Hold the frontpage

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The Great Squeeze has produced some really great headlines. Two at random from the Sunday Times: ‘Life gets tough-ish in Notting Hell’ and ‘Bonfire of the Bankers,’ which both referred to well-written pieces by Rachel Johnson.

Tom Wolfe’s seminal novel – ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ – featuring bankers and other horrible people of whom we were once in awe ( Masters of the Universe we used to call them) reads today like a history book bursting with wit and spite and the acid observation of which only the ascerbic, famously white-suited Wolfe, is capable.

And what of that box-office smash-hit flick Wall Street with Michael Douglas playing the barking but compulsive Gordon Gekko? “ Greed is good, “ Gekko shouted, strutting around watching his giant share-screen. And we all thought it such a scream, what a rib-tickler, we were rolling in the aisles. How times have changed.

You could re-release Wall Street today and watch the audience throwing cabbages and bad eggs at the screen. It used to be that estate agents, politicians and journalists were the most hated groups. Today estate agents and hacks don’t look too bad.

There never was any hope for politicians, even in the good times. So in these dark days together with the spinners and semi-literate speech-writers that so many politicos employ today they’re all but a step away from the tumbrils..

The new villains today are bankers, hedge-fund managers, short-sellers, derivative experts, vulture fund managers, and anybody who so much as dares to mention the hated B-word. That means bonus. It’s those of that ilk who are currently in the frame.

It all began going wrong long before the world had ever heard of a sub-prime crisis.

One only has to look back a year or two.

In the UK Thatcher said that if Gekko’s greed was good, money was God. Into the City came Big Bang and deregulation and armies of Yuppies in Porsches. In came financial yobbery and a brazen post-Thatcher Triumphalism. Out went pin-stripes and bowlers and fuddy-duddy carefulness and any semblance of integrity or propriety.

Then a vast sense of hubris engulfed the West as Statism collapsed like a rotten apple falling from a tree and Capitalism suddenly emerged supreme. Blair, Brown and Bush – three Bs in a row – said the Free Market, in all its unfettered, unbridled glory, would solve all the worlds ills. Dear old Milton Friedman had been right all along.

And what has happened? Northern Rock has been nationalised. Nye Bevan would have been proud of Mr. Darling and Mr. Brown. And the Hell-fire capitalism of the Republican party which is in its DNA has been turned on its head as it reluctantly plunders government coffers to save the US economy from collapse.

Just goes to show. You can never trust a word the politicians tell you.