| | By Mick James
You take a week off
and all hell breaks
loose. It's been the
story of my life: I
leave a terminally
placid office alone for
a couple of days and
come back to lurid tales
of fistfights and
overnight sackings. I go
to Greece for a week and
the whole financial
system collapses. Plus,
it rains. This might not
seem like such a
disaster in the great
scheme of things, but I
still need some sun this
year. If you're as
superstitious as I am,
you might want to
consider bribing me to
stay in the country to
avoid further
catastrophe.
Peering through the
little window on the
world that is my mobile
phone screen, it's hard
to get a handle on the
tectonic scale of recent
events. Banks are
disappearing like
contestants on a reality
show. US Treasury
Secretary Hank Paulson
has promised to stop the
rot by pouring "hundreds
of millions of dollars"
into the bottomless pit
of debt that is the US
housing market.
That's a sum that's
worth mulling over. It's
not even one of those
annoyingly precise | |
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| | "$112.7bn" figures where
the rounding error
represents more money
than you and all your
friends and family will
see in a lifetime. We're
not even getting to the
nearest hundred billion
dollars here, and a
hundred billion dollars
is a serious amount of
money – a Dr Evil ransom
demand.
I'm not normally a
fan of assessing public
spending in terms of how
many nurses you could
hire or children's
hospitals you could
build, but with a
hundred billion at your
disposal you might face
a shortage of sick
children. Forget
building the odd AIDS
clinic in Africa, you
could pay for all the
medication for everybody
there who was ill with
anything at all. You
could send everyone in
Britain on a proper
holiday. One where it
doesn’t rain.
And yet Hank doesn't
know exactly how many of
these fabulous banknotes
he's going to need to
print. And to get what?
A moon shot? A Manhattan
project for climate
change? No, a pile of
dodgy mortgages held
against worthless houses
occupied by people with
no money. Honest
businesses go bust, but | |
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| | the dodgiest
money-lending scam in
history is propped up by
what may be the last
hurrah of the golden age
of Western capitalism.
It's not exactly the New
Deal, is it? One wonders
how the ideological
taunting of
"left-leaning liberals"
will play out in the
coming US election, once
the incumbent
administration embarks
on the biggest socialist
project in the West
since the Welfare State.
This being the age of
the Internet, the
columnists and analysts
have instantly rushed to
print, to tell us "what
this all means". I'm
happy to admit I have no
idea. Can I have a
couple of days to think
it through, to at least
find my A-level
economics notes? I
suspect it would take
the platoons of PhD
students months to work
out the possible
ramifications of this,
and legions more in a
few years’ time to
discover what did
actually happen.
What is clear is that
we are entering a period
of unprecedented change,
and I say that knowing
what a cliché that
phrase has been for
years now. But people
often use change as a | |
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| | lazy synonym for
progress, and what we
are talking about is
being overwhelmed, not
by the speed of
technology but by the
rapid unravelling of
familiar structures, of
whole ways of life even.
Change is the
lifeblood of
consultancy, so we are
inclined to focus on the
positive side of it.
It's like life: we
eagerly anticipate the
new qualification, the
promotion, the new baby,
and the changes they
will bring. We're much
less willing to dwell on
retirement, the empty
nest, the loss of income
and faculties. As a
result, we tend to
approach these kinds of
change with much less
creativity and
involvement than we do
the "progressive" ones,
and are the poorer for
it.
While there's going
to be an awful lot to do
in the coming years,
much of it may seem
retrograde or tedious.
For a start there's
going to be a lot of
grunt work, welding
together "new" financial
institutions, where the
old ones weren't that
well integrated in the
first place. New
regulation will require
the unpicking of years | |
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| | of careful work to cope
with regimes that,
ultimately, failed to
deliver or even to
achieve maturity. The
new realities of
financial life will
probably be simpler,
certainly starker. Much
of the work might seem a
bit like attaching a
carthorse to a Porsche.
It could all get a bit
depressing.
I don't want to get
overly apocalyptic; the
end of the world has
been coming in various
forms ever since I was a
child. But you can't be
complacent – drive an
hour from where I'm
currently sitting and
you can take your pick
of the ruins of a dozen
mighty empires destroyed
by fire, earthquake and
conquest. Our current
nemesis seems a bit dull
by comparison. We didn't
have a war or even run
out of oil, just that
largely imaginary and
abstract commodity –
money.
It doesn't have to be
depressing. Adapting to
a new paradigm, like
aging gracefully, can be
a source of great pride
and achievement. Our
monument can be the
appalling mess we got
ourselves into – or the
way we get out of it. | |
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