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As the financial
system totters around Samson's sightless head, we can all feel good blaming
the post-Lapsarian evils of what we have been brainwashed into believing in
some way represents "free market capitalism." We can huddle
together and sing the Internationale in atonement at the shrine of the
saintly FDR, stopping a moment to pay an undue reverence to the sanitized
half-memory of the rag-bag of charlatans, vote-grubbers, and fellow
travellers who rode his coat-tails to power.
Ah well. Amid the
unseasonable chill and lashing rain which besets us, this bleak, solar
minimum July, such a mass outbreak of comradely curmudgeonliness would make a
rare divertimento from the relentless persecution of poor, old
"carbon."
If it does, however,
it might not entirely please Sir David King – former chief witchdoctor
(sorry, scientific advisor) to the British government. In a wonderful
example of utterly misplaced climate battiness from a serial alarmist, he
used an Observer op-ed last weekend to
suggest a radical new opportunity for unwarranted state intrusion in our
lives – not entirely whimsically, either, one suspects.
No more tilting for
windmills for this Green Knight: instead he has in mind a radical new role
for the Bank of England – you know, the institution which has proven s-o-o
successful in discharging its existing mandate of keeping down inflation
and of preserving financial stability; the one whose former governor, it
should not be forgotten, was a fervent advocate of the policy of stimulating
the turkey-breeding mess of the housing bubble and the fiscal blow-out in
order to compensate for the chicken-farm collapse of TMT, which also happened
during his watch.
In place of mundane
monetary manipulation, Sir David would like the Bank to be henceforth
entrusted with the job of reducing economy-wide CO2‚ emissions (no,
honestly!), presumably complete with the requirement that if a wet litmus
paper turns too vibrant a pink when waved in the air, the Governor would have
to dash off one of those confounded apologia to the Chancellor and
adopt a polar bear as penance!
Suspect science, bad
economics, and poor politics all in one remit. That's quite an achievement,
even for a career bureaucrat!
On second thoughts,
why not? Then, when the perversely-incentivised bankers next land themselves
in difficulty – compounding up from cap-and-trade to continent-wide
crash in a flurry of crazed financial creativity, no doubt – we can
presume the Old Lady will stand ready with a "special facility" to
swap the noxious flatulence they give off for a steady puff at the collective
oxygen tank.
After all, the
ordinary working man will never realise just who is responsible for
the fall in air quality he will be asked to suffer as a consequence and,
besides, what better way to be Green than to collapse the modern industrial
economy amid the ringing approbation of the anti-capitalist mob?
Sean Corrigan
Sean Corrigan is Chief
Investment Strategist at Diapason Commodities Management (Lausanne and
London)
Copyright © 2008 -
Copyright © Diapason Commodities Management - Sean Corrigan
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