Is TCE the only one who thinks that football is now more than ever detached from the real world? When Joe Punter moans about the state of the economy caused by rich bankers spending his money, he manages not to mention the overpaid manager or player at his favourite team; burning his cash and racking up unserviceable debts.

Football is a financial folly of the highest order in which only the outsiders (the vast majority) are foolhardy. The insiders at the PFA and the FA feel the need to massively overpay themselves, mainly because overpayment is expected and hence normal in football culture. Typical upper division footballers get paid multiples of those that decided to get an education and to be in the top 0.1% of a university, to go through rigorous selection procedures at financial firms, to pass, and then to train for many years to be at the top of their respective leagues.

Let’s not pretend that football is a meritocracy, after all Chelsea has spent tens of millions of pounds paying off woefully underperforming managers, making most bankers severance packages look like a bargain.

So Mr Capello, what did attract you to the highest paid management job in football?

Obama has little public history on which to be judged, but now as President, and also post honeymoon, his successes and failures will be very public.

In TCE’s opinion he’d be wise to address the vast wealth imbalances that exist in the USA. He surely would have to be judged a success on leaving office if the burgeoning number of poverty stricken underclass (that die annually) in the USA had access to basic medical provision without relying on charitable handouts like a third world nation.

If Obama were to leave a decent economy and a controlled national debt, his place in a Hollywood script would surely be assured. The problem is that the numerous problems facing America are real and vast. California is basically bust, and New Orleans an embarrassing reminder of his country’s priorities.

Given the scale of these problems TCE thinks that Obama has little chance of achieving these ‘minor’ moral or economic goals; he’ll be too busy stopping the US dollar turning into the next Argentinean Peso.

The Blair and Brown Labour policies of the past decade have encouraged the level of household debt in the UK to run away, making UK households the most over leveraged on earth. In TCE’s view, the process was a deliberate attempt to create a veneer that the British economy was strong, that simply back fired.

Labour in reality has only ever had two plans. To keep interest rates dangerously low to inflate asset prices, whilst dramatically increasing the number of civil servants effectively falsifying the unemployment numbers. So Labour, please don’t blame the banks for this mess; blame the debt addicted voting masses for wanting to live on the ‘never–never’ encouraged to think that house price increases will always bail them out, and of course yourselves for gross incompetence.

This government’s answer to dig Britain out of this hole has been to reduce the number of people employed in the private sector i.e. those that actually contribute to the UK coffers, and paying the average civil servant more than the average private sector worker. This, whilst encouraging wealthy foreigners to leave the country through onerous fiscal enforcement.

Gordon Brown; control freakism and spin, apparently the two main skills of your party, won’t get Britain out of this Labour created mess.

During the past year or so it seems as though anyone remotely connected to the finance industry, mainly bankers and hedge fund managers, have taken ‘one hell of a beating’ from all the uneducated pundits in the press and on television.

Unfortunately TCE thinks this is just another example of the cheap points, column inches, and pounds Sterling, gained by all the ‘Robert Peston’ types in media. Clearly the art of being a ‘Robert Peston’ is to say nothing original or meaningful, and to write a backward looking, rather than a forward looking commentary.

TCE wonders what the ‘Robert Peston’ types will have to say once Downing Street has no use for them and the puppeteer’s hands are finally extracted.

There are very few topics that are as actively discussed and generate such strong and differing opinions, as property prices and house ownership in the UK.

Property and property prices, it seems, have been topics of conversation for decades at mother and baby coffee mornings, the hairdressers, the pub, the local wine bar, and dinner parties, alike. This is not a surprise, as residential property has been, and still remains, the biggest asset of the average Brit even after sustained periods of house price volatility and recent malaise; after all “house prices don’t go down , do they?”

In the 80’s much was made of the substantive drop in prices and associated rise in personal and corporate losses, with over extended borrowers not able to meet mortgage payments on their once solid assets. Record numbers of houses were repossessed by the banks and sold on to extract what little remained of the potential equity.

After five years or so of price falls and consolidation up to the mid 1990’s, the foundation was set for a sustained corrective recovery in the housing market. Cheap and available capital drove substantial price upswings in pockets of the South East especially, supporting a new breed of so called ‘property developer’ and buy-to-let landlord. So widespread was this activity and so easy was it to jump aboard this skill less gravy train, that rather than just having to talk about property at dinner parties, worst still one had to keep the company of this new breed too. As the number of players taking part in this property game increased, the greater the upward pressure on house prices became and apparent increase in enthusiasm for banks to lend them money.

When one takes a retrospective, and for the purposes of being applicable to 80% of households rather than just the very wealthy or the less well off, it is astonishing the ease at which banks gave cash away for basically anything. As the nation’s economy became more dependant on house prices it seemed as though the Bank of England kept an agenda to support them too.  

The new ‘low level’ of interest rates experienced since 1994 (basically at the same level as Q2 2008) can never really be justified purely from an inflation standpoint. Personal inflation for most consumers has done nothing but race away during the present government’s tenure, appearing to have little correlation to the indices used to guide monetary policy.

Britain simply became a nation of amateur landlords fuelled by greed and ignorance whilst happily being funded by banks trying to build assets and market share. No surprise then that the gravy train eventually ran dry.

One only has to look at the stark reality of commercial property and the substantial hit taken at the end of 2007 to realise the effects. But look on the bright side, there’ll be less airtime for shows on television about how to make your fortune in property; with no financial, technical, engineering, or personal skills needed.