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markanash

Listed below are comments made by markanash between Sunday, 5th October 2008 and Sunday, 29th March 2009.

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Preparing to herd cats 10:31am on 29 Mar 2009 "By the way, there's an amusing photo of all the other leaders hanging around waiting for the PM who, how shall I put it, had to make another urgent call"

The man's arrogance knows no bounds. Not surprisingly, in the same way that Brown has lost whatever credibility or respect he ever had from the British people, world leaders undoubtedly think the same way. The remarkable thing is that Brown is perfectly oblivious to how people think of him. That, at root, is why he is such a failure as a politician. He is totally incapable of connecting with people. How did he ever get to hold high office? Look to Machiavelli.

The G20 summit was also going to deliver very little (these sorts of gatherings of politicians are always largely huff and puff), but with Brown in the vanguard the G20 was doomed from the start (just like the UK economy with Brown at the helm). How can a bloke heading up a country heading rapidly for banana republic status command respect?

Gordon Brown is a pitiful joke and the sooner the electorate is allowed to tell him that, the better. He's getting more embarassing with each passing appearance in public. Snubbing his world leader colleagues like that makes my point; it is shameful.
42-days is dead 8:57pm on 06 Oct 2008 Another political masterclass from Gordon? This guy's good isn't he?
6pm. Bank bosses to meet Darling 8:37pm on 06 Oct 2008 Forget worrying about defining 'bank recapitalisation'. I suggest (seriously) that ordinary folk like thee and me should proceed to the nearest ATM for the next 3 days in a row and make your maximum daily drawing of cash. Stick the cash under your mattress and thus be prepared for when the whole banking system siezes up - which seems to me to be pretty imminent.

You can then persuade Tesco to sell you the bare essentials for a week or two until sanity is restored, or at least until the helter-skelter opens again and we can all continue the downward slide into oblivion.

Isn't this fun?
German guarantee lost in translation 10:11pm on 05 Oct 2008 Sorry guys, but my money is on economic nationalism from here on in. The EU will struggle to survive this crisis. Bear in mind that the EU is little more than a monstrously bloated bureaucracy. It has virtually no accountability to the peoples of its individual nation states who are now about to find themselves on the receiving end of economic collapse and all of the serious social implications that will flow from that.

Are you seriously expecting me to support, at my further expense, actions designed to bail out not only the UK, but also France, Belgium, Germany, Italy etc etc etc?? And vice versa? No chance. Like virtually everyone else observing this chaos I've no idea where things will end up, but I do know that the fragility of the EU will be shown up for what it is: an economic, political and social mirage borne of good times and singularly incapable of surviving bad times.
Pretty big steps. Does the real Minsky Moment lie ahead? 9:59pm on 05 Oct 2008 Threnodio Post # 9

Superb observation. Let's hope that the BBC and our newspaper community pick up on this point and harry our glorious leaders to distraction. It is indeed shocking if not scary (is this fascism?) that the handful of incompetent individuals currently running our country and doing it with no reference whatsoever to its people (ie parliament).

Can Newsnight not explore this matter in some depth. Let Paxman loose.
Full deposit protection is nigh 9:51pm on 05 Oct 2008 To hitthebid at Post # 87

Thanks; good interview - a tad too optimistic in my view. By nature, I admit to being more of a pessimist (realist?) than an optimist, but my various readings into this crisis have a common theme. Our current debt-based financial system is flawed, has been exposed for what it is, and WILL collapse. Government attempts to shore it up today (more debt, more printing of money ...) WILL come unstuck - we're just chucking good money after bad.

The law of unintended consequences will come to pass and this global financial failure will impact in two significant areas: the undermining of our relatively ordered society here in the UK (after alll we're bust!!) and tectonic shifts in global power as western nations are forced to yield power and influence to the likes of Middle Eastern countries, Russia, China and others.

There is absolutely no way that the consequences of this mess can be painless. Thanks to the crass incompetence of our socialist and economically illiterate government of the past 10 years, the UK is shamefully badly postioned to deal with this. The world's biggest chicken is coming home to roost.
Full deposit protection is nigh 9:01pm on 05 Oct 2008 I beg to point out that 'Sir Wallace Mercer' at Post # 76 is naive if he thinks that this crisis is a somewhat minor affair being stoked by the media, including the likes of Robert Peston. I suggest that 'Sir Wallace' dips into a few of the websites and blogs being run by relatively dispassionate observers like 'Financial Sense', 'The Levy Economics Institute', Nouriel Roubini's 'Global Economic Indicator', 'Simmons and Company' and many others.

In fact, the BBC is underplaying this subject by a long chalk for fear of being labelled a scaremongerer. I can assure 'Sir Wallace' that we've barely started watching the collapse of our beloved, debt-fuelled, inherently flawed global financial system.

The consequences of what's happening right now are barely comprehensible to most of us, and our politicians are lying through their teeth about how soon and how easily we'll pop out of the other side of this mess. We're facing geopolitical ructions on an unprecedented scale as well as severe and unpleasant disruptions to our society here in the UK.

This is really bad and Robert Peston is certainly not part of the problem. May I politely suggest 'Sir Wallace' that you do your homework on this subject. Watch out first for a downard spiral of economic nationalism and disintegration of the EU mirage.
Full deposit protection is nigh 6:22pm on 05 Oct 2008 Does this mean that we can now stop dancing around the handbag and talk about how we're going to deal with the economic and social consequences of a depression?
Full deposit protection is nigh 6:05pm on 05 Oct 2008 Am I watching a Hollywood disaster movie or is this really happening? I'm looking forward to the day when the BBC (??) spends, say, a day on TV or the radio airing this global financial crisis in full - cutting and dicing the problem from all angles and setting out the true economic and social consequences of this thing blowing up in our faces (as surely it will).

This is the usual way that the BBC and other news organisations deal with a major crisis (eg Twin Towers, London Tube Bombings etc). Why is the BBC so reluctant to explore this crisis in detail? Could it be that the potential consequences of what's happening at the moment are so alarming that the BBC's decision-makers (like our impotent politicians) are caught like rabbits in a headlight?

This tendency by our politicians and the BBC to respond to each new astounding revelation on an event-by-event basis smacks of panic. Let's take time out to step back, inhale a deep breath and take a long, hard look at what is really going on here. Then, let's hear some credible experts (not politicians, for God's sake ...) give us some objective, hard-nosed views on what lies ahead and our options for dealing with the situation.

Frankly, I'm now more interested in the strategic geopolitical and social implications of all this rather then whether or not this or that bank will be saved by yet more debt and money printing. It's time to look at the big screen scene.
Pretty big steps. Does the real Minsky Moment lie ahead? 5:37pm on 05 Oct 2008 To use the vernacular, this is doing my head in. I'm a reasonably intelligent, articulate member of the professional middle-class. I'm trying my damnedest to follow events as they unfold. I read all of the credible commentators' blogs: yours, Peston, Conway, Halligan, Roubini etc. With each passing day I become evermore convinced that out political elite have not the faintest idea how to handle this. They are permanently on the back foot, responding to each new crisis as it slams into them.

The underlying sub-text is that we're witnessing the end of debt-fuelled economies, themselves predicated on endless economic growth, in turn predicated on an infinite supply of cheap energy (ending now = the REAL problem). The financial system is collapsing around our ears and our politicians' response is to, er, jack up the debt (print money) to almost unimagineable levels as if, somehow, this will solve the problem. Are they kidding?

As a layman, I simply cannot believe what's going on here. The potential for economic and social catastrophe grows with each passing day as our glorious leaders stumble around, mouthing ludicrous platitudes about 'doing all that it takes ...' (= print money and spray it into the economy) whilst all along not having a clue about what is really needed to avert disaster (if, indeed, it's not too late).

My simple mind says that, despite the misguided efforts of our politicians, bankers and others, the global financial system is fundamentally flawed and it WILL, therefore, collapse; it WILL just fall apart. My concern is that the social consequences are going to be dire. Everyone is scared to death of talking about a depression.

At this rate, we'll be talking about another Dark Age soon if somebody doesn't step up to the plate and propose some credible and workable solutions to this unholy mess.

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