Well, play suspended. Wonder what the member of the audience hoped to achieve there.
Then, I wonder what anyone was trying to achieve. The committee investigation was too unfocused to do anything of much use. They kept slipping and allowing the Murdochs to reiterate their “We’re sorry, we’re nice really, forgive us” message. Rupert even buttered them up by suggesting that MPs should be paid a million each. Now he’s getting to tell them some of his life story.
I don’t believe they didn’t know perfectly well that some of their papers used illegal techniques to get stories – even if they managed to remain carefully uninformed about who and where and when. But they’ve managed to say the opposite so many times, it’s bound to influence perception. Really, the MPs let them use this as a press conference.
But perhaps the weak questioning is a clever tactic. Once he’s off the back foot and feeling confident again, James Murdoch sounds like a supervillain.
Now the questioner is thanking Rupert for being more helpful than James, which is surely going to make Rupert less helpful again. But it does appear that Rupert knows quite a deal about the workings of News International, making it seem like his vagueness on detail earlier was really reticence.
But now James has the helm again, and has another opening to explain how sorry they are, and how nice they will be to their former employees who didn’t get caught.
Hmm. They’ve actually gotten a commitment out of Rupert to cease paying the legal fees of Mulcaire (the investigator they paid to hack) – if they’re not obliged to do so by contract. It will be interesting to see where that goes.
Some of these questioners seem very amateurish and unfocused. Not surprising I suppose – it’s an investigation designed by a committee. But do they really have two of the world’s most influential men here to ask them about the day-to-day running of newspapers? It’s like they’re taking advantage of the situation to ask things they’d always wondered, and it’s giving the Murdochs opportunities to paint themselves in brighter colours.
James Murdoch apologises. He’s not addressing the committee, he’s addressing the shareholders.
“This is the most humble day of my life” – Rupert Murdoch. Yes, but what’s the scale?
By saying he cannot say who was involved in the phone hacking because of ongoing investigations, James Murdoch seems to implicate Rebekah Brooks.
Monosyllabic answers from Murdoch Senior. He denies knowing who lied to him. This may still be true if no one lied to him. But he is denying any knowledge of anything awkward in his UK operation – indeed, virtually any knowledge of how News International was run. Either you don’t believe that – and it is hard to believe – or you have to accept that the guy in charge is no longer really in control.
I can actually hear News Corporation’s share price falling.
Time for a little liveblogging I think… Just watching the UK parliament’s select committee hearing (video feed) into the phone hacking affair. The Murdochs will be on later, though at the moment it’s Sir Paul Stevenson, the freshly-resigned head of London’s Metropolitan police.
First though, I want to remark on the fact that more than one News International journalist I’ve heard seems to be of the opinion that if you take any money from Rupert Murdoch – even appear in a 20th Century Fox film – then you are fair game. He has the right to do with you as he pleases. It’s as if they think they work for Satan.
Paul Stevenson is a funny bird, wearing what looks like the Dalek Prime version of police uniform, yet unworldly and even slightly fumbling in manner. Hard to imagine him as the top policeman of all London.
He says that he was satisfied with the Metropolitan Police’s original phone hacking investigation, which found no wrongdoing; sufficiently satisfied that he saw no problem with ten of the Met’s media staff being former News Of The World employees. Yet he also states that the never knew the actual parameters of that investigation.
Funny how it doesn’t seem to be in the news this morning, but last night all the websites of Murdoch’s UK newspapers were brought down. The Sun’s by LulzSec, the fun-loving hacker network – they switched it to a fake version that announced Rupert Murdoch’s death – the rest probably pulled by News International itself in a somewhat desperate effort to protect them.
I like the humorous anarchy of LulzSec and their ilk, but I fear an organisation as media-canny as News Corporation will be able to turn this to their own advantage. You want to make Rupert Murdoch look like a victim, you attack him with something even more feared and poorly-understood than himself. Interweb hackers, that can do all sorts of mysterious and dangerous things. Things that are – sharp intake of breath – bad for business. Bring down a Murdoch website, and you give him a chance to portray himself as a champion of free speech. Which would be ironic in any number of ways, not least because most of Murdoch’s websites were not free.
Meanwhile, rumours fly that Murdoch is about to be deposed as head of News Corporation.
Meanwhile, perhaps even as you’re reading this (video feed), Murdoch and other heads of News International will be giving evidence before an investigating committee of the UK parliament. They didn’t want to much.
Meanwhile, the next domino in the Metropolitan Police has fallen: Assistant commissioner John Yates, the UK’s leading terrorism officer.
Meanwhile, the whistleblower who originally broke the phone hacking story has been found dead. The police say it’s not suspicious, but… The police say it’s not suspicious.
So thanks for the lulz, LulzSec. But it looks like things are already way beyond that.
Brace yourself for more irritating, hyperactive adverts on TV, more men with laptops and weighing scales in shopping malls, and more burglaries. Gold has reached a new record price of over $1600 per ounce. This means that, for the first time ever, gold is now actually worth its weight in gold.
But I shouldn’t get surreal, the reality is ridiculous enough. Buying gold is the global economy’s answer to popping valium and praying. Whenever the markets don’t know what’s going to happen or what to do next, they run to the yellow metal. There is no clear reason why, it just has this talismanic ring to it. Weight. Historical value. Shininess.
Also of course, it’s an actual thing. All those brave traders out there, wildly speculating all day on derivatives and futures and other fanciful ways to bet on how other people will make bets on how you will bet suddenly realise that all they own are pieces of paper written in the conditional mood, and succumb to an urge to possess something that you can actually hold and touch and hug. Or at least, a piece of paper that says you possess something you can hold and touch and hug.
This superstition-based value is highly dysfunctional. The problem with the flight to gold is that there is not enough room in gold. You’ve heard that factoid about how much there is in the entire world? Enough to fill just two Olympic swimming pools. It depends of course on how deep those pools are, but this is roughly right. There are something like 155,000 tonnes of gold lying around. Assuming that ounce price is for troy ounces, the normal ISO (International Silly Old) unit, and that comes to about eight trillion dollars ($8 000 000 000 000).
That’s hardly the current account deficit of a small South American republic these days. With the Euro in dire straits, there is clearly a lot more money needing somewhere to hide than that, and all the gold in the world is not a big enough hiding place.
Unless, of course, its price goes up even further and even faster.
You can almost hear the new wars starting in Africa, as it becomes lucrative once more to arm some children and turn over a neighbouring country. (Arms manufacture is always a good secondary bet when gold goes up.) Oh and if you have any gold fillings, now would be a good time to cash them in. Before someone else does, with a brick.
Hiya. If you haven’t dropped in to I.Doubt.It over the weekend, it was a busy one. Thanks to everyone who made Saturday a record day for visitors. Here’s the best of what the rest of you missed:
Latest in the ongoing series of articles aimed at helping you pick the best fruit in the smartphone jungle. Today I look at Google’s Android and ask if it is a better alternative to Apple’s iPhone.
The agency charged with keeping us safe from the likes of the News Of The World’s “phone hacking” has a suggestion to prevent the same thing happening here. Unfortunately, it’s wrong.
Despite ever more excruciating cuts into Ireland’s budget, no matter how much we reduce health and social spending, the US-based agencies continue to revise our credit rating down. Could there be a hidden agenda?
Disgraced Murdoch minion Rebekah Brooks admitted her papers got celebrity news from police informers – or so George Michael claimed on Twitter. I edit his tweets together to make his allegations clear.
Before she was fired herself, when Rebekah Brooks made the entire staff of the News Of The World redundant, she told them that when the full story comes out in a year from now they would see she had no choice. I think I know what the terrible secret is.
I have to admit, the resignation of the head of London’s police was not the next move I expected. He accepted no responsibility for the stunningly suspicious web of relations between papers and police however, but only claimed that media coverage around these events would be too distracting while he was trying to oversee policing for the Olympics.
The Olympics. A world-class excuse for a world-class scandal. Does he think the media will be less curious about his successor? His own second in command was more deeply implicated than himself.
Rebekah Brooks’ arrest of course comes as less of a surprise, though one hopes she is not made the scapegoat for a what appears to be a long-established cosiness between News International and the Metropolitan Police. You can easily imagine how they’ve grown close over the years; maybe Scotland Yard giving Wapping the odd tip-off, maybe the papers spiking the odd story that didn’t reflect well on the Boys in Blue. Such a relationship must be nearly inevitable when people work side-by-side, investigating the same events in the same city. They may even be useful in the solving of crime at times. But the risk of corruption is obvious and enormous.
Many have asked recently whether ratings agencies like Moody’s, Fitch, or Standard & Poor’s really are the neutral commentators they claim to be. Do they provide advice to investors without fear or favour, merely giving their assessment in a disinterested way? Or are they out to get us?
To think the latter would seem just downright paranoid. And yet… This post on well-respected politics blog Crooked Timber suggests that there is something rather difficult to explain going on with the agencies’ assessments of the Irish economy. Every time Ireland complies with the conditions of the EU-IMF deal by cutting spending, the agencies downgrade it further. This downgrade means that the goal of raising money on the markets moves still further away.
Let’s just repeat that – the more we cut our budget spending, the less likely it is we’ll be able to borrow the money we need to pay for our budget.
It really does seem they’re out to get us.
Why would they be? They’re not there to frustrate our economic recovery or undermine the EU’s plan. They’re there to give the best advice to investors. That’s how they make their living.
But wait – Can’t it be both? The thing is, the ratings agencies do not – cannot – issue predictions while pretending the prediction itself is not going to influence the market. If they did, the predictions would be wrong. They must have long accepted that they help shape the market they pronounce on. Yes, they are there to give good advice to their clients. But that can mean giving advice that is good for their clients.
They also know that when a currency collapses, there’s a killing to be made. The Euro’s fall could be the biggest free money explosion in history, and what easier way to cause that fall than to bring down one of its more vulnerable economies?
