.12


Text copyright Sidney Donald 2012

DEMON BANKERS

In my City investment banking days long ago, I recall attending the usual Monday morning meeting for all the directors in about 1987. We were given an exposition by a bright spark from the quantitative (“quant”) analysis team about his latest product – some kind of hedging or swap instrument with various bells and whistles attached. My field was blissfully uncomplicated Private Equity, but I listened politely and I hope my face did not betray my almost total incomprehension, shared, I would guess, by plenty of others in the large room. I thought then that banks should not dive deeply into matters most of their senior people did not understand but I could hardly admit this to such a hard-bitten gathering. So I was really left at the starting gate on the invention of new instruments and derivatives followed by the securitisation of debt, perhaps one of the reasons my finance career never rose beyond the commonplace. Yet the Financial Crisis from 2007 onwards shows that my unease was well justified. Bankers often complain that they have been unfairly demonised: this complaint is not well founded and bankers are prominent (if not the only) villains of this story.

At about the same time, unforgettably described in Michael Lewis’ Liars Poker, the mortgage team at Salomon Brothers in New York run by the florid Italian-American Louie Ranieri, discovered a way to trade boring old mortgages in bulk making a fortune for the team and the firm. This was done in a dealing room with a Babylonian atmosphere – new recruits being verbally abused, women being belittled and insulted, constant foul language, customers being gleefully fleeced and the team relaxing with gluttony competitions featuring huge takeaways of Mexican food and litre tubs of guacamole. Ranieri sold his mortgages mainly to naïve members of the US Savings and Loan industry (RIP). The tone, the intellectual climate was simply deplorable.

His methods were soon enough copied and surpassed by other Wall Street institutions. The invention of the Collateralised Debt Obligation (CDO) is “credited” to Drexel, Burnham, Lambert in 1987 but it took some years to win wide acceptance. The mortgage CDO takes a pool of mortgages and divides it into tranches – the first tranche being rated AAA down to riskier tranches, rated BBB. Investors can invest in whatever tranches they want, the lower the rating, the higher the interest return, as the tranches are sliced. With the variety of borrowers and credit ratings, with some mortgages being on fixed and others on adjustable rates, with redemptions being unpredictable, the CDO became a very complex product and “quant jocks” were employed to analyse and structure them. Some banks were chary of CDOs as they found them difficult to value.

An apparent breakthrough occurred in 2000 when a Chinese mathematician working in Wall Street, David X. Li, presented a paper on his Gaussian Copula, a formula based on probability theory, which purported to produce a correlation number. Calculating this number and applying it to a model allowed banks to value their CDOs more easily, which now pooled all types of loan, not just mortgages. Li’s method was widely adopted, although there were doubters like Warren Buffett, who described CDOs in 2003 as “financial weapons of mass destruction”. Yet the CDO market grew from $275bn in 2000 to $4.7 trillion in 2006. Most crucially the rating agencies were converted to Li’s methodology and somehow rated most CDOs AAA, making them acceptable to the banks.

Sadly, Li’s formula was flawed and relied on houses rising in value; the end of the US housing bubble led to the collapse of the mortgage CDO market, as nobody could say where the liabilities lay, and inter-bank funding sources dried up for many banks globally. Post-crisis, J P Morgan estimated the recovery rate for CDOs would be a catastrophic 32c in the $ and 5c for mezzanine. The casualty list was long as huge write-down were necessary; all the following collapsed, had to be rescued or were sold off cheaply – Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Fannie May, Freddie Mac, Washington Mutual, Citigroup, AIG and Wachovia. Alan Greenspan’s belief that the market was best left untrammelled proved false, the rating agencies and the academic economist establishment should have foreseen the crash; the auditors should have raised the alarm; the Fed should have supervised the banks much more closely, but the culture of Greed dominated the powerful banks, driving them to ever greater imprudence and contempt for their fellow-citizens and to well-deserved ultimate disgrace and execration.

In the UK, the crisis took a different shape and drew blood 12 months earlier than in the US. The US sub-prime mortgage panic undid Northern Rock and caused an ugly run on that bank in September 2007. The Bank of England provided the required facilities, but NR did not recover and it was nationalised a few months later. Its management had foolishly relied far too much on short term inter-bank funding to run the business. Several members of the board were quite rightly heavily fined and banned from the banking sector.

Much worse was to come. In an excess of folly, already overleveraged Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) mounted a complex 3-way bid in September 2007 for ABN-Amro for an eye-watering £71bn. The target, feeble due diligence and timing were disastrous; soon enough the poor quality of ABN-Amro’s loan book emerged; emergency rights issues failed; a record loss of £24bn was reported for 2008 and to avoid panic RBS came into 84% public ownership. A proud Scottish bank, the product of generations of hard graft and prudence, was wiped out in a few months. The only executive to be heavily criticised at first was senior lender Johnny Cameron but clearly the greatest source of grievous error was the CEO, over-assertive Sir (now plain Mr) Fred Goodwin, aided and abetted by an ineffective group of (be)knighted non-execs Sir Tom McKillop, Sir George Matthewson, Sir Steve Robson and Sir Peter Sutherland. Their duty of oversight and challenge was very imperfectly exercised.

A similar sad story surrounded Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) and Lloyds Bank. HBOS had made wildly inappropriate property loans and had funding difficulties. The Chairman of hitherto stable Lloyds Bank, Sir Victor Blank, received a nod and a wink from Prime Minister Gordon Brown to take it over. A deal was carelessly rushed through only for Lloyds to discover what a can of worms had been bought. Lloyds too became 41% publicly owned. A recent report has criticised HBOS’ corporate lender Peter Cummings, but the buck really stops at CEO Andy Hornby and Chairman Lord Stevenson and a set of silent non-executive directors.

The crisis spread to Europe, but that is another convoluted story. The bankers should now be wearing sackcloth and ashes but they are certainly not. A few days ago Greg Smith resigned from Wall Street king-pin Goldman Sachs and in his resignation letter highlighted the “toxic and destructive” culture, the shameless crowing over rip-offs of customers, known as “Muppets”, the continuing peddling of opaque derivatives and the lust for profit at any price.  It sounds much like Salomon’s 1980s dealing room.

In the UK, where vast public funds have been injected into the bankers’ money markets to assist their liquidity, the remuneration package this year for Bob Diamond of Barclays Bank is a stratospheric £17.7m. They just don’t get it, do they? Self-restraint is not a word in the bankers’ vocabulary. So let Vince Cable do his worst to clip the wings of the irresponsible banks who are the authors of much of our current misery. Otherwise, do not be surprised if the tumbrils soon roll and the suffering working people scream for bloody and exemplary revenge!


SMD
18.03.12


Copyright Sidney Donald 2012

FIVE ROCOCO CHURCHES IN SOUTH GERMANY

This is the third article I have written on Rococo buildings in South Germany. The first concentrated on the famous pilgrimage churches of Ottobueren, Die Wies and Vierzehnheiligen. The second looked only at secular buildings, the Residenz at Wurzburg, the Amalienburg at Nymphenburg, the Cuvillies Theatre at Munich and Linderhof Palace. I now want to share my pleasure in five more modest but still sumptuous Rococo churches at Regensburg, Weltenburg, Munich, Steingaden and Oberammergau. I have visited them all and apologise for the omission of those others I have either simply overlooked or not managed to inspect in person.

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I have come to realise that splendid as many of the secular Rococo buildings are, there is an extra dimension in the religious ones. This is a hard admission for me to make as I am a self-proclaimed sceptic, proud of my rationalist and humanist credentials. The sinuous, uninhibited delights of Rococo architecture, the dizzying vistas, the extravagant ornamentation, the sheer physical beauty of the paintings, stucco figures and asymmetrical decorations intoxicate, inspire and delight the viewer, raising him to new levels of joy and, yes, I say the word, of spirituality.

Our first stop is St Emmeram, Regensburg. The former Imperial Free City of Regensburg has had two millennia of distinguished history starting as an ancient Roman bishopric and thriving as a great trading city on the Danube. It escaped serious war bombing damage and has an enviable heritage of fine buildings and churches. It is flatteringly twinned with my home town of Aberdeen.

St Emmeran, Regensburg

The church is by the gatehouse to the Schloss Thurn und Taxis, the T&T family being immensely rich benefactors of the city (they held the postal monopoly in Germany at one time). The church was a medieval foundation but was remodelled in the Rococo manner in the 1720s by the famous Asam brothers, painter Cosmas Damian Asam and sculptor Egid Quirin Asam. A glorious painted ceiling, white and gold walls, rapt saintly figures and a galleried balcony grace this lovely church.

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A short rural trip from Regensburg takes us to our second highlight, Weltenburg Abbey Church, near Kelheim, attractively situated in the Danube Gorge. It is a popular excursion destination as visitors allow their children to paddle and their dogs to swim in the river from the pebbly banks; the Abbey has a famous brewery with a delightful beer garden where one can eat and drink lazily in the summer sun.

Weltenburg Abbey

The large Benedictine Abbey, which still functions, is in the Baroque style while the Abbey Church was decorated, again by the Asam brothers, the great Rococo masters. The Abbey Church is quite small but the Asam brothers and other artists have covered every surface with their lavish decoration. There are various scenes appropriately from the life of St Benedict and other saints, stunning allegorical painted ceilings, augmented by a profusion of angels. The most striking feature, framed by splendid barley-sugar shaped columns, is the theatrically-lit high altar where a golden mounted St George slays the Dragon with exemplary aplomb.

Weltenburg Altar

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Our third church is in central Munich, St John Nepomuk, known as the Asamkirche, after the famous brothers who designed and built it. It was intended to be their private church but local pressure forced them to open it to the public. It was built between 1733 and 1745 and is an illustration of the devout Catholic feeling in Europe at that time – in 1736, for example, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi was commissioned by a pious Neapolitan confraternity of laymen to write his wonderfully moving Stabat Mater.

Asamkirche, Munich

St John Nepomuk was a Bohemian martyr, then recently canonised in 1729, and his life is venerated above the portal of the church. Great artistic genius and substantial wealth has been spent on this lovely place. The church is small and narrow with only 12 rows of pews but it is most opulently decorated. The walls are covered with frescos, beautifully carved animated wood and stucco figures abound and the church is suffused with a dark red and golden glow. A window behind the altar provides a bright, symbolically striking, sacred light.

Asamkirche interior

As a footnote, a good friend of mine, a highly intelligent Scottish Episcopalian, was inspecting the holy water stoup here and was painfully stung by a Catholic wasp, settling perhaps an abstruse theological score!

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Our next church is on the Alpine foothills in Upper Bavaria. In the little town of Steingaden stands a now dissolved monastery and its abbey church is now the town parish church of St John the Baptist, Steingaden. This church is often overlooked as it cannot rival nearby Die Wies, a world heritage site, but it has its own lively charm.

Steingaden ceiling

Originally a Romanesque building, after burning and looting in 16^th and 17^th century wars, it was decorated in the Rococo style in the 1740s, under the supervision of the fresco painter Johann Georg Bergmuller. South German craftsmen, along with Austrians and Bohemians, had developed over the years great expertise in wood-carving and wood painting. This expertise was easily enough transferred in the Rococo period to carving and painting plaster stucco and also to a huge talent for ceiling paintings, those rapt and flowing apotheoses which enliven so many Rococo churches. Many of the builders and artisans are not known by name but how much pleasure they gave and they too could echo Wren’s epitaph; “Si monumentum requiris, circumspice”

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Our final stop is St Peter and St Paul, Oberammergau, the little Bavarian town famous for its Passion Play, held every 10 years as a 1635 promise by those villagers spared from a devastating plague. It is now performed in years ending in a zero. The Rococo parish church, with its distinctive onion dome, much seen in Central Europe, nestles in a town where many houses are adorned by attractive devotional murals.

Oberammergau

The sumptuous Rococo interior (1736-42) was the work of Josef Schmuzer and the ceiling paintings were created by Matthaus Günter. The ecstatic saintly figures crowd in on all sides and the delightful decoration of this beautiful pink church make it a most memorable sight. When my wife and I visited, a young woman was rehearsing a baroque aria from a balcony vantage point. The lovely music and the singer’s clear soprano voice complemented this splendid church in a unique way, raising our morale and enthusing us, which is one of the great merits of the Rococo style.

Oberammergau church interior

SMD

10.03.12

Text copyright Sidney Donald 2012