Tonight:
4°c
The race to claim intellectual pre-emption of the credit crunch reached the final furlong this week.
In pole position for the title of the original and best Dr Doom is Nouriel Roubini, the Turkish economist who warned back in 2005 of a once-in-a-lifetime housing bust and deep recession in the US into which the whole world would fall.
But others are jostling him out of their way. There's that Taleb chap who wrote Black Swan about our collective blindness towards random events, and there is also a Japanese whose name for the moment eludes me, George Soros
Then, this week, I was forcibly reminded that my old Financial Times colleague Gillian Tett has a claim too (as does Robert Peston, one of many money honeys of the moment who also happens to be an alumnus or alumna of the Pink Un). For on the dust-jacket of her new book, Fool's Gold, which was distributed gratis to those who came to her launch held at the newspaper's Southwark Bridge HQ - for which many thanks Little Brown - she is hailed as "the (note the definite article, if you would) journalist who predicted the financial crisis".
She extends her lead over the field in her preface. "In 2004, when I was working on the Lex column of the FT, I realised that something highly significant was underway in the vast, murky debt world."
I missed the speeches but there were plenty of Cassandras in the crowd who probably thought they called it first too (I saw Vince Cable, Evan Davis and Martin Wolf looking slightly pursed of lip, but it could easily have been the white wine).
Ah well, as they say: success - even when it comes to being more pessimistic about the future than your peers - has many fathers.
* Nick Coleridge, who is winning gaspingly good notices for his new novel Deadly Sins, has an advantage over the rest of us when it comes to novel-writing. He only has time for fiction on Saturday mornings, being a bit busy with his day job running an empire of glossies during the week. For him, writing is not work, it's play. It's not fair!
* I'm slightly fed up with everyone giving up drinking. Jeremy Clarkson (below) says he feels so much better and has lost two pounds. My fellow Notebooker Sebastian Shakespeare now claims he only drinks at weekends and looks more baby-faced than ever (at Oxford, he was often described as looking like me, "only prettier"). I tried it for four days. When I crossly mounted the scales, I found Clarkson's lost two pounds on my muffin-top.
Reader views (2)
Darius, there's an awful lot of bright people in the U.K. who agree with you -- but there's even more dopes around who will consider voting Nu Labour yet again -- many of them out for the freebies associated with Nu Labour!!! And watch those freebies multiple as lollipop time approaches!!
- Phil Jones, London UK, 08/07/2009 10:27
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Anyone with any sense could see the whole system of debt couldn`t be maintained for ever.
Once house price inflation was detatched from interest rate policy it was inevitable, given the prevalence of greed involved, from the new sofa syndrome, thru to the incentives given to mortgage providers to push endowments, then 125 percent borrowing for that trip abroad or that nice little imported sports car etc.
Next up the food chain were the estate agents, upping the valuations to get the customer (who would, after all, want to sell at the lowest valuation price?).
Then there is of course, the parasitical extras like insurance, then near the top come the Bankers themselves, riding on a tide of knowing greed and song and dance advertising routines!
But let`s not forget who allowed this greed spiral to happen, those who were elected to steer a decadent Nu Labour populace to do the "right" thing - that is be responsible, take personal responsibility - they are ultimately at the top of the tree of gross negligence – and you should have no doubt, they will try every trick in the book to bribe their parasitical client base to vote for them next year, whether it be doubling benefits, handing out free car vouchers or giving new jobs only to women.
These will be the death throes of Nu Labour, False Boom then Real Bust.
- Darius Midwinter, London UK, 08/07/2009 09:27
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