I have just got off the Videophone with my cohorts Borke, Swine, Astral-Martin & Pitt-Quicker, the news from all fronts is not good.
Pitt-Quicker – the man who literally broke the bank at Monte-Carlo in 2008 & then sold it poverty insurance – is a deeply worried man. And when he frets we sweat. Fire, Plague & Pestilience are just opportunities as far as he is concerned to go long or short in the markets. But the current state of affairs has him rattled.
Apparently it’s not because he’s losing money. On the contrary he is coining it in faster than you can say ‘New Ferrari please’. The worrying aspect for all right thinking people is: He doesn’t know exactly where all this dosh is coming from and more importantly – where it’s going! For a man who knows the inner workings of the market with Newtonian precsion his current perplexity is astonishing. According to his gospel: bat-flu, Brexit, Trumpery, unemployment, factories idleness, empty planes, Governments cooking books and all related icebergs should have the markets & the economy holed below the waterline, but instead the whole issue seems to be rising faster than Lazurus on a Sunday. Individual stories can be woven of swings & roundabouts, but taken in the round the economic ship should be sinking with all hands, but here all the dosh dealers are, partying like it’s 1999…
Normally he is the first to know how the magic is done, what’s behind the curtain and how to make a turn. But for the first time in his professional, money-grabbing life he has no idea how long this flush will run and what to do about it.
Astral-Martin tells the same sort of story from the World of heavy machinery. They are bound up in red tape & empty containers, but still the balance sheets won’t fall off a cliff.
Borke our resident boffin & Swinefever of technical bent say in their Worlds it’s boom time for brains, which is slightly more explicable given the need for Science to think its way out of our current predicament, but who is ultimately paying for it all?
The short answer of course is Bunter & the Fourth Form, and like minded international circus’s, but since we all know they cannot organize a whiskey challenge in a distillery, the taps will have to be turned off at some point & there will be no strategy for a soft landing or what happens next, so sooner or later it will be Ka-boom baby! as Mitzi would say just before the money shot!
That being the case, why are the markets defying gravity & climbing higher just to make the eventual fall bigger? And most importantly for my limited buried family silver, when should we bail out? Too soon and we risk missing out, & too late and it’s pulling pieces out of the wreckage…
It all may seem like First World problems but that’s all we are good at solving & we have to keep our own particular Wolves from the door. Besides everyone gets wet if the ship goes down, and most passengers will drown.
On the whole this group has been anti Europe. Mostly because they hate the French & anyone foreign telling them what to do. They all saw the glint of Gold in an EU free rule-book, closer ties to the U.S. wallet, Far Eastern markets on the make & were rubbing their hands ready to roll the dice. But leaving aside the mountain of paper-work that now has to be climbed, resigning as a European super-power doesn’t seem to be as great an opportunity as it did four years ago in a World where bat-flu roams free & all the made up Global money is going to keep the ships afloat instead of building new shiny expensive projects to line all free-thinking lead-pipe capitalists pockets.
It makes for a Nation where the wealth creators I know are keen to hedge their bets – but are not sure how. Old remedies may not work anymore & the thought of an underfunded lazy, English Middle-Class is too much to bear. I am going for an early lunch with a big bottle. So much for virtual companionship!
Bulk and The Devil 