Bodhisattva Manjusri (2)

Bodhisattva Manjusri

Bodhisattva Manjusri at sunrise today

This being, that exists.
Through the arising of this that arises.
This not being, that does not exist.
Through the ceasing of this, that ceases.

A Corporate burden

From the Financial Times,

"...Goldman's pre-tax profit margins, at 29 per cent, were 10 percentage points higher than the average for other financial firms in the Fortune 500 this decade, and substantially higher than in other industries such as energy, healthcare and consumer staples.
The average for Fortune 500 companies was 8 per cent."

Goldman's 30,000 employees can look forward to an average of $650,000 in compensation.

I wish them well.

"When this is, that is.
From the arising of this comes the arising of that.
When this isn't, that isn't.
From the cessation of this comes the cessation of that."

Remembrance Day 2009

The last dawn

Manjusri at Sunrise

Cutting through illusion

Cambridge Pensioners

Onwards!

Monozukuri

From the Economist , November 7th-13th.

"Moreover, the knowledge about the technology is tacit, not formal. It cannot be transmitted by writing a manual or reading a patent application. Rather, it accumulates by working with colleagues over many years. This poses a barrier to entry for rivals. It also explains why firms try to maintain lifetime employment in specialised high-tech sectors, though it is ebbing elsewhere in the economy.
This belief that the strength of the company is stored in the collective mind of employees–rather than in the share price of the moment–also helps explain why Japanese companies disdain mergers and acquisitions. Firms resist takeovers, rather than viewing them as the natural combinatory process of business, as in the West."

The Rainy Season

Mind games

Headline from today's FT:

"RBS cautious after reporting £1bn loss"

and from the Wall Street Journal:

"RBS Posts Loss, Takes Dim View on Recovery"

But from the BBC:

"RBS downbeat despite £15m profit"

But then the BBC is not what it was.

Falling on swords

On a day when it is reported that RBS will post the biggest loss in Britain's corporate history and when its share price plunged 67%, the government increases its stake to 70%. Where are the swords, the shame, the apologies?

Mr Elster writing to the FT at the end of last year spelt it out:-

"Sir, I am deeply saddened to find that my newspaper of choice for more than 30 years is indulging in the same shabby rewriting of history as our prime minister. One expects this from politicians, not from the FT.

Your editorial "Why free markets must be defended" (December 27th) is grossly disingenuous (not to mention over-simplistic). To say that "incompetence, and is some cases outright fraud, had grown so quickly that by the time market participants woke up to the problem, the entire financial system was threatened" suggests that nobody saw the problem coming. Of course they did. I suggest you read some of the brilliantly prescient articles written five years agao by your own journalists, some of which you have featured recently in advertisements for the FT.....

The fact is that we failed to protect the financial system in the same way we have failed to protect so many valuable components of our society because of complacency, lack of accountability and the failure to attach value to anything. Opportunism, recklessness and fraud were bound to fill the vacuum this created.

That large numbers of people in the financial sector have made huge amounts of money while acting irresponsibly, recklessly, incompetently or dishonestly is beyond doubt. That huge numbers of "little people" are now going to pay the price for this is also beyond doubt. That this should not have been allowed to happen, and that politicians, bankers, regulators, economists and bit players such as financial journalists (with a few honourable exceptions) have been complicit in what has happened, is also beyond doubt...........

What has happened is rooted in incompetence, recklessness and criminality of such grotesque proportions yet of such a simple and obvious nature that to suggest this was a complex and unforeseen failure of the market is a gross and self-serving distortion of the facts....."


And more tempered but equally accurate:-

"Last week, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury...called into question many of the assumptions business leaders and financiers have made over the last two decades. He criticised the "endless spiral of accumulating wealth, which has nothing much to do with producing anything". He talked about creating "sustainable wealth", which supported "long-term welfare for populations" rather than putting extra noughts in the bank balance for [certain] individuals. We needed to consider wealth creation in terms of the well-being of society, he said."

Not too profound perhaps, but it needs saying.

Today's the inauguration. Let's hope for change, real change.

My Mother's Birthday

Today is my mother's 84th birthday.

Incense and turning of the great prayer wheel at the Buddha's Tooth Temple.

King's College Chapel

Henry VI laid the foundation stone in 1441. In 1471 he was murdered in the Tower of London. Glazing began after completion of the fan-vaulted ceiling in 1515 and took another 30 years.


The fan-vaulted ceiling by John Wastell, constructed between 1508 and 1515. A similar ceiling is in Peterborough cathedral.

The Sentinel

In Cambridge yesterday, cold and clear as befits the winter solstice. My friend looked over his kingdom from his vantage point at Senate House. Nearby Dicky Deegan played the Uilleann Pipes. Good bread was to be bought in the market. King's College Chapel was open. What more do I need.

Dark times

From yesterday's Financial Times, closing paragraphs of Modern History's Greatest Regulatory Failure by Robert Altman,

"This will come to be seen as the greatest regulatory failure in modern history. The degree of leverage that these institutions took on is indefensible. The average large securities firm was leveraged 27 to one in mid-2007. They were not regulated by any prudential supervisor. In effect, they regulated themselves. The lack of transparency was stunning. Many big lenders did not disclose off-balance-sheet risks. In some cases, they did not understand these risks themselves. More fundamentally, we allowed a second, huge financial system to develop outside the normal banking network. It consisted of investment banks, mortgage finance companies and the like. It was unregulated, not transparent and way too leveraged. But with nine separate and mostly ineffective financial regulators, these risks were ignored. That is, until this second system crashed.

We will be climbing out of this financial hole for a long time. Three or four years may pass before normal lending functions are resumed. In the interim, our economy will not have access to all of the credit it needs and may underperform, at great cost to our society. All of this could have been prevented".

I'm on my way to London tonight.

Stop-Loss

On the flight to London I watched "Stop-Loss" a harrowing film revolving around a group of soldiers lured from their checkpoint in Tikrit to be ambushed in a narrow alley. From one moment to the next, alive young men are dead, dying and horrifically wounded, as are a man and his son, in the wrong place at the wrong time. That's the back-cloth.

The substance of the film is about the complex mixture of duty and despair that overtakes the soldiers back home in Texas. If you have come through an American airport and seen soldiers welcomed home and others departing - whatever your politics, you know that this is not black-and-white nor election sound-bites.

Then at the weekend the violent death of 9 US soldiers in a prolonged firefight in a forward base in Northern Afghanistan.

And Stop-Loss? The right of the military to involuntarily extend the term of service for another tour of duty. In the film, Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe), having done tours in Afghanistan and Iraq is ordered back. It's a sobering film.

Quiet Dawn

UK dawn
04:30 - jetlag has its virtues

Robust Zen

The trick is to practice while crossing the street, dodging people and cars, and immersed in noise and heat.

I can see Bodhidharma cussing drivers and whacking boot-lids with his staff. He's out there somewhere.

Back to London tonight for a few days.

(Bodhidharma, British Library, non-commercial use)

The Fifth Noble Truth

From the Financial Times, June 17th 2008:-

UK becomes biggest weapons exporter
By Stephen Fidler, Defence and Security Editor

Britain became the world’s largest arms exporter last year, according to government figures released on Tuesday, overtaking the US, which normally occupies the top slot.
The UK won £10bn of new defence orders in 2007 from overseas, giving it a 33 per cent share of the world export market, according to figures released on Tuesday by the Defence and Security Organisation, set up to promote Britain’s defence exports. Export orders totalled £5.5bn in 2006.

Fire

Timeless

The sun has started its journey back across the sky, though only two weeks on from the solstice, the change in direction is barely discernible. The cloud was low but the high clouds were lit up long before sunrise. Resonates deep in the collective unconscious this daily renewal.

Colour of a different kind in the splendid Buddha Tooth Relic Temple. The chanting was particularly fine yesterday, if incomprehensible to me. Maybe the better for being just that.



Then a concert of old music from Southern China, in the afternoon - "Soul Journey" was the concert title. More later on this extraordinary music.