Rooney for President?

On a day when banking giants merge and the US Government ends up sponsoring Manchester United it’s tempting to think the world’s gone mad.
This bizarre sponsorship situation is a product of the Bush administration’s decision to take control of the crippled American insurance giant AIG - which is title sponsor of Rooney and his chums (not for much longer, I suspect).
Manchester United fans – and the rest of the UK population – will be more concerned about a deal closer to home, namely the takeover of Halifax Bank of Scotland by Lloyds TSB.
If you read the scary headlines you’d think that for all HBOS’s reassurances about its finances there must be something up that we don’t know about.
I’m not sure there was. Yes, HBOS is a big mortgage lender, and therefore exposed to falling house prices, but the decision to seek shelter looks like the result of a sustained assault on its share price rather than crumbling finances.
There are echoes of the Derbyshire Building Society’s decision last week to get into bed with the Nationwide in all this.
The Derbyshire wasn’t broke, but its chief executive knew that, once it started revealing the scale of losses it had made in sub-prime mortgages, savers’ confidence in the business might start to walk away – along with their money.
This, I suspect, is the spectacle that HBOS, the financial authorities and the Government wanted to avoid at all costs. The last thing they wanted to see was the kind of queues that built up in Nottingham’s Market Square when Northern Rock hit the skids a year ago.
It will be a while yet before the dust thrown up by this week’s financial scare-athon starts to settle.
When it does, there may be a lesson to learn not just about the financial system but about the way in which rumours may have undermined parts of it.
In previous economic crises it has taken time for information and its implications to emerge, sometimes over days, weeks and months.
Today? Well, I was reading about the AIG bale-out on an iPod Touch web page at home in the early hours this morning, and watching the news about the banking merger flash up on a rolling news channel screen just a few feet from my desk.
In an era when information travels searingly fast, rumours, facts and consequences become engaged in a race to reach people first.
So beware anyone who says they know now, in the eye of the storm, exactly what the result of this financial hurricane will be. Anything is possible. Even Rooney for President…