"Probably the Biggest Financial Crisis of All Time"

Martin Vander Weyer leads his article in The Spectator with this doozy:

At this juncture, my best credit-crunch advice is to keep beside your armchair at all times an atlas of the world, a modern American dictionary and a bottle of whisky. If your constitution is strong, you might also want a copy of the Financial Times but do keep the television zapper handy, so you can hit the ‘mute’ button when the news comes on.

Further down:

What began as the American subprime mortgage crisis is now the biggest global financial crisis of our lifetimes and probably of all time. Six weeks ago, we were being invited to feel sorry for sacked Lehman Brothers staff carrying their belongings out of that shiny Canary Wharf tower in cardboard boxes. Now we see just how far afield the damage is spreading; how many hard-working people, most of them much poorer than ourselves, are going to get hurt. And we begin to sense how chaos theory actually works, how the flapping of all those flamboyant butterfly wings in the financial industry has finally caused a tornado to rage across the world.

Asian and East European economies that looked immune to trouble because they were driven by low-wage manufacturing and not yet as decadent as the West, turn out to be just as vulnerable to the downturn as the buy-to-let plagued cities of provincial England. Any ‘emerging market’ that was hot last year is suddenly stone-cold, because foreign investors are fleeing as fast as they can, causing mayhem for local stock markets and currencies. And it turns out that many of these eager new players of the globalised game had all too swiftly learned our bad habits: their banks are dangerously undercapitalised and overexposed to real estate, while their profligate governments lack sufficient firepower for the necessary bail-outs.

I don't know if this piece will leave you chuckling. Or crying. Or tempted to do a bit of both.

Comments

[Student Investor]

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Thanks for publishing this comment.

[John]

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