The writing has been on the wall for the last three years and the fallout from the sub prime markets in the US should have been enough for anyone with a brain to see that the financial meltdown was coming!

I never quite understand why anyone should think their investments should grow by 20% plus a year. There is simply not that amount of wealth increase in the world. Moreover if you are stupid enough to put anymore than 20% of your total investment in the stock market, you deserve what you get. Not just this day, but every ten years or so there is a major glitch, as if nobody actually learns from the past. Remember the internet crash? Well the financial principles are the same, don’t expect a lot and don’t stop working, it is good for you. House prices in the UK have been wildly over inflated; I think as much as 50% in some inner London areas.

The UK situation has been made worse by the influx of Polish and other Eastern European workers around 500,000 who have taken jobs away from British workers, work for less money, pay no tax, insurance and live four in a room paying an exorbitant sum for rent. Add to this now Northern Rock sucking up UKP30B and one wonders whether anyone in government here has a brain!

The UK government should not have put any money into the society and in fact the CEO and boards of directors should have been held accountable for fraud for having invested in the US sub prime market. What percentage of their total financial investment went into this Sub prime market? It must have been quite substantial to have such an affect on the company!

All of this is a reflection on the sort of society we have become. Get rich quick! Delboy rules supreme! Most countries today are not run by governments, they are run by multi-national companies or their directors who have only one thing on their minds, their own survival, share options and climbing up the corporate ladder. They are professional corporate soldiers. They move quickly from one corporation to another, as most corporation are too lazy or stupid to train staff up and groom them. Just pirate from someone else! They buy the perception that the person they are hiring knows what they are doing. They in most cases do not. Look at HP as an example. Why would you buy Compaq? No reason other than to try and acquire some technology (which they could have developed themselves) and customer base, which is so fickle, one cannot rely on loyalty.

Just how much did Carly Fiorina get as a payoff? Millions in share options, salary pay off and 5 million to find a new job!

Mergers and acquisitions have become a quick path to increasing turnover but is it really? There is no substitute for hard work, careful planning and a good direction. AOL/Time Warner, Sony-MGM, Sony-BMG, the list goes on and very few will be better off long term. Shareholders are demanding too much which leads directors to do stupid things in order to get their own share options and appease their shareholders. Time to back to basics, hard work, clear vision and thought and that most British of traits, ‘Stick-at-itness!