nothing common about this market
The bitter truth of the current economic downturn is that we’re all going to be the poorer for it. And in reality we should have all seen it coming a mile off. Contrary to the depiction by many journalists, the free-market has not failed, it’s just delivering a long-overdue correction, a correction necessary and one brought on by a generation of cheap debt and inflated house price equity.
For years, we’ve been living beyond our means, blithely assuming (hoping?) that free-market economics will fund our ever-improving lifestyle and anticipated comfortable retirement. We’ve grown petulant and greedy and have come to expect these as our right. But guess what? Growth is not automatic and these are not our God-given rights. The supply & demand nature of our economy means if we’re not keeping up with the competition in either cost or production efficiency, the free-market will shrink our economy. The resultant bottom line is that we’re all (well, OK, most of us) going to have to get used to living less well and expecting less to be automatically provided to us.
Furthermore, at the risk of appearing even more pessimistic, don’t forget we still have to deal with the fall-out from the euro crisis, a situation that Barack Obama has said is “scaring the whole world”. Greece will default on its debt. And so will Portugal. Please God help us I hope Spain, Italy and Ireland don’t go the same way. And which country looks likely to tip Greece over the edge? Tiny, Slovakia. The country declined to take part in the first part of bailout last year on the grounds that Slovaks are poorer than Greeks and should not be required to pay for Greece’s profligacy. So much for the European ideal!
Hands up if you remember the Common Market? Back in the early 70s this is how the EU was first envisaged, a relatively loose area of free trade set up by relatively equal states. ‘Relatively equal’ equating to economic size, economic development, negotiating power, similar military outlooks, similar-ish religion and faiths, ambitions and goals. Even with this in mind we had to be dragged to the European table kicking and screaming. Ted Heath must be spinning in his grave right now when he sees the size, scope and cost of the omnipresent EU.
One long-standing myth is that the EU came about through a natural and highly laudable desire to prevent any repetition of the two previous World Wars. No such luck. It was actually inspired and conceived by the French diplomat, Jean Monnet, in the early 1950s. Monnet’s belief was that French has suffered huge humiliations in the two wars, especially with the development of the Vichy Government, which was fascist at best and Nazi at worst! He felt that France’s diplomats and politicians were no longer treated as they had once been and in order to recover their prestige, the country must become one of the emerging superpowers, with a fully continental and international outlook. The arrogant Bonapartist believed that such a force could only be directed and controlled by the civilised and cultured individuals produced under the Tricolour. Fast forward 50 years and many would argue his dream is realised.
