The price of everything

A Christmas Miscellany

“I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.”

 

-       Shirley Temple.

I saw three tips

I saw three tips all failing, in

A dismal way, a dismal way

I saw three tips all failing, in

A dismal way in the morning.

 

And what was in those tips, you say ?

That dismal day, that dismal day

And what was in those tips, you say ?

That dismal day, in the morning.


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So long, and thanks for all the stress

“Helmut Schlesinger, the Bundesbank president in 1992, was asked why he disliked the precursor of the Euro, which was called the Ecu. He replied, “I have nothing against the Ecu apart from its name – I think it should be called the Deutschemark.”

 

-       Anatole Kaletsky, ‘The Euro Debate Gets Philosophical’, November 29, 2011.

So the UK doesn’t get to join the great euro zone leper colony. Oh well. Tant pis. Tja. As Captain Blackadder once said, we lost closer friends the last time we were deloused, and were more wounded the last time we clipped our toenails. If we could summon up the mental energy to care about Europe we might bother to cite the perhaps apocryphal British newspaper headline that once read:

“Fog in Channel; Continent cut off.”

As regular readers will attest, we have long approvingly cited the work of Albert Bartlett, emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Professor Bartlett regards sustainable growth as a contradiction in terms, and has voiced at least two startling opinions on the topic:

“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”

And he has asked,

“Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavour on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted or advanced by further increases in population locally, nationally or globally ?”

Such views are unfashionable, of course (although some have referred to them as fashionably declinist) – we are somehow meant to believe that perpetual growth is not just desirable but essential, and that the planet can cope with an infinite number of people despite its obviously finite resources.

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Liars led by junkies

“In my several decades as a financial and economics commentator – covering banking crises dating back to the early 1970s and the Latin American debt catastrophes of the early 1980s – I have never heard a sitting [Bank of England] governor talk in such apocalyptic terms about the parlous state of the global financial system.”

 

-       Alex Brummer, The Daily Mail.

So what precisely did our inflation-fighter-in-chief actually say ? Well, that euro zone instability had created

“an exceptionally threatening environment”

as falling government debt prices, softening confidence and distressed asset sales threaten to

“spiral”

into a systemic financial crisis. Also, the UK financial system was encouraged to continue building up capital to bolster against an

“extraordinarily serious”

situation not of its own making and which it could not resolve. Also,

“The crisis in the euro area is one of solvency not liquidity. And the interconnectedness of major banks means the banking systems and economies around the world are all affected. Only the governments directly involved can find a way out of this crisis.”

And

“If debt is not to [continue] exploding to ever more unsustainable levels, transfers will be required together with the plan to restore the competitiveness within the euro area. There comes a point where the creditors need to realise that the scale of the debt owed to them is so large that they may have to be part of the solution.”

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