Mannerisms

Penn was highlighting one of the extraordinary things about the credit crunch, that we still don’t know the extent to which banks are exposed to the debts run up by sub-prime, CDOs, dodgy dealings and the rest of it.

The banks, it seems, can declare what they want and keep secret what they want. Transparency, they seem to think, is for others.

Europe’s Big Three were as horrified as Malcom Penn.

“If we don’t want a return to protectionism we need a return to transparency,” said Nicolas Sarkozy, the fun-loving new President of France, last week, “we can’t accept this lack of transparency that jeopardises the jobs we all want”,

“We need to call on all players to show more transparency “, said Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, last week, “if they don’t, we’ll regulate to ensure they do. We need to have more transparency about these new, very complex financial instruments.”

“We want the prompt and full disclosure of the write-offs that are now to take place, as soon as possible”, said Gordon Brown.

Can the pols nail down the bankers? Or will the slippery shysters simply slide off to some lenient regulatory regime in the Turks and Caicos Islands or somesuch?

Maybe the slippery shysters are beyond control.