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But it gets worse. According to USA Today, the FHA backed about 3% of mortgages in 2006. This year, its market share is going to hit 24%.

Graham was critical of the corporations of his day for obfuscated and irregular financial reporting that made it difficult for investors to discern the true state of the business's finances.

In the foreword to RBS’s 2006 annual report, published in April 2007, Sir Fred wrote: ‘Sound control of risk is fundamental to the Group’s business . . . Central to this is our long-standing aversion to sub-prime lending, wherever we do business.’

On the principle that people deny something only when there’s something to deny, this remark might be the biggest single clue anywhere in the RBS accounts as to the risks the bank was running. RBS turned out to have quite a lot of exposure to sub-prime risk, and to be steadily acquiring more.

Put simply, this is an insurance scheme. The government is insuring the banks against losses on their assets. There’s nothing unusual about such schemes: they’re a standard feature of the banking world. In fact, they are one of the sources of the current crisis. In the commercial world, a deal in which one financial institution insures another against defaults, in return for a fee, is called a credit default swap, or CDS. In effect, the UK government has undertaken a CDS with our imploded banks.

The story was a distraction from the real scandal about AIG, which is what was happening to the other 99.9 per cent of the money the government was pumping into the company. Since AIG wrote CDSs, which are effectively insurance against losses, and since those losses had occurred, why then the cash was going to companies that had lost money in the credit crunch: companies such as Société Générale, which received $11.9 billion; Goldman Sachs, $12.9 billion; Merrill Lynch, $6.8 billion; Deutsche Bank, $11.8 billion; Barclays, $8.5 billion; BNP Paribas, $4.9 billion. Nothing could better illustrate the way in which this has be- come a systemic international crisis than the fact that the US Treasury is transferring these gigantic sums to foreign banks, because they feel they have no choice if they’re to keep the financial system functioning.

I guarantee that at this very moment, somewhere in the world, somebody at one of the big banks is sitting with his head in his hands, looking at the company’s balance sheet and sweating over this very problem. If the global economic crisis can be reduced to one single phenomenon, it is this: the fact that nobody knows which banks are solvent.

1. Because the government would be bad at it. This is the only reason governments are willing to give in public, and it fails the most elementary test of all: only a professional politician can say it with a straight face. Bad at running the banks, compared to the bankers who broke capitalism? Please.

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If you will power,
then it is in your interest to enhance yourself. Enhancement, however, is just
what transhumanists aim for. Transhumanism is in favour of technologies and
other means which could be used for “enhancement of human intellectual,
physical, and emotional capacities” (Bostrom 2001) so that posthumans could
come into existence. Consequently, Bostrom stresses that transhumanists value a
type of liberalism, which implies that people have the right to choose “to live
much longer and healthier lives, to enhance their memory and other intellectual
faculties, to refine their emotional experiences and subjective sense of
well-being, and generally to achieve a greater degree of control over their own
lives” (Bostrom 2005b, 1). Bostrom obviously has gone into more detail
concerning what all of these demands do and do not imply. However, what is
important is that he, in contrast to Habermas, values the option for parents to
choose the genetic makeup of their children.

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Transhumanists do
not intend to impose their values upon other people, as “transhumanists place
emphasis on individual freedom and individual choice in the area of enhancement
technologies”

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Bostrom’s concept
of the posthuman seems to be slightly different from Esfandiary’s: “By a
posthuman capacity, I mean a general central capacity greatly exceeding the
maximum attainable by any current human being without recourse to new technological
means”

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Nietzsche sees
philosophers as creators of values, which are ultimately founded in personal
prejudices.⁹ He regards his own prejudices as those that they
correspond to the spirit which will govern the forthcoming centuries. “Spirit” here
does not refer to an immaterial nous
in the Platonic sense, or some ghostly spiritual substance. “Spirit” in
Nietzsche’s writing refers to a bodily capacity of interpretation by means of
language, which is based upon physiological strength.

So there you go. Vermont farmboys fighting Muzzies on behalf of sleazy Greek bandit chiefs, Brooklyn commies practicing their Madrid lisps for the proletariat and dear old Uncle Joe, or Somali immigrant kids quitting their jobs at Starbuck’s or Kinko’s to give their all for the noble cause of some khat-chewing gunslingerclan boss—there’s one born every minute. And luckily for everybody, there’s one dying every minute too, dying stupid.