CeilingCat
Posts: 2363
Joined: Dec. 2007
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| Quote (stevestory @ July 26 2015,12:28) | Corny Hunter has a new post at UD which links here to his blog and it's all "Blah blah climate change is a hoax blah blah".
was it a whole 24 hrs ago that NASA said June was the hottest month ever recorded? |
Corny doesn't give near enough information on Matt Ridley. He's a wealthy British Conservative (now "5th Viscount Ridley on the death of his father") and member of the English House of Lords, yet he's managed to write two very good books on evolution, "The Red Queen" and "Genome" which I've read and highly recommend as well as several other books I've never seen. Some of those others also look pretty good but some of them give off a distinct odor of crank.
One other thing, "His great great great great grandfather, Dudley Marjoribanks, 1st Baron Tweedmouth, created the Golden Retriever breed of dog." An interesting man, wealthy, titled, famous - O'Leary would probably call him a Toff.
However, he was also Chairman of the Board of Northern Rock Bank. Under his direction, Northern Rock borrowed heavily in the short term money market - loans that typically had to be repaid in 30 days. Rock then took this short term money and used it to sell 30 year mortgages to its customers. They would then resell the mortgages to investors, thus getting the money they needed to pay off the 30 day debts. This is borrowing short and lending long, the classic recipe for killing a bank.
If the hairs on the back of your neck are standing up right now, you probably remember what happened here when America tried this Applied Bushanomics in 2007-2008.
Suddenly Northern Rock couldn't sell its mortgages to outside investors. This meant they had no large cash payments coming in, just the slow monthly payments from the mortgage holders. This meant Northern Rock couldn't pay those 30 day debts and that meant they were bankrupt. "This led to panic among individual depositors, who feared that their savings might not be available should Northern Rock go into receivership. The result was a bank run – the UK's first in 150 years – where depositors lined up outside the bank to withdraw all of their savings as quickly as possible, particularly since everyone else was doing the same."
It cost the British taxpayers well over 30 billion Pounds to clean up the mess. Ridley refuses to discuss his historic fuck-up and so far he's getting away with that. However, being featured in a UD post indicates he's lost a lot of his prestige.
See the Wikipedia articles on "Matt Ridley" and "Northern Rock" to see the quotes in context.
I'm not current on the climate controversy, but it looks like Ridley is using the same kind of thinking here that cranks have always used to push their cranky beliefs and which he used to destroy Northern Rock: Concentrate on every little factoid he can drag up which supports his beliefs while resolutely ignoring the many clashes between those "facts" and the greater reality. Borrowing short and lending long intellectually, in effect.
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