Erikka Askeland: Funny things will happen if you mess with the bond boys

And it has been malingering around that level for 14 straight months, the longest stretch since the dustbowl days of the 1930s.

Funny things happen, perhaps like the collapse into administration yesterday of one of Hollywood's major film studios, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Most people realise that times have changed for the studios since the golden era of the silver screen. The studio, home to the James Bond and Pink Panther franchises, has struggled for years with a massive debt after a $2.85bn leveraged buyout in 2005 by a group of private equity firms and Sony. Hardly the stuff of Hollywood legend. Yet the MGM Lion will roar again, as the administration process is essentially a debt-for-equity swap with its bond holders.

Bond holders. Now aren't these just the sort of people that need a good talking to. While MGM cuts a deal with its bond boys in Hollywood, the bond holders in Ireland are holding fast for their pound of flesh, lent to the profligate Irish banks and landing the taxpayer with a potential €50bn clean up bill.

But the sovereign bond, unlike a somewhat sillier corporate bond, is supposed to be gold-plated and ultra-low risk. That is the deal. Take their money and they get it back, no fooling. Anything else and the worn fabric of the global economy might be rent completely. Anything else and the QE programmes elsewhere might be put at risk as bond investors shy away.

This is essentially what Matthew Elderfield, the head of financial regulation at the Central Bank of Ireland told the Irish parliament this week, as outside the doors of the Oireachtas economic sentiment was crashing and the cost of lending was rising in a queasy storm tossed seesaw ride.

Yet ask any Irish man or woman, or politician (they are different), and most would wholeheartedly agree that maybe these bond holders should take a haircut and share their pain as they try to dig themselves out of the hole.

And despite his very firm lecture that this wasn't going to happen, Elderfield hinted at the "possibility" of "negotiations" or a "liquidity management exercise agreed by consent", whatever that means.

This is dangerous, tempting territory - but it still most likely that Ireland will maintain that its word is its bond.

It can be bad for business to dabble in world of politics

AS HINTED above, politicians may be a different breed than you or me. Business people, sometimes tempted by the power and glamour of the political arena, decide that they too might have a go, but after this week they should think again. Witness the brief foray into politics of Ivor Tiefenbrun. Earlier this week, the redoubtable founder and chairman of Linn Products thought he had a chance to bring his rather trenchant mode of plain speaking to bear in the Scottish Tory Party as a candidate for Glasgow Maryhill. But a day later, after some ill-judged comments to a Scotsman reporter, he had to resign.

The path between business and politics is littered with corpses and the wounded. Remember Brian Souter and his equally ill-judged attempt to fund a campaign to retain a law banning the discussion of homosexuality in schools. Sir Philip Green isn't having it easy either. Despite being picked by Prime Minister David Cameron to run some sort of waste reduction exercise, as if government finances were like Top Shop, he's being hounded by the Lib Dems - who are supposed to be in on the game - about his wife's tax-exile status.

It is hard to see what these otherwise successful business men get out of their time in the political gladiatorial ring.

For the most part, it is driven by a desire to "give back". Or perhaps, on a less noble note, they wish to shape the world closer to the way they think it should be.

But customers buy stereos, while voters buy ideas - more often than not expressed as platitudes. It's a difficult product to make and sell.