There’s a bit of a catastrophe fest going on in the EU at the moment, but not much of it makes sense. Predictably, Brussels and its UK Fifth Columnists are arguing that the effect of a British exit from the Union would be catastrophic for London, because mainland financial centres would simply regulate the City out of the game. They couldn’t and (more to the point) they wouldn’t even if they could, but the bollocks will continue until enough people are frightened, or simply stop listening entirely.
What beats me however is how this catastrophe is going to square with the other one now on the horizon: the collapse of Cyprus. This time, the agenda is “we need another bailout”, and so Olli Rehn is leading the charge on how the sky would fall in without one. Now clearly, the sky can’t fall in on the eurozone if Cyprus defaults and on Britain because it leaves the eurozone. Nobody should listen to the ezoners anyway, but if they’ve all been blown over by Cypriot debt, the credibility of their “you’ll be destroyed” shtick is pretty seriously scuppered.
There’s another option hanging around in my mind, although it isn’t in the air just yet, as such: if the EU decides to take action against the UK banking system, we should default, and thus destroy theirs. I mean blimey, if little Cyprus can deliver a eurozone belly-up, Britain could destroy the entire Western world, couldn’t it? Once this sadistic kamikaze mentality takes off, there’s no saying where it could lead.
So we need to nip the entire thing in the bud right now, today. I propose, not a truce, but a truth.
What we need is a brief outbreak of facts to replace threatening agendas. In fact, I’d go as far as to suggest that, had more people studied and then stated the facts a little earlier, we wouldn’t be chucking ire in every direction today – and we wouldn’t all be doing it from the questionable safety of our very own gigantic vats of mire either.
The truth is that no nation in history ever paid its own gdp back in debt. Not only do the maths give plenty of clues as to why, I see no opposing clues coming from Cyprus that, in this vital sense, it is uniquely well versed in the art of so doing. So we should forgive the Cypriots before things get out of hand like they have everywhere else.
The truth is also that, once the more jumbo-dumbo markets work out how the UK (and that’s us, folks) is a pantomime horse wherein the head is insane and the backside not producing anything useful, we will be insolvent too. There simply aren’t any jobs left in vaudeville for crazy horses that run in circles and sh*t everywhere. So unless the ezoners want that sooner rather than later, they should STF up.
This is about as long as the truth session needs to be, because after that things start to sound so serious, just announcing them would be enough to render the major powers paraplegic. And anyway, the catastrophe war is thus far restricted to Europe. I think we should give it a try.
The Slog 