With the new computer, the unsleeping eye grows ever more vigilant and today it picked up two interesting stories. The first is here and although Realitatea has the video of it on their site, I haven’t seen them play it on on their television broadcast (nor any other channel show it):

Şeful delegaţiei Fondului Monetar Internaţional (FMI) în România, Jeffrey Franks, a început a râde atunci când a fost întrebat, la postul de televiziune The Money Channel, în legătură cu propunerea majorării salariilor bugetarilor.

For those of you who don’t speak Romanian, my translation (errors and all) is:

The head of the International Monetary Fund (FMI)’s delegation in Romania, Jeffrey “Pig Man” Franks, began to laugh when he was asked about the proposal to increase government employee salaries during an interview on The Money Channel.

Hee ho! Quite amusing if I do say so myself. After all, we are talking about teachers, doctors, nurses, police officers, engineers, firefighters and other greedy bastards who were forced to take a 25% pay cut last year. The impudence of these rascals! I swear.

I should add that the Pig Man is in Bucharest to officially hand over another 500 million smackers (Euros) in debt that this country now owes his bosses.

In other, completely unrelated and totally unconnected news, the eye found this article:

Las prostitutas de lujo de Madrid se declaran en huelga de sexo con los banqueros hasta que vuelva a fluir el crédito hacia la economía real

La mayor asociación gremial de escorts de lujo de Madrid anunció ayer el inicio de una huelga total e indefinida de servicios sexuales para con los empleados de banca hasta que éstos vuelvan a proporcionar crédito a las familias, pymes y empresas españolas.

La idea de esta huelga surgió de la experiencia de Lucía C.P. una de las miembras de la asociación, que durante la rueda de prensa relató emocionada cómo uno de sus clientes habituales le contaba que, desde hace muchos meses, su única actividad consistía en pedir prestados cientos de millones de euros de la ventanilla de liquidez al 1% del BCE, e inmediatamente invertir ese dinero en deuda pública europea y productos derivados altamente especializados, como CDS y fondos especulativos de materias primas, con rentabilidades de entre el 3 y el 7%, embolsándose la diferencia. “-Un buen día me harté y le dije: Ya está bien no? Vete olvidando de mi coño hasta que no cumplas con tu responsabilidad con la sociedad. Mi cliente al principio refunfuñó y amenazó con subirme las comisiones de mantenimiento y por transferencias, pero al final reculó y tres días después, volvió con un certificado notarial de haber concedido una línea de crédito a una PYME y un préstamo para compra de una furgoneta Citroen a un autónomo. Así es cómo me dí cuenta de que nosotras podíamos contribuir a que el crédito vuelva a fluir”

This Lucia C.P. lady is now my new hero, I swear to God.

In case your Spanish is a little rusty, my translation (errors and all) is:

Luxury escorts in Madrid declare they are on strike concerning bankers until credit begins to flow to the real economy

Yesterday the biggest labor union of luxury escorts in Madrid announced that they will go on strike and no longer provide their sexual services to bank employees until the banks return to providing credit to families, small businesses and Spanish firms.

The idea for the strike came from Lucia C.P., one of the members of the union. During a press conference she became emotional when speaking about one of her regular clients, who had been telling her for months that his [bank’s] only activity had been to borrow hundreds of millions of Euros of bailout money at 1% interest from the European Central Bank and immediately invest this money in European public debt and related derivatives, such as credit default swaps which have a rate of a return of 3 to 7%, pocketing the difference.

“One day I got fed up and I told him, ‘It’s all pretty good for you, eh? Well you can forget about my pussy until you start being more responsible to society.’ My client at first got quite angry and threatened to get me in big trouble but after three days he returned, showing me a certificate showing that he had given a line of credit to a small business so they could buy a Citroen van from an independent seller. That’s how I realized that we can help contribute so that the credit begins to flow again.”

You’ll note here of course that it is bankers who are “regular customers” of high-end or luxury escorts (prostitutes). Ordinary workers and owners of small businesses rarely can afford such things in the first place, much less on a regular basis.

Secondly, it’s pretty awesome that prostitutes in Spain have their own union (or “trade association”). As I’ve written about before, sadly in Romania there are no legal protections for sex workers and they aren’t allowed to organize nor go on strike.

Clearly “Pig Man” Franks is a sanctimonious Mormon and I highly doubt he is flying in to make the use of Bucharest’s finest escorts (although who knows, really) but I wonder how many of the other “delegates” and financiers from the IMF are (let’s not forget dear old Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the IMF and a big fan of prostitutes himself – and yes he has definitely been to Romania many times). Regardless of how much solidarity the escorts in Bucharest might feel with their sisters in Madrid on this issue, due to lack of labor protection they are unable to do anything about it.

Lastly, I find it amazingly admirable that this Lucia C.P. seems to be fully cognizant of exactly what financial scams these bankers are running (and she’s quite right) not to mention specialized terms like credit default swaps and the like. You can find her profession morally repugnant if you like but don’t ever call her a dummy.

The program Lucia is talking about is called LTRO in “Big People Code” and is specifically marketed to the citizens of the EU as “preventing a credit crunch”. Meanwhile, as you can see in the exact same fucking article:

But banks are under no obligation to use the money for any specific purpose, and it remains to be seen if Italian and Spanish banks will continue to use ECB money to buy government bonds.

So Lucia is right, banks are getting LTRO “bailout” money with one hand and scooping up government bonds with the other, making a tidy profit (as always) for doing little more than five minutes of “work”. So it’s only normal that after a hard day at the office these bankers would seek out some “luxury” in the arms of Lucia and her coworkers.

Well hey, at least somebody got a Citroen van out of the deal. So who got the last laugh here, eh? ;)