Capitalism. It's been getting a bad press and some guilt-ridden liberals have been proclaiming its death. Not so fast lads, not so fast. We're in baby and bathwater country here.
Ken Ofori Atta learned his trade on Wall Street but now plies his trade in the emerging markets of his native Ghana. Here is his diagnosis of where the west went wrong,
What went awry among the frenzy for growth in more mature markets was people losing sight of the fact that someone somewhere has to work hard to make a market and build a business to create real enduring value that goes beyond the bottom line.
That's one of those cartoon light bulb moments if you ask me. Nail on the head job. Getting something for nothing is not a viable basis for an economic system. Nor is a dumb belief in ever increasing growth and exponential rises in values of favoured assets, be they South Sea stocks, property or dotcom shares. Where the system falls down is when the fools and charlatans go unpunished by that system - the currently fashionable term is 'moral hazard.' This simply means getting your just deserts or more precisely your lack of them. (And that is the correct way of spelling 'deserts' - it has nothing to do with pudding.) So when it is deemed politically necessary to bail out banks (and that one could also legitimately be 'bale' out) what would really help would be if the bastards at least said thank you and took a pay-cut. Not because some simpleton like St Vince of Twickenham says they have to but because they realise that such would be the proper (and in fact ironically also the enlightened self-interested) way to behave.
Warren Buffet. People keep telling me what a champion bloke he is. I don't quite buy it. Apparently he thinks 'the rich' (who they ed?) should pay more tax. Well, Wazza mate, here's the news, there's no rule against you paying some extra over to the revenue if you want to. But I also note that you plan to dispose of the bulk of your own spondulicks to the Gates Foundation, presumably (and one might add wisely) because you trust your fellow billionaire (the nice bloke from Microsoft) to spend the readies more sagely than the government. Funy that.
The Euro. Gorgeous George Osborne says we Brits should be worried about the fate of this dishonestly conceived currency. If I'm honest George there's a considerable part of me that doesn't give a stuff. The Euro is the bastard love child of a social-democratic continental elite who have our very best interests at heart, so much at heart that something as petty as the affection of the people for sovereign nations will not be allowed to get in the way of them doing what is good for us. Now I am not so pig-headed as to deny that they might very well have a point. I am of a fortunate generation who did not grow up in the clamour of pan-european war. I respect the motives of men such as Edward Heath who served in a war and were determined that it should never be repeated. I happen not to think that the creation of a European single state is a prerequisite of such peace. Sovereign states have sovereign currencies. The Euro is and always has been a signpost to absoulute surrender of sovereignty to a larger entity. The French think that larger entity is Franco-German. The Germans know it is German but are coming to doubt the wisdom of what they have taken on. Which may or may not be a good thing - that is another debate. But what is categorically not acceptable is the intellectual determination to pretend that sovereignty was never at issue here, a pretence posited on an assumption of laxity/torpor/stupidity on the part of the little people. My hope is that the people are not that lax/torpid/stupid.
Here's a thought - the total sovereign debt of the Eurozone countries is within acceptable bounds if measured against the GDP of that zone. Greece's debt (expressed let us not forget in Euros) is a cataclysmic problem only because it is Greece that has to pay it - can't, won't, fact. If we transpose the problem to the pound zone (let us call it Poundland - geddit?) this would be rather like Gorgeous George saying that our own bonkers debt is not our problem because we have had a look at how it happened and we think Hounslow (or perhaps more realistically Scotland, now there's an even better thought) should pay the whole shebang. Oh no Overgraduate I hear you saying, you're over-simplifying things there. Well yes I am but this is precisely the line that your ubereuroistas (I made that one up) will take (are already taking) to justify greater integration. They will say it is ridiculous to have a currency zone within which the participants do not stand, fall and (here's the rub) tax together. I kid you not, there's a class of politico out there who saw this coming, who welcomed all manner of basket case economies into the Eurozone because it would precipitate a crisis (the scale of it has rather taken everyone by surprise) whose resolution would further the grand project. All in a good cause. So that's alright then. Actually no.
Silvio Berlusconi. I'm beginning to think I must have imagined him. He can't be real. But he is and so is Ed Miliband, which possibly worries me more.
My right hamstring. It's pissing me off.
