I didn’t get where I am today by having the time to write an At the End of the Day every day. As you may have noticed, there’s been rather a lot going on of late. But I do have to write something tonight because it’s one of those moments in life when one feels things might be about to c0me to some kind of head. It might be the one where Vesuvius burps, or it might be The Big One where Krakatoa’s head blows right off and there are vermillion sunsets for the next two hundred years. I just sense that something significant is going to loom over the horizon next week.
As January got into its stride, I remember posting to the effect that the “élite” (as we tend to call them, although the soubriquet is far from deserved) had stopped trying to hide what they’re about. I think that may well have been the best insight I’ll have this year: everything they do continues to be explained away to some degree or other via risible bollocks, but their heart isn’t in the subterfuge any more. Bernanke obviously knows his QE is a waste of time, Mervyn King has more or less confessed to the certainty of disaster in that way he has of being Mole squinting through his glasses, and Brussels-am-Berlin no longer mince words about screwing depositors in Cyprus or private pension holders in Athens. Every central banker – and Mr Carney is no exception – openly accepts to media contacts that devaluing the currency is probably the only game in town.
Similarly, the Turks are brazenly demanding a slice of the Mediterranean spoils, Draghi has told the EU pols that financial repression of the workforce is the only route left for Europe, and pretty much every Sovereign State from New Zealand to Paraguay has admitted it has plans to levy taxes on our savings. At times it almost feels like somebody just rang us up and said, “I know the code number to turn off your burglar alarm”. It is at one and the same time both unsettling, and oddly exciting in that one might get to kill an intruder, and feel intense guilt about having done the right thing.
Can you imagine writing anything like that fifteen years ago in a serious vein? I can’t. Even a decade ago, I was beginning to have doubts about British police, I knew Blair was an arse, I didn’t trust the bank not to overcharge me, and I was fairly certain that most car services would be technically incompetent and financially fraudulent. But that was it.
I didn’t like how the EU was turning into a controlling rather than a liberating institution, but I wasn’t especially eurosceptic. Economically, I felt emu was a daft idea, but part of me vaguely admired the chutzpah of it. I had a house in France and was a long-time francophile, I liked Germany as a country in which I had several friends, and I had a soft spot for Greece because of a misspent youth there.
But then a series of things happened in quick succession. I was defrauded out of £50,000. I was illegally threatened by an ISP. I was a victim of ID theft…watching in frustration as Plod stood by and did nothing about it. I was shafted by an incompetent firm of pension managers. I encountered a truly unpleasant gagging order in Bristol, then an obvious case of systemic paedophile grooming in Plymouth. I discovered that a West Country MP was profiting from a corrupt land deal. I witnessed Devon & Cornwall Constabulary colluding in an unwarranted domestic raid to take children off their parents. I got a nasty letter from a prominent legal practice. I uncovered crooked psychiatrists and Secret Courts in Staffordshire. And it dawned on me that – while I’d been swanning about in the bubble of corporate life for twenty years – the world had changed. The insects with twelve legs had crawled from under the stones, and they were running things.
At first I thought the Westminster graft might just be New Labour, and Mandelson’s infamously depraved knitting circle. But then I got wind of what the banks were up to: I learned about derivatives, and began to study the gold sector. I overheard stuff in a famous London club about ‘phone hacking’ – and began to ask about it. Returning from a French holiday in 2006, I looked at the cheap Asian clothes on sale, the ridiculous house prices in the UK, the number of our friends who had massive debts, and the dominance of City financial products in our export mix. I heard Gordon Brown give a speech in which he massively and knowingly understated Britain’s overdependence on such paper shuffling.
Then I learned of Brown’s depression, and the blackmailing of Tony Blair to get him to vacate 10 Downing Street. I heard about some of the people around newly elected Conservative leader David Cameron. A contact in a German bank began to tell me horror stories about incontinent lending by everyone from the ECB to Credit Agricole – my own bank in France. In mid 2008, I first heard the words “sub-prime debt”. A few months later, I was in London when a valued contact rang me and said get your money out of Northern Rock pronto.
Since that time, almost every assumption I’ve ever had about anything has been challenged. At retirement age, this wasn’t the sort of future I was expecting. The real Iraq War motives, the creeping advance of Islamism, the corrupt instability of the EU, the crazy gearing ratios of US banks, the dependence of Australia upon China, the ghastly nature of the emerging Conservative Party, the dominance of investment bankers and globalist media barons, ubiquitous care-system paedophilia, spineless Labour leadership, American hijacking of the IMF, the bizarre cv of Angela Merkel, the hellish marriage between German bribery and Greek greed, money-laundering Peers, perjuring Downing Street advisers, a UK Coalition at war with itself yet in league with ethically bankrupt bankers, and the seedy manipulation of the Libor rate.
During this period, what started out as Boris Johnson’s bombast in favour of Rupert Murdoch alongside the Young Right’s idolisation of Milt Friedman progressed to being a dogged, deranged defence of every indefensible policy from ClubMed austerity to subordinating senior Sovereign bondholders. A country clearly in default became a country being bailed out. A half-baked fiscal botch became The New Dawn. An unrepayable debt became a revised repayment schedule. Downright denial of insolvency became “a strategy we must follow for eurozone growth”.
But then, ten days ago, stealing money from innocent bank depositors became Open Bank Reconciliation (OBR), and I finally realised there could no longer be any doubt: the King was in the Altogether, and engaged in a naked smash and grab raid on our assets. Worse still, the nudist King was nothing short of desperate, because it had to be just as clear to him as it was to me that his subjects had nowhere near enough money to repay the Everest of debt….a debt created by lazy export marketing, banker greed, taxpayer-funded bailouts, fiscal indiscipline, and derivatively sliced salamis of mad multiplication.
The paranoid conspiracists need to wake up: there is no Grand Plan hatched by the Elders of Zion in concert with the Bilderbergers, the Rothschilds, the US Fed, and the man who erroneously signed Barack Obama’s false birth certificate. There are only the mad plans of those the Gods are about to destroy. There is no more a Grand Strategy than there was 101 years ago today when the Titanic hit an iceberg. There is only blind hubris: the misplaced belief of Homo sapiens in its ability to control global panic, or sail at full speed ahead through treacherous waters.
Within three hours in 1912, the largest ocean liner ever made – a ship chock-full of multi-millionaires – went from supreme confidence in the species triumph over nature to the bottom of the Atlantic on its maiden voyage. Everyone from Draghi to Ahmadinnejhad has, in 2013, a quiet confidence in their ability to control the unpredictable. I fancy we are all about to be noisily disabused of this silly notion.
The Slog 