Nobody knows anything

Well, that's the longest Uncrunched blog holiday I've ever taken. Sometimes silence speaks volumes. I just thought getting the G20 summit, the new financial year, Vince Cable's new book and a whole lot of "real work" in the "real world" behind me would be a sensible thing to do. It transpires that I was correct and now one can get back to being quite silly.

During the G20 summit, as our world economic problems were not being sorted out, I played a rather silly game which I called "There goes Obama!". Everytime my modest pile shook from the vibrations of a phalanx of military helicopters flying overhead (I happen to live near the Excel centre in East London, the venue for the G20 summit) me and the nippers would run to the window and shout "There goes Obama!" It really was quite amusing and far more engaging than what the Saviours of the World were planning for us down the road.

Rob Killick, a fellow blogger, has pointed out, "the full scale of the crisis has yet to be properly discussed." Killick neatly describes how the collision of the economic crisis with a crisis in political leadership has created a situation where no one can act decisively or even discuss the real problems we are facing. "Catch 22" doesn't quite capture the situation, how about "Vortex of Fear"?

...We are nearly two years into the toxic debt crisis and still the bank bailouts appear to be having very little impact. The weakness and isolation of the political elites has led them to scapegoat bankers, and by extension the whole financial system of capitalism, as the cause of the problem. This has in turn undermined the bailouts of the banks as investors have become wary of being seen to be making money out of the crisis and governments have become constrained about what they can do for fear of upsetting their voters.

UK After The Recession

Reading Killick's most recent post (Green shoots or reinflating the bubble) about how Obama is trying to spin us into a 'pint class half full' perspective on the economy, I was reminded of a great quote from the legendary Hollywood scriptwriter, William Goldman. In Goldman's great book, Adventures in the Screen Trade, he describes how difficult it is to predict success: "...nobody knows anything... nobody – not now, not ever – knows the least goddamn thing about what is or isn’t going to work at the box office." Now, of course, we all know something, but as Killick points out, in relation to the economy, we should focus less on predicting upturns and concentrate more, on discussing the main problems that underlie the recession and how we got into this fine mess (as Oliver Hardy would say).

[If you have never seen football manager, Martin O'Neill, explaining to Alan Shearer and Alan Hansen about William Goldman and why "nobody knows anything" as a retort to Shearer, who reminded O'Neill that he had wrongly predicted France to win the 2006 World Cup, then you should. It is a hilarious moment in football punditry. I would have provided a link to the BBC programme but it seems to have been removed from YouTube but this delightfully named blog refers in detail to the incident].