Across the pond

Just picked this up from the blog of Adrian Monck, the young upstart who is now head of journalism at City University, London. In his blog Monck extracts from an article written by one of the Bradford and Bingley companies written as recently as last May.

It is chilling in its complacency. This is the lot who have just been bailed out by the Government, who have been selling their services to tell people where to put their life savings.

Far be it from me to suggest that readers should trust journalists.

But we are living in an age when Lehmann Brothers have joined the bread line. Which unlike Bradford and Bingley is a firm at the heart of American consumer capitalism.

What the bankers are saying to each other now – in my view rather belatedly – is that the world is facing a crisis, probably the most serious since the 1930s. The minority Republican administration of George W Bush, has survived by pumping money into the US economy, which is Democratic policy, not Republican.

It is now reaping the famine. And governments and bankers around the world are thinking up ways to stop the panic, which can turn a financial crisis into a world-wide depression.

They may get it right. But on the other hand they may not.

The economic thinking which enabled President Franklin Roosevelt to take the US and the world out of the 1930s depression was that of a British economist, John Maynard Keynes who was married to a ballet dancer.

Keynes’ seminal work, was ‘The Economic Consequences of the War’, meaning the First World War.

The voices of today’s economists who have been pointiing to the economic consequences of the Iraq war, have been drowned by the babble of the many economists employed by governments and big business.

Individually, the journalists are quite as untrustworthy as human beings as the bankers and the politicians. But the journalist’s job is to report what those in power are saying, and to compare that with what they said and did in the recent past.

So in today’s conditions we need journalists. As individuals, what they have to say is no better, or worse, than what is said by those who hold the reins of power. But collectively they deserve to be listened to.

The first of the Presidential debates in the US ended in a draw. Although it was supposed to be about Foreign Policy in fact the state of the economy took up quite a lot of the time. Not whether McCain could do better than Obama, if the US was faced with an attack from Putin’s Russia, Iran or the new China or the new North Korea. Which are all possible.

But not very likely.

But the debate reflected the situation in the US where many Americans are in danger of losing their jobs and their homes. And at a time when most of the power players in the world, and particularly China, have learnt how to turn American consumer capitallism to their advantage. And so they will suffer if the US economy collapses.

Just see how many products you buy are made in China?

The voice of the economist tellling us this is drowned in the Babel of our media age. But he must be there somewhere.

And maybe some journalist will find him.

Or her.