CITY AND SUBURBAN

Fill in the form and open up your bank account Big Brother is keeping a database

CHRISTOPHER FILDES

To convince your bank that you are who you say you are, send in your gas bill. Then, if you want a job as a teacher, send in details of your bank account. This will convince the official checkers that you are who you say you are, and not a paedophile. The form goes on and on, as such forms do. Applicants must identify themselves by their passports, driving licences and so on. Section 6 of the form then asks for information which is normally, and for good reason, confidential between customers and their banks: their account number. their branch's sort code, even their mother's maiden name, which banks often use as a password when dealing with inquiries on the telephone. A minatory guidance note explains that all sections of the form must be completed. In the House of Lords the other day, Baroness Blatch asked about this bizarre procedure, and the erstwhile Dome Secretary, Lord Falconer, fielded the question. It was important, he said, that people should be appropriately identified before any checks were made. It is, I would have thought, just as important that people should be allowed to keep this information to themselves, and not to let it wander off into a database kept by some computer company hired for the purpose — even if the checkers were up to their task, which has been open to question. Some of this detail. Lord Falconer added, is being processed in India. I just hope that none of it finds its way to Nigeria, to be followed, fairly quickly, by the money in the bank accounts — but I am left with the uneasy feeling that those in power are trying to equip themselves with a database on all of us.

Stupidity pact

DEAR Mr Fildes: You are over the limit. You have borrowed too much money. need scarcely remind you that you put your name to a pact, promising not to do this. Now, under the terms of the pact, you will be subject to a fine. Please let me know how you propose to pay this.

Dear Romano: I thought I'd put it on my overdraft.

Dear Christopher: That's stupid.

— I could have told him that. Fining people or countries for borrowing too much was likely, I thought, to be counter-productive. Now Romano Prodi has said it out loud. 'Stupid' was his word for the stability and growth pact, and there has been no such stir

among the faithful since a Victorian bishop questioned the historical veracity of Noah's Ark. How could the European Commission's president cast doubt upon a sacred Euro-text? Easily, according to Pascal Lamy, his commissioner for trade: Romano was only saying what everyone thinks. That, of course, makes his offence even worse.

Dead duck, lame owl

THIS pact already has the smell of a dead duck. It was called into being to shore up the central doctrine of monetary union. Improvident members of the union might treat it as a licence to borrow money, so they had to promise not to. That, so the Germans thought, would fix those spendthrifts south of the Alps. In the event, it has fixed the Germans. My solution (as you may remember) would be to deal all the players a Get Out Of Jail Free card, to be kept until needed or sold, but what this would mean for Europe's own Monopoly money is another question. It is now being tested for the first time in a downturn. A regime that may still be too lax for some countries is visibly too harsh for others, and there is nothing they can do about it. To the mob in the streets, the elected rulers will have to explain that they are in the hands of that owlish Wim Duisenberg, the all-wise central banker hooting from his tower in Frankfurt. There, change is imminent and overdue, and the French will have a candidate lined up as soon as he can clear his name, but the European Central Bank would still be left to manage a currency which, like the pact, is supposed to make one size fit all when it patently doesn't.

The markets' shrink

JIMMY CARTER got his Nobel prize for annoying his current successor, the Wellcome Trust's men got a pair for their work

on the gene pool — but Daniel Kahneman of Princeton got the economics prize and he is, what the markets most need, a psychologist. He can explain why they behave in ways that arithmetical thinkers might have dismissed as irrational. His prize, says Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley, must be read as a sign of the times, for his 'behavioural economics' teach us that people react more strongly to losing money than to making it, and more strongly to losing some of their original stake than to losing their gains. When that happens they stop spending and start saving, and it's goodbye to hopes that the cheery consumer will keep the economy pushing ahead. I blame the earlier Nobel prize-winners whose model was adopted by Long Term Capital Management and marketed as a sure-fire way of making money. In those days investors believed that the biggest risk was to be out of the market.

Fire alarm

THE most dangerous time for a ruler, said Machiavelli, is when he relaxes his grip. If Gordon Brown has not yet worked this out, he should ask a passing fireman. This is the Chancellor who let public spending go up by £100 billion a year while retaining the semblance of iron control. Now that he hopes to transform our public services by spending another £100 billion a year, the unions are ready to meet him half way. They would, naturally, be happy to see the same people paid more to provide the same services in the same way — public sector inflation, as this is called — but if he will not accommodate them, they will switch the services off. The firemen are first in line, and can expect to be offered more money if they will tear up their rule book, but the book that ought to be top of the Chancellor's reading list is II Principe.

Out on a wing

MYTRAVEL (Airtours that was) has been crippled by double counting and left to fly on a wing and a prayer. The finance director came from the company's auditors, where he was the partner responsible for the account. They were, of course, Arthur Andersen. How rapidly a CV can go off.