I have never been one to play the economist and claim I have seen through a finance minister's ploy. As a journalist, I have always been more interested in trying to gauge and redefine the everyday effects of a budget and people's reactions to it, at least having a good go at that, rather than just hurling it onto the deep political pan to let it simmer for some more weeks before the nation's topics switch to other things, usually Christmas presents and holiday trips. So, see other pages of this newspaper if you're after a sumptuous, pros-and-cons analysis of Edward Scicluna's fare last Monday.

But over the decades that one has spent in newsrooms and editorial offices, there has been an interesting story unfolding with regard to Malta's Budget Day as different administrations, different prime ministers, and different finance ministers have played it their own way, not always successfully.

In the late Sixties, when I got into the world of journalism, Budget Day was, for most people, as exciting as a cold wintry day. No one really waited for it, no one leaked anything from it, no one told everyone anything about what to expect from it, and no one resorted to spin (this very word was to find its place in the political vocabulary many years later).

The Budget Speech was not even broadcast, and people just got snippets of the measures announced the following morning in the print media and, hooray, all was well with the world. You could go to sleep with your destiny under the pillow.

All that started changing with Labour's electoral victory of 1971. Suddenly, Budget Day was a day to look forward to as new concepts and new methods were being introduced at a breath-taking pace. The Mintoff government had introduced fairly-estimated cost-of-living increases at a flat rate for everyone rather than the percentage system of the past that saw high-earners getting more than the low-earners on the labour market as if the cost of living did not affect everyone the same way.

The annual bonus was introduced - a concept so incredibly simple and yet so late in its arrival - providing people with money to spend on Christmas sprees, with the commercial sector on the positive receiving end. Other Budget ideas included job-creating initiatives like the setting up of Air Malta and Sea Malta, many new infrastructural projects involving quasi-military-disciplined workers' corps, and a complete revamping of the tourism sector.

It has been fascinating to see how different finance ministers went about doing it on the big day. Dr Ġuże' Abela, famous for his "milking the cow" reference, was a natural - strumming his budget speech as he would a delicate musical instrument. Others followed him with their own styles of presentation. One I remember distinctly was the shortest, yet captivating, Budget Speech ever written and presented by Lino Spiteri, the ex-Labour politician, economist, writer and journalist who sadly passed away last week (more about him further down). I remember going to his office for a post-budget interview and complimenting him on both the Maltese language used and the astonishingly reasonable volume of text in his speech. It was practically the first budget an idiot in economics and financial matters could understand the first time around.

Of course, there were years, under different governments, when Budget Days turned out to be either too boring and too negative or too speculative and downright too smart for anyone's liking. Tonio Fenech, the former Nationalist finance minister, had also once remarked on "the fuss" that is often made of Budget Day, insisting - and he may have been right - that the whole process no longer made much sense since measures and initiatives were often either known beforehand or slyly introduced later. He was quite good at that.

Last Monday, Edward Scicluna gave us a marathon performance, four straight hours of useful information in his breathless, sometimes staccato method of presentation. Not the greatest of TV viewing, but incredibly jam-packed with ideas and positivity.

It is certainly not the end of the story.

An editor for a mentor

Lino Spiteri was my first editor. I remember him taking over the editorship of the old Malta News and immediately calling an editorial staff meeting. We gathered inside his small office to listen to him willing us to work as a team that could offer competition to the only other English language newspaper at the time, The Times of Malta. He referred to it mildly as "our adversary", pointing out that we had to make sure we delivered a better service to readers by opting out of our Daily Mirror mindset and offering more food for thought in fields such as culture, literature, the cinema, television and sport.

The change was highly successful as more and more skilled correspondents and columnists, some of them even from anti-Labour camps, joined the paper to give it the new look we all desired. Sadly, the change of style and the greatly improved quality of the content that had made the Malta News at that time the best read of the day, were not matched by the sales.

Just about a year later, it was announced Lino Spiteri was leaving the day-to-day journalism scene. For me, helplessly captured by his "unto-the-breach" address, this was a bombshell. So, an overtly dejected, painfully thin journalist looking up to him as a mentor for professional inspiration, I strode into his office and enquired how he could get us all so excited and then just leave.

Lino smiled. He was himself a young man still and knew what enthusiasm was all about. He then told me: "Charles, remember one thing. In life no one is indispensable. As we say in Maltese, Papa jmut, u jitwieled ieħor (loosely translated: a Pope dies, another one is born)."

I never forgot that piece of advice which one quite obviously needs to apply to his own sense of being in both career and life.

Crooked bankers                                            

As yet another financial and economic crisis looms ahead in Europe, many people, including a top UK newspaper, have been asking why the crooked bankers who fixed currency rates and were caught doing so are not in jail. Politicians of both the Left and the Right and shareholders everywhere are demanding that Europe's biggest banks erase hundreds of millions of euros and pounds from this year's bonus pools as they finalise a multibillion-pound settlement over cartel-like behaviour in the foreign exchange markets.

This is not a new game the bankers have been playing with people's money in the name of international trade and the so-called free market. The Americans, to their credit, have thrown some of their bankers and speculators into prison, while in Europe they have been receiving generous bonuses. Ask the Greeks, the Spaniards and the Portuguese to tell you who actually left them in their current mess.

Fortunately for Malta's minuscule economy, our modern banks have always been run on strictly ethical and professional lines, their recent European stress test results giving them the right impetus in a highly competitive and globalised world.