Apparently there's a gold bar vending machine in the basement of the Westfield shopping centre in west London. If you can find it – oh, Westfield planners, your creation is a truly vast and mighty multi-tiered leisure behemoth – you put in £50 and instead of some Doritos you get a Dorito-sized wafer of gold worth £50.
Now, imagine that the vending machine is the portal to a global casino playing your money through roulette tables, slot machines and poker games with innumerable players in countless, ever-changing combinations.
That's international banking for you. It's addictive, fast, time-consuming and risky. And boy, does it eat you up and spit you out. The latest casualty is António Horta-Osório, the CEO of Lloyds TSB, who's taken leave due to tiredness after only six months in the job.
I understand the pressure he's under. Lloyds was bailed out massively and has to be turned around. But Horta Osório's a financier; that's what he's supposed to be good at. And tiredness? A woman who walks six miles to get water for her children is tired. Cleaners, cooks, carers, outreach workers, teachers, overnight A&E doctors, labourers and factory workers are tired. A woman who has a full-time job as well as all the childcare, parent care, home upkeep and family admin is tired.
Bankers are experiencing karma, not tiredness. The crash was set up to happen, through their greed and imprudence. It didn't manifest out of the ether like a magic mist of divine debt. A financier's fatigue can surely be treated when he has immense personal wealth, elite contacts and full ensconcement in the boys' club, who'll ensure he has a great job to return to. It's hard working at the coalface of global capitalism. But it's not as hard as working at an actual coalface.
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