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Archive for the ‘Economies’ Category

This picture of the G8 Leaders sitting around a table together, is very symbolic because whilst they can arrange a meeting and deliver a conference, the one thing that they can’t do is deliver their electorates.

Solving the Euro crisis would be simple if either the Eurozone countries opted for a “United States of Europe” where all resources are pooled, both assets and liabilities or, Germany accepted ‘funding’ such a programme without such a structure. The real problem as the election of Hollande in France and the non-election of any kind of government in Greece demonstrates is that the average European voter is not prepared to face reality.

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All Socialists are Pond Life…but so too are their equivalents on the political Right, both are stuck fast in “nostrums and remedies” based upon political dogma from the past that have little to no relevance in today’s world. The biggest problem when faced with the failure, real or apparent of one course of action, is to immediately correct it by steering sharply in the opposite direction which seems to be the reaction of the French people in electing Hollande to the Presidency.

Whilst this is natural, when it comes to nations and economies, perhaps this is not the wisest course of action to take in fact, it is most likely the wrong one and can lead to lots of unintended and nasty consequences.

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I returned to the “Britain and the EU” theme recently only because of an article in The Economist on the subject of a proposed UK Referendum on the topic. I posted a comment against the article and as a result got some interesting replies. Often most replies on this topic are a waste of time because both the For and the Against mob consider their opposites heretics that should be burnt at the stake, never a basis for rational debate.

However sometimes, debate is possible and it teases out the various threads to the subject which is a good thing so the following are really various ‘one sided conversations’ which may work in covering some ground, this may or may not work, I offer it as is…

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Apparently the former ‘Dark Lord’, an European Groupie if ever there was, Peter Mandleson has put forward the idea that we should hold a UK Referendum on an IN or OUT basis. As someone wryly commented, a proposition that only a person no longer seeking elected office could make. Of course it is more likely that as the EU isn’t a burning issue with the British public, his guess is that confronted with a straight choice, they could be easily intimidated by tales of what they might lose by leaving the EU, a very Brussels stance if ever there was.

However and even for those of an “Visceral Anti-EU” posture, the fact that someone like Mandy proposes it, of itself might indicate that there is no need for an “IN/OUT” Referendum because the EU as we currently know it, is unlikely to survive it’s Nemesis the Euro.

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For an exercise in soft and weak minded liberalism, it would be hard to beat an editorial in The Independent that prattles on about youth unemployment. Whilst they sketch out some of the issues rather as plotting dots on a chart, they totally fail to join those dots up. The current levels of unemployment are distressing in all sorts of ways but what this Editorial like most politicians seem to miss is the key point about these figures…

This is not the disease, it is just a symptom of the real underlying ailment that is not local but global in nature. If you want to read it yourself, here is the link: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-articles/leading-article-we-allow-joblessness-to-rise-at-our-peril-7627537.html

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To my mind, Budgets are the same as New Year’s Eve parties, they come high on expectation and are guaranteed to disappoint in the actual event. I feel a touch of sympathy with any journalist having to write anything on this week’s Budget, to be honest, even felt the same for the hapless Ed Millipede…” Millionaires budget…” was the best he could manage, bless.

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I was quite amused to read an article today about two people who are “camping” outside the Apple Store in London, a week ahead of the sale date of the iPad 3 tablet just so that they could be the “First to get one…” Whilst rather sad and a bit pathetic too it is also quite thought provoking in an entirely different way when thinking about the wider world economy.

The iPad itself is a device for “consuming” material with limited data input potential rather than the “creative space” fully fledged computers offer. However, this probably more properly reflects the limited use that the vast majority of people have in terms of computing power. However, I suspect that whether we look at smart phones, iPads, Facebook, Twitter and all the rest, what we are really seeing is the start of a major decline in the current business model they all represent…

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I suppose and in often strange ways, we sometimes discover “the fatal flaw” in most ideas. Having started my commercial life as a designer concerned with engineering and production, there was a very amusing story about a “new mousetrap”, I will not bore you with the tale but the ‘punch line’ was quite simple:

The basic concept behind the design was obviously flawed and when called upon to deal with this, the designer instead of having a total rethink, just “improved” upon or refined his own flawed original concept. To engineers, this was all very amusing because it was something that we had to deal with on a daily basis and knew that it was far too easy to be led astray. I have an awful feeling that Scottish independence is the same…

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At the ‘turning of yet another Year’ there was a really interesting article in The Economist recently about the continuing phenomena of yet further increases in US productivity, it is well worth a read even if it raises more questions than answers : http://www.economist.com/node/21542211

Of course it led me to consider a personal “theme” I have been developing and that I feel will become ever more important from 2012 onwards, right across the “Old” Western industrialised economies and the World at large, “Productivity” in the old sense, is no longer any kind of solution, new thinking is needed.

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Whatever else may be said or written, as an Englishman, I am just so ‘stoked’ that for once, a British Prime Minister has returned from an EU Meeeting having made a positive decision and without excuses about why they were mugged by the ‘other big boys’, that is something even the ‘sainted Maggie’ never did. Well done David Cameron, I say.

Well we have the overnight fallout from the EU Conference on Treaty Changes to accommodate the Euro Crisis although these “changes” obviously don’t require a Treaty Change, they are just a further strengthening of the so called stability pact rules that everyone has already disregarded, led by Germany and France in the first place. What a load of bullshit this all was !

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