I have a favour to ask.

My friend Mark Tanner phoned me the other day to ask if I was going to enter the blog for the  Orwell Prize. I said I hadn’t thought about it. There was a tolerant silence followed by a gentle suggestion that I do think about it. I have and …well, why not. I never win these things because there is pretty stiff competition but what’s the point in not even entering.

To enter you have to submit 10 blog posts from the last year. So my favour is to ask any of you who feel like it, to suggest your top 10 or top 5 or however many you think are worth submitting. If, between us, we can come up with 10 we feel are worth asking the judges to read, I’ll submit them. The entry has to be in – by email – by Jan 10th.

I will quite understand if you don’t have the time but I thought I’d ask which worked for you.

Thanks to all of you. For both the kind comments and your suggestions.  I added up your votes for particular pieces, added one of my own and here they are.

Liars Lexicon – Mark to Market   1st Feb

Regulatory Arbitrage – What bankers don’t have to tell us  3rd March

The New Normal   15th May

How to Destroy the Web of Debt   26th May

World Wide Credulity Crunch  22nd September

Risk – tricky stuff  15th November

Debt or Taxes – the battle of our time   23rd November

The Hammer of Debt   5th December

Plan B – How to loot nations and their banks legally  15th Decmeber

The Miracle of Solvency  29th December

I would like to express both my sincerest apologies to Hawkeye for not being able to include any of his pieces and to thank him for his wonderful contributions to this blog.  The conditions of the Orwell prize are that you can only submit your own work. Otherwise I would have definitely submitted both Wall Street Fiddles and Irresponsible Borrowing and irresponsible Lending.