Sunday 12 October 2014

Repeating the conditions of the 2008 slump

Mitch Feierstein, in an article in the Indy in August, warned that the same mistakes that led to the collapse of confidence in financial institutions six or seven years ago are being repeated, only with central banks dragged in. He concluded:

The recipe was ever thus: equal measures of greed and speculation, blind-bake, heat on full power. Relatively speaking, the risk is 40 per cent bigger than it was in 2008: bigger institutions, bigger transgressions, bigger fines. And this time, the central banks want a slice of the pie, making this an exponentially larger feeding frenzy that can only end with indigestion.

Our only chance for salvation is an injection of honesty and governance into politics. Voters will not keep blindly electing politicians on rhetoric and spin, but that doesn’t mean the outcome will be an improvement. The swing to the right in the recent European elections suggests more than a protest vote.

Someone once alerted me to the BOHICA syndrome. BOHICA? I asked. He sneered: “Bend Over, Here It Comes Again.”

On this side of the Atlantic, the Telegraph is not the first journal to warn that borrowers taking advantage of government schemes and lowish interest rates are going to be hit when the next downturn comes - and this cannot be more than five years away.


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