There's no doubt some who will prosper in spite of the price we have to pay for the freedoms allowed to our financial knights, buccaneers and mercenaries. But, in the absence of any real measures in retribution, control, or the elevation of responsibility and social morality to be included as a factor in their wheeling and dealings, it's highly likely the financiers will form the vanguard of that some.
Others will prosper because of the effects caused by the recession. Most of whom will be the fringe predators whole sole reason for existence is to pick the cadavers clean of the victims who have succumbed to the effects of the melt down. At the top end they are receivers and liquidators - they like to be called administrators - but there function remains as it has always been, namely to cover their fees while manipulating some return to secured creditors (usually the bank, especially if its the bank who instigated the receivership).
Generally these liquidators! sorry administrators, are subsidiary sections of the main - the big five - accountancy firms. The big five who earned £51 bn in fees for 2007/08; a large part of which included their fees for vouching for the veracity of the major banks audited accounts and the booming profits they claimed to make. Profits that for some unknown reason or metaphysical financial jiggery pokery never seem to relate to the amount of their corporate tax liabilities? However that discrepancy could be explained by the fact another large section of their fees are earned by the employment of their expertise in designing the manipulative levers, derivers and avoiders that give lie to the fact of these audited accounts being an accurate account of the assets and liabilities of the firm they represent to merely being a jumble of figures they consider they can get off with. Nothing has been said about the failure of these probity policers, though given the paucity of action against their fraudulent clients there's little to be surprised by that lack.
At the bottom of the fringe we have those who take action against the gullible consumer who's been gulled by the plastic snake bonanza's of credits and the ladders of housing booms. Here we have the witless morons, the bailiffs, the sociopaths of a legal system that has removed any liability from cause and acts on effect, provided the esoteric i's and t's of its systems have been properly dotted and crossed. No doubt we can, with a fair degree of accuracy, assume they will enjoy a prosperous 2010 relevant to their status.
The other event we can look forward to this year is the general election.
