The One We’ve All Been Waiting For: The Credit Crunch..

It’s here at last folks, the show you have all been waiting for, The Conservative Party Credit Crunch Conference. How interesting it will be as Lord Snooty Cameron and his Pals take centre stage to hear what they have to say about the meltdown of the global economy and the irresponsibility of the Merchant Bankers who caused it. Especially when you remember Lord Snooty and his Pals were at school with that very same bunch of Merchant Bankers. In fact some of Lord Snooty’s chums used to be Merchant bankers when they were younger but, we hear, now they are serious politicians their tastes have matured and they can only be satisfied by a couple of visits a week to Nanny Whiplash.

No doubt as the chums take the podium they will unite behind Lord Snooty Cameron in blaming the hapless Gordon Brown for the crisis. Fair play, he was in charge of the tuck money for eleven years but we must not forget it was Lord Snooty’s Party, The Conservatives, led by Margaret Thatcher who kicked off the economic madness that led to the bubble and squeak economics of the past quarter century by a hasty and ill though out package of deregulatory measures.

Before Thatcher’s disastrous meddling on behalf of her hubby’s cronies, short selling, known by the much more sinister sounding name of arbitrage, the process of selling something one does not own in the expectation of buying back the asset more cheaply before returning it to the owner at a profit was illegal. People could go to prison for it. So was arbitrage a restrictive practice holding back markets or just good sense.

Whatever we think, short selling, in effect betting on stock market movements, was so lucrative that trade in “derivatives,” administrative vehicles facilitating such trades, became more profitable than trading in boring old stocks, commodities and bonds. The risks became greater too but nobody mentioned that.

As time passed the Merchant Bankers became more greedy and took bigger risks. They were not risking their own moolah of course, oh no, they were betting with your pension funds and personal savings.
There have already been two financial disasters, in the early 1990s and the dotcom + 9/11 bust of 2000 and 2001. if once is unfortunate and twice looks like carelessness to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, then three times is downright stupidity.

So it will be a tad hypocritical for Lard Snooty and his pals to stand up and condemn the Labour Party for mismanaging the economy. They were simply playing the game invented by the Conservative economists with more flair and panache than the Conservatives have shown.

So it will be like blaming Brazil for England’s decline as the foremost footballing nation.