11 December 2011

In the light of the current world situation I thought I would start with what have been described as the five best sentences ever written, Some of which were written centuries ago but are just as apposite today. and then I will conclude this entry with 25 excellent homilies. or, If you prefer it , Great Truths.

FIVE BEST SENTENCE
1. You cannot legislate the poor into  prosperity, by legislating the
wealth out of prosperity.

2. What one person receives without  working for…another person must work
for without  receiving.

3. The government cannot give to anybody anything  that the government does
not first take from somebody  else.

4. You cannot multiply  wealth by dividing it.

5. When half of the people get the idea that they  do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of  them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to  work because somebody else is going to get what they worked for, that  is the beginning of the end of any nation!

Well, last night coincidently, the BBC put on a documentary entitled How the West Went Bust. This was the. European side of the sorry tale of which I previously watched the American side, that probably started the avalanche over parcelling up and selling on the sub prime mortgages as triple AAA investments.

After glossing over the corruption and millions of euros which are unaccounted for, the documentary turned to the English economy. Much of it was about consumer credit. In other words people buying things they could not afford and building up a large amount of debt. It rather quaintly showed the world in which I was brought up in when you were cautioned by your parents not buy anything until you could afford to do so, i.e. have saved up sufficient money.( I remember doing a paper round to save up £15 to buy a full set of Dickens – which I still have today) but then it showed the introduction of Hire Purchase in order to stimulate post war consumer spending. Which as I say was foreign to my generation so some smart Alec, euphemistically quickly renamed it ‘Deferred Payment’ which did not sound so drastic , a change from the way that we had been brought up to save the things that we wanted to buy.

Certainly the greedy bankers in this country had a part to play in the current financial crisis but, as the head of the Royal Bank Of Scotland explained. the banks are between the devil and the deep blue sea. Unless we pay the ‘going rate’ ,then our best people will go and work elsewhere, so in effect the banks will pay more and more to get the best people until it becomes uneconomic .Ideally, there really needs to be a worldwide moratorium on salaries and bonuses rather like the nuclear disarmament agreement. However I can see the impossibility of achieving such worldwide agreement. There will always be some small offshore country that would be prepared to host these massive financial institutions which can turn over £4-£500 billion in one day, so I really don’t know what is the answer to this no more than I know how they can bring footballers wages back to realistic levels. Interestingly, knowing nothing about football, it seems to me that clubs appear now to be reaching the ceiling whereby the wages they pay are crippling them and a number of them are going down, so it may well be that FIFA will cleverly devised some means of capping these ludicrously high wages for kicking a ball about.

Unless some sanity is returned or imposed on the financial institutions we are all doomed. Greece will almost certainly collapse having failed to honour its debts and be forced out of the Eurozone. Others like Italy, who have no choice but to pay interest on their debt at a rate which is totally unsustainable, will probably be next, followed by who knows? Portugal, Spain and then once the whole thing starts to unravel maybe the collapse altogether of the Eurozone. What effect that will have on the global economy no-one knows, one can foretell, only speculate and then base the contingency plans on that speculation. But then as I have said before, I am no economist so what do I know about it! The only glimmer of hope in all of this is that there are a lot of very clever people spending every day scratching their heads for a solution. Pray for them to come up with one soon.

More to my point is that I received a lovely long newsy e-mail from my darling daughter Chloe, basically apologising for not having spent time with me or contacting me over the past few weeks. Poor thing must be run off her feet with a part-time job in a very senior position as a clinical psychologist and three young children, all having to be ferried to different Christmas parties, pantos, school plays etc and a busy husband ,to keep happy. Of course, I don’t expect that the darling thing to spend a lot of time with me it’s quite enough that she thinks of me daily and prays for me whenever she can (albeit I am an aetheist). In any case I’m so looking forward to seeing her and the rest of the brood here over Christmas.

To finish this rather heavy entry, as promised I now give you 25 very sage sayings. Click here, learn and inwardly digest.