As life imitates art, so the weather mimmicks economic crises.

After four days of driving rain with scattered monsoons, the hosepipe ban in the UK is finally being lifted. It’s obviously worked, so now I’m expecting the economy to pick up immediately as the entire nation rushes out to buy hosepipes. In our village we’re having a hosepipe party. Next year is the 53rd anniversary of the 1959 hosepipe ban, so preparations will begin later this year for the Diamond Hosepipe Jubilee in 2019.  As I’m on the steering committee, I’m thinking lots of barges on the Thames, pissing rain, and uncomfortable celebs in yellow all-weathers wittering on to people age 75+ about their memories of 1959 – the ice-cream rationing, the old people suddenly quiet about summers not being like they used to be, and so forth – the full works. Might bus in a few disabled kids with leukaemia as volunteer stewards too, but we’re not sure on that one. It needs the overnight test.

The weather is in fact further evidence of the Creator’s dementia problem, in that this year we had July in February and January in March. Last month we had August in May, and so now it’s June and we’re in the remake of Moby Dick. “Thar she blows!” yells the haunted voice of Gregory Peck above the rain-sluiced 70 mile an hour gales. As for the global econo-fiscal cock-up and catatonia virus, it may be God’s work or it may just be us. On balance, I’m going for the latter.

“Markets up briefly on hopes for Spanish banks,” says Reuters. What hopes for Spanish banks – that they might crawl away somewhere quiet and not cause an fuss as they vapourise? This from Australia: ‘the jobless rate inched up to 5.1% in May from a revised 5% in April, but that’s actually good news as the rise stemmed from an increase in the labor force participation rate’. We are saved. But on the other hand, maybe we aren’t: as that’s 20,000 more people claiming benefit, the onces increasing their rate of thingummy are going to be paying a shedload of tax just to break even on the deal.

Says Bloomberg, ‘France’s unemployment rate rose in the first quarter as companies eliminated jobs in the face of faltering economic growth, posing a challenge to newly elected President Francois Hollande’. Well Francois, nobody forced you to take the job ducky, but he sure as hell does have a pocketful of challenges at the moment. Cut to the opening scenes of Mission Impossible, and the voice over intoning, “Today Francois, your mission is to eliminate the job eliminators, eliminate Angela Merkel, eliminate the Brussels torpor, eliminate the negative and accentuate the positive”.

The last one is the trickiest, and the Elysees is working on it. That alone has created three jobs, so we’re on our way. Step Two came yesterday, as Hollande kept his campaign promise to lower France’s minimum retirement age from 62 to 6o. So that wipes out all the lost jobs and replaces them with roughly the same number of new pensioners. It’s called Socialism. I have seen the future, and it’s full of jerks.

The Wall Street Journal opined that Brussels is ‘struggling with a lack of market faith in their crisis plans’. I don’t see why: the plan was to launch the euro, and now we have the mother and father of all crises. But I sort of do get the credibility gap re the plan going forward, if only because their isn’t one. While we wait for the plan to materialise, Draghi has decided to hit the politicians with a stick by refusing to lower ECB rates. This is no time for pique Mario my friend, especially as the FT this morning says that Brussels is ‘weighing up a limited Spanish rescue’.

This is standard EU practice. What you do is weigh the crisis, and then divide that by ten and say everything’s OK really, so we’ll limit the rescue. The rescue will be limited to one bank, one region, and five fishing boats off Alicante. Think of it as anti-Geithner, as the deleveraging of rescues. Cameron is doing the same with the abolition of the Lifeboat service in Britain. It’s like austere economic stimulation, and has a similar track record.

On a more cheery note, those of us who always suspected Jamie Dimon of being the reincarnation of John Dillinger may be in for some confirmatory news before too long. Yesterday evening in the States, Daniel Tarullo, a governor at the Fed Reserve, hinted to Congress that the authorities were likely to find “an absence of documentation” regarding Morgan the Pirate’s loss of $2bn on hedge trades two weeks ago. I have long been a satirical fan of the American euphemism, but ‘absence of documentation’ is the best yet. Also expected on the missing list are the shredder that did the business, but chiefly the money.

That is all.