Cometh the hour cometh the men?
In wartime unexpected leaders, flawed leaders come to the fore, while men and women of moderation and apparent good sense can be broken.
Perhaps it is the same with financial crises.
Today's meeting of the leaders of the European Union countries may see a subtle shift in relations at the top table.
Gordon Brown, it's widely acknowledged, is having a good war. Both the Americans and other Europeans are adopting his plan. Other leaders defer to his economic knowledge.
Sarkozy, too, currently has a spring in his raised platforms. He's often regarded as a bit flighty, firing off ideas left, right and centre without thinking them through, or even bothering to tell his diplomats and civil servants. But his restless spirit has seen him restlessly searching for a way out of the crisis.
His first meeting in Paris was a dangerous gamble that didn't pay off. Without a clear outcome or agenda warm words failed to reassure the markets and preceded a week of turmoil (the worst day in history part 47). But last weekend's get-together was apparently on the money. Unity was agreed, and unity was what was required. In the words of one diplomat, "he's a high-wire act and so far he has stayed on the wire."
But Angela Merkel, with a very high reputation in Europe for cool, level-headed, unegotistical problem-solving, has rather come a cropper. Loudly protesting against the Irish bail-out of their banks during the first Paris summit, she appeared to adopt their scheme the next day, only to say she hadn't. Now she has gone along with the Sarkozy plan with some enthusiasm. But she clearly wasn't taking the lead.
This judgement comes hedged with caveats. I hate the journalistic practice of "build 'em up and knock 'em down". It's often based on exceedingly superficial observations, so David Miliband can't be prime minister because he waved a banana - good thing photographers weren't around to catch that shot of Bismarck with a pineapple. Or even Garibaldi with the biscuit. Of course if the markets go crazy in the next few days we will all shake our heads and wonder how Mr Brown didn't realise his plan was ludicrous.
When people start losing their homes and jobs they will be ready with the bucket of ordure to tip on his head. But for now he is something of a hero to other European leaders. It's not the first time of course: he was widely applauded in Brussels for keeping the Lisbon Treaty alive at the June summit, because he didn't call off British ratification. Careful Gordon, you might get a reputation as a Good European.
By the way, sorry I haven't commented on any of your recent replies and thoughts. Internet wasn't the best in Georgia and I didn't have a lot of time. I will read and reply to you soon.
I’m Mark Mardell, the BBC's North America editor. These are my reflections on American politics, some thoughts on being a Brit living in the USA, and who knows what else? My 
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David Miliband can't be prime minister not because he waved a banana - but because he lacks vital ability to analise and separate the wheat from the chaff.His role during the georgian conflict was a fun.
greed for power and political exibitionism can not make from somebody a real political figure.
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The UK have been given credit (in the media) for "leading" with a solution promoted by Gordon Brown. But the idea was drawn from Warren Buffet and his team when they pumped in $5 billion to Goldman Sachs.
It was better than the US' original option, because it was a conditional proposal, and was not going to be applied as a blanket solution. It met political concerns from left wing to right. It was helped considerably because of the great urgency for a plan.
Europe's leaders knew they would be severely criticised if they were seen to be arguing with each other, especially about whose plan was the one to follow. Action was needed, and because we were in the mess first (Northern Rock, B&B, HBOS), we were further down the road of crisis management. The US were likely to follow us, as our plan came from the States (Warren Buffet and Goldman Sachs).
The advantage our PM has over other leaders is that he served an apprenticeship as Chancelor. In a crisis it is common for people ot step back to what they know as a safety zone. Fortunately he was able to step back into his safety zone amongst people wo he knows and who know him. This isn't leadership, it is management.
Leadership will come when a vision of the way ahead is presented to us that will lead us from financial chaos to security and prosperity. If we are inspired to follow, then we might have a leader.
However to lead, he needs a mandate from the British people, not just is party.
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Agree Brown has done well, even recieving plaudits form the U.S.
Sarkozy has also had a 'good crisis'
It is to be hoped Brown's plan will work. At best ,to be realistic, the recession will be shallower and because of this plan, we may be able to climb out of it in the next 12-18 months . But as people inevitably start to feel the pinch and jobs are lost it is still likely that Brown will lose the election, but perhaps by not a great a margin as it was looking like.
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It is a conspiracy of stupidity.
Brown appears to be a genius because he seems to have got away with taxing the public many, many decades/generations in advance.
And the british media and oppositions parties have conspired let him get away wiith it.
As a fait acompli the public will not have a chance to have their say untill it is too late - so they will have to be resigned to it.
Other leaders are lost in admiration as to how he has got away with it -- and delighted that they can cite this example to their own people to 'prove' that it isn't totally insane.
The naked emporer is showing other emporers how to ditch their clothes and get away with it...
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What tosh?
You say others are following Brown's lead. That simply is not true. The governments of Luxembourg and Belgium, with France, recapitalised one of their major banks and then guaranteed all its interbank and bond borrowing (what is more without actually nationalising it) some weeks before Brown and HM Treasury claimed to have come up with that “innovative” idea.
Brown is not leading, but following meekly in the bold footsteps of those who really knew what to do.
His hero status, like everything else in his “reign”, is based on grains of sand, on deception. The sooner those grains are blown away, the deception is exposed and the world sees him for what really he is the better.
But of course he will never admit that Luxembourg, as always, knew and knows better!
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greatBobFrance @ #5
Not that I disagree with your hypothesis that France led the way and dear old Gordon Brown is a pygmy compared to the Leaders of the French, Luxembourgoise and the Belgians who recapitalised their bank weeks before Gordon preference-share-funded-not-quite-nationalisation scheme appeared, but was not the French/Luxembourg/Belgian (and let us not forget the Dutch either shall we?) solution simply cash injection and was not that the solution which the Americans announced to be their solution first with their $750billion bailout plan?
It should also be said, and I hate myself for defending Brown, but his preference share led bailout scheme was unique and was a UK idea - hence for the first time ever a British Prime Minister was invited to join the 15 Eurozone Leaders to explain to them the scheme which has now definitely been aped by the G7 Leaders and will no doubt become THE adopted solution.
My fear is, however, that it is but a potential solution and may not work . . . .
Thus crowing about who did what first is merely nationalistic and premature crowing as we are deep in the ack and any solution, regardless of which country thought of it first, may not be enough to get us all out of the ack we are all very deeply and up to our necks within.
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#2
Seriously, is it not time people gave the "he doesn't have a mandate" rubbish a rest? I'm no fan of Gordon Brown, but the way people have been manipulated by the media/Tory party into thinking we should have a general election is ridiculous. When you cast your vote at the last election, you were voting for the candidate for your region, not Tony Blair. I can't think of any country where Prime Ministers are directly elected - in France, for instance, they vote for the President, but it is he who decides who the Prime Minister is. Germany's Chancellor is not directly appointed either. To have a General Election merely to give Gordon Brown a "mandate" would be to completely ignore the established conventions of British politics - ie General Elections are for changes in GOVERNMENT, not Prime Minister.
Besides, it's not like Gordon Brown hadn't been lined up to take over from Blair for the past ten years. The Scottish Parliament had three First Ministers in the first 4 years, but no one screamed "Election! Election!" each time there was a change.
If people really want to moan about something, let's moan about the unfairness of incumbent Governments being allowed to manipulate the time of a General Election to suit their own agendas, and try and get it replaced with fixed-term Governments of 4 years, with no excuses.
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#3
Not so sure, if 'greed and the free market' is seen as the villain that caused the recession (just as the 'unions and the union power' were seen as the villains in the 1980s) then Brown might be in No.10 for the long haul just as Thatcher was.
What is of more importance is how such a recession will affect both the UK's entry or not into the Euro and what happens to the Lisbon 'Treaty'.
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#6
"My fear is, however, that it is but a potential solution and may not work . . . . "
Of course, but that would apply to any 'solution' short of mass adoption of communism!
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So Brown 'looks good' when compared to EU leaders? Well, so would a donkey.
It could also be said that Brown 'looks good' when compared to the rest of his government. Again, so would a donkey.
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I have NEVER read such rubbish in my life - cometh the hour etc etc - is Mardell a Nu Labour mouthpiece??????
This is Gordy Clown who has presided over the buiggest Boom and BUST in UK history - now he is a hero???? GET REAL - as for comparing him to Churchill - what an insult to the great Churchill - he had guts and foresight but most of all HONESTY - Clown and Nu Labour have no idea what these are.
Mr Mardell should ask some real questions - like WHERE is all the money coming from - answer is MORE borrowing. This article makes me sick.
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Why is Mardell so pro-european. How can he spout so convincingly the EU line and ignore the democratic deficit and corruption that is obvious to everyone else.
At least the USA has only one pathetic head of state.
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#6 - Menedemus
'My fear is, however, that it is but a potential solution and may not work . . . . '
My fear, perversely maybe, is that it will. Brown is turning out to be effective in handling this crisis but, as I have posted elsewhere, it could all too easily become a smokescreen for his manifest inadequacies in other areas as this becomes a single issue political landscape. We certain want this mess sorted. Whether we want another 5 years of Father Brown is an altogether different question.
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StroszekBassist
He has no mandate to break Manifesto Commitments which he has consistently since becoming P.M.
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#11
But he didn't cause it, Thatcher and inept and greedy bankers / speculators did, had Thatcher not put in place the idiot-olgy the bankers and speculators would not have been able to 'play'.
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Boilerplated @ #9
With nationalisation of two banks plus up to 60% preference shares in three other banks with government-appointed Directors on their Boards - how far short of Communism are we at this point in time Comrade?
From cradle-to-grave we WILL now be definitively working for the good of all AND our political masters under this new form of State-led Economics!
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bubblingmaximoo @ #11
You wrote, "Mr Mardell should ask some real questions - like WHERE is all the money coming from - answer is MORE borrowing. This article makes me sick."
If you look at Mark's previous Blog Entry and the translation of Item No 7 from the output of the 15 Eurozone Leaders Accord you will see that the money is going to be increased currency supply. In other waoirds the various governments are simply going to inflate their economies by printing more money.
The governments bailing out the banks will replace the vanished value of the held loans debt with cash created out of thin air.
This will still mean that the citizens WILL pay as they lose their jobs, find their assets and savings diminished in value and that money-supply fueled inflation will reduce the value of incomes of those lucky enough to keep their jobs BUT on the brighter side anyone with huge debt now will find the relative value of their debt reduced quite considerably - just like the debt of the government created by the government bailing out the banks will reduce!
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Why is Mardell so pro-european/At least the USA has only one pathetic head of state.
Condrediction!
You can't be anti_Eu and want a single head of and EU state. Wally
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#14
And Tony Blair - the man who supposedly had a mandate because of all these people who think General Elections are for appointing a Prime Minister rather than a governing party - never broke a manifesto promise? Don't make me laugh.
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Talk about putting lipstick on a pig. So it wasn't even Brown's idea after all, it was Warren Buffet's. Not a surprise. Brown never showed he was more than an unimaginative gray banker who would make the stormiest day look sunny by comparison. That he could quickly think up a solution, any solution to a problem of this dimension on his own even with the help of his advisors was totally out of character, entirely unexpected. In fact it is remarkable he even recognized it was a good answer when someone else thought it up first. The UK/EU plan is not precisely the same as the US government's. The US government will not take direct ownership/control of the banks through common stock but will own preferred stock. Is that socialism with a happy face? It will also become the creditor of last resort to credit worthy borrowers, soemthing I think is a very good idea.
President Bush said yesterday on television that the US government had headed off the crisis by acting pre-emptively before the banks actually went bankrupt the way they did in the 1930s.. In fact the government waited until the last possible moment just before the entire world's economy had shut down. To hear these people tell it, they have fixed the problem. There was about a day or so of irrational exuberance on Wall Street and then in the other markets. Then reality set in.
Despite the massive infusion of liquidity from central banks around the world, the fact is that the underlying causes of the problem have not gotten any better and may get far worse. This is what the markets woke up to on Wall Street by around noon Wednesday.
Here are my round numbers. According to some experts, there are 55 trillion dollars in credit default swaps...tick tick...boom still out there. See Robin Lustig's web site, his number is as good as any of them. I've head it said this is four times as much as there are sub prime mortgages which would put that at 13 trillion. That translates to about 4 to 5 million homes. All of them are in jeopardy of default if they haven't defaulted already. Beyond that there are between 300 and 600 trillion in derivitives. There also appears to be many iron clad contracts in the US for banks lending huge amonts of money to large corporations at rates which would create severe losses to them on every one given the current Libor rate. Nobody has found a way to unwind any of this without a very deep recession, even a depression or massive inflation. Trying to steer a midway course could give us both.
It's rather funny how people who were unaware that there was a very serious and growning problem with the world's finances for years suddenly became experts on how to fix it almost overnight. And it was interesting when one Republican Congressman from Texas pointed out that the plan Paulson and Bernanke told Congress had to be passed immediately or the economy would shut down and that nothing else would work just a couple of weeks ago has been changed radically already. When comparing the stature of these "leaders" it would do well to consider that what you are really doing is comparing which are the largest of the midgets.
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#16
A VERY long way, but then if you really knew what communism is - clue, socialism / nationalisation doesn't equate to communism!
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"Cometh the hour, cometh the man! "
exactly. I don't know, who said this?
I mean, before Mark Mardell.
I also remember smth similar from Jeeves and ? Wuster. Like, one says (pacifyingly, to himself) "if one has brains (to solve an issue) - good. but if you happen to have not - moreover good, nothing to start bothering about." approx. sorry I read in in Rus.
Natural inclinations you can't change and some are fit for war, others are better skilled in peaceful times. See how nicely St. petersburgers on board the plane now dis-armed a terrorist with a bomb. What did he think of himself? Peaceful Russians return home from holidays in Antalia, sun-tanned and happy, with photos and fond memoirs of an unnatural nature's phenomenon (sun), so long expected and expensive trip, saved for for a years or two times, and then someone with a lousy bomb - wants to spoil the holidays?
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Re post 13, threnodio, tend to agree with you. Reason being this could end up being a very good deal for the tax payer, judging by the bleating I listened to by share holders in the banks concerned re the deal and how unfair it is as the Government get first preference etc. In a year we could even see the Government selling the shares back at a considerable profit. The money gained could be given in tax reduction and who knows what effect that could have. Lots of ifs and buts and only time will tell. It could also all come to a ball of chalk and the worst financial disaster in living memory - interesting times.
Not a supporter of Brown, but credit where it is due. Still think he will lose the election however.
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19 Two wrongs don't make a right
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Well I am sorry to say is not Warren Buffet’s idea after all. What he did was a kill, sold his name and 5 billion at a very steep rate to Goldman. Not bad really for a grandpa.
The idea if my memory is right comes from Finland where they nationalized a few banks in the early 90s, to sell them later at big profit. Brown deserves credit for spotting a good idea and implementing it. After all that’s what makes you a good politician. After all you don’t want your doctor to invent a great new therapy on you, you want him to apply one that will cure you (hopefully). I just wonder what is Cameron going to hug next, may be a bank?
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#24
You're right - so calling a General Election several years earlier than required will not right the wrong of Tony Blair not standing down before the last one and choosing instead to spend the first two years of the third term to go on vanity farewell tours and setting himself up for his next job, just so he could be recorded in the history books as the first three-term Labour Prime Minister.
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#26
You simply don't understand how UK politics works, sorry.
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You can't ever truely right a wrong!
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#various StroszekBassist
We don't have a written constitution, and many things cannot be taken on face value.
Blair was a great proponent of 'the people voted for me, so I will get my way' - a mantra he repeated again and again in his 'exit' interview. And, in as much as he used this argument against unelected whitehall mandrins he had a good case.
Do you really suppose the recent collapse of labours vote in by-elections is because the local labour candidate is particularly un-popular ?
However you want to spin the practices and proceedures, the people of this country expected Blair to be PM for the full term -- that is not what they have got, and if the system allows it then the system is wrong...
Thats one of the good things about our 'system' -- it is secondary to our expectations -- it changes to suit us, we don't change to suit it.
That is why socialism is despised by the british -- people are made slaves to the rules; rather than rules being the tools of the people.
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#5 - Unfortunately, Fortis was nationalised (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7653496.stm) - first by the Dutch, then the rest of its assets were bought up (I think the French now own the Belgian assets of Fortis). The Bradford & Bingley nationalisation came at around the same time as the Fortis collapse/rescue - and, of course, Northern Rock was nationalised earlier this year after coming into effective govt ownership last autumn.
Isn't the BBC site useful to find out the facts?
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#29
"That is why socialism is despised by the british -- people are made slaves to the rules; rather than rules being the tools of the people."
The same could be said about capitalism - and any flavour left, right and centre - which is why there was such excitement in the early 1980s when the SDP promised a 'third way' - only for people to realise that it was (in all truth) just more of the same.
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"You simply don't understand how UK politics works, sorry."...LOL! It's amusing seeing boilerplated trying to correct all and sundry: after message 15 it is quite clear he/she hasn't the foggiest about anything relevant to this thread.
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From Mark's article. "Careful Gordon, you might get a reputation as a Good European." ...well we know the answer to that; tit for tat...(literally) he's taken Mandy off their hands and so they're delighted.
Re the bail-outs it's a travesty and I wonder how anyone can support it: the public will pay (in their respective countries) but they're being spoon fed how wonderful it all is by corrupt politicians and a tame media.
A few centuries ago their heads would be on spiked poles at the city gates.
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I've just watched Geoff Hoon on the BBC question time, has anybody else seen how incapable this type of fool is, talk about smiler is an understatement. The fool was in Stoke and maybe unfortunately for him copped it, all he could do was waffle and try to use the words of the other members of the panel to blind his ignorance. To be honest his visage was very reminiscent of the comedian Jasper Carrot, the only problem is that Carrot was/is great and Hoon is on the moon.
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Re 12: "At least the USA has only one pathetic head of state."
Actually, each state in the USA has TWO heads, called Senators. They sit in the Senate and have loads of power over what their President can do or not. This doesn't make them look less pathetic though... assuming you look close enough.
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Re 16 "how far short of Communism are we at this point in time Comrade?"
You don't understand: Communism is the system that helps people that don't work, Capitalism is the system that helps banks that don't work.
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lacerniagigante @ 36
My #16 was very tongue in cheek.
I am impressed by your use of the word "work" twice.
The propaganda statement is: "From each according to their work, to each according to his need"
In practice it is going to be more like giving the Banks everything and the Government will decide how much to take back on behalf of the tax-payer who do the giving.
I don't think the tax-payer does very well out of this arrangement - be it a Capitalist scheme or pragmatic socialism bordering upon Bolshevik Communism which nationalised the Russian Banks as soon as they took power in October 1917.
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