Coming back ‘online’…
Five months since my last blog.
Forgive me, reader, for I have been preoccupied.
I was conducting a ‘dialogue’ with the Department of Finance with respect to the ‘Offset Debt’ proposal (Link) and I decided to keep “shtum” for fear of upsetting the tender sensibilities of those I encountered therein.
I will give an account of my adventures in that ‘Wonderland’ in a little while. The story is not fully done and I am, currently, too close to the events to be able to give a dispassionate account. (Begging the question of whether one’s blog should be ‘dispassionate’…)
Jumping out of my own navel and surveying the landscape, I can see that nothing has changed and everything has changed during the tumultuous 5 months while I was silent.
The various economic and financial ‘cans’ (EU, UK, US, Chinese) have all been repeatedly kicked down the road. Each kick has been a little weaker and delivered with less conviction and the ‘cans’ are deteriorating and the end of the road rapidly approaching.
In the EU, particularly, the austerity path to growth has clearly failed but in the run up to Sarkozy’s election Ms Merkel will try to maintain the fiction that ‘all is well’….and why wouldn’t she while the world wants to pay to be allowed lend her money. But whether they can whip up a functional treaty in 60 days to fix the dysfunctional Masstricht and Nice and Lisbon treaties that took decades to construct is another matter altogether.
In the US the figures seem to indicate a very modest recovery and I won’t rock that boat …though I won’t bet the farm on it either.
The UK is in some form of economic limbo, kept alive by cash transfusions from the distorting parasite that is the City and Mr Cameron is having to juggle with the possibility of Scottish independence in order to distract the populace and the markets until the feel good factor of the Olympics and the Jubilee arrive. His non-veto of the latest EU contortions will have to await the new treaty before he can dip his toe back in those waters. But he should not expect a warm welcome for any form of ‘I told you so’, so beloved of past UK PM’s.
Meanwhile, the “oh! so different” home life of own dear Taoiseach continues to circle the plughole. We are enduring a “tale of two economies”, whereby the domestic one is drowning and is barely kept afloat by the exporting one. The enduring is not likely to continue for much longer though.
Brace for impact!
