Back when Simon S asked me how would I feel if the govenment changed the rules on my pension I (not having one and hence no clue) wished I'd pointed out that self employed business men would surely be glad the word `recession' hadn't been mentioned for nigh on ten years.
Does anyone know if there was any substance to the accusation that as well as prudence and low interest rates and all that borrowing Brown was gaining stability by vastly over increasing public debt - basically the UK was racking up its VISA bill but can't change cards?
The boss of Ryanair, full of lies as his advertisements are, we while ago said that maybe we could all do with a recession. Even I know that assumptions of equilibria and stability are very naive aims from a modelling point of view without a vey sophisticated control strategy, and are just unachievable for a chaotic system like the economy. But obviously borrowing shit loads, and worse, lending it on to bust geordie `institutions' is not necessarily going to make the problem any better in the long term than we thought it might do immediately, certainly in the North East. A TV banking correspondent (the gruff Investment Banking guy who looks like a cross between Blofeld and Penfold) saw it coming in advance by a month too when he singled out Northern Rock in early September. Every time the share holders winge I think of a child who's dropped their ice cream, for whom no amount of freely provided new ones are ever good enough. But the rock were just uniquely vulnerable (they were proportionally increasing their VISA bill and lending it out again to fuckwits faster than even the UK is doing now). The whole crisis was acutally creatd by Wall Street Bankers, who haven't taken any hit for the ridiculous risks they took with everyone's money.
I wonder if we've not only gone out of the Frying pan into the Fire, but failed to realise that while the pan might have singed us and gently sweated us down for a bit, caramelised us in goose fat even, the pan would've soon enough been deglazed with a nice wine and its contents made into a nice warm gravy. But now we're in the fire we're being burned to fuck while some cunt poors on petrol to smother the flames.
Sorry for the lengthy surmise, but I've become more and more moderately interested in this - basically because it involved numbers and it's so hilariously fucked up that I coudn't make it up.