Thursday, December 11, 2008
Fire Sale
More deaths on TV. This time it's Gordon Brown and Britain. Brown, as Martin Kettle points out, uttered a career-defining/ending revelation in the Commons when he said, 'We not only saved the world....' In fact, he's been doing this for a while. On Mumbai he started a sentence with the words, 'I think I speak for the world...' One wouldn't mind were it not the the fact that he can't save Britain. Our financial position is now truly nightmarish and, humiliatingly, the Germans have noticed the ineptitude of our policies. The fire sale at Woolworths is, under the circumstances, an all too obvious image of the nation's plight. Probably we should do a Bear Stearns and sell ourselves to J.P.Morgan. After all a country can't be allowed to fail like Lehman Brothers. Can it?
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Was talking to a taxi driver in Buenos Aires last week - fine city and fine country, by the way - and asked how the recession was effecting him/them. He replied - "We are always in a crisis here, so what's the difference". All said with a big smile and followed by a full-on chuckle. Now that's how to deal with economic disaster.
ReplyDeleteAnd since we are on the subject of BA taxi drivers, well I am, at least, another said to me - "But Senor Brown has invented a plan to save the world, no?".
ReplyDeleteI know that Mandelson and Campbell's seeming ability to control the news agenda is well known; I just didn't realise how good it was!
The Germans know what they are talking about. At the trough in 1923, the mark plunged to an astonishing 4,200,000,000,000 to the dollar.
ReplyDeleteHow they let themsleves get into the Euro bed with the likes of Greece, Spain and Italy is a bit of a mystery. German guilt over the war has gone a long way. Bet they're glad we're not in the Euro to debase it still further.
When the Russian economy collapsed in the 1990s, the reason the populace didn't starve to death was because many people had kitchen gardens attached to their dachas, while the mega poor lived in villages and on collective farms and were thus able to keep chickens and grow their own vegetables. If you have a bit of land, get planting.
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