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The road to fiscal hell is sometimes paved with the best intentions. As Europe’s politicians seek to win electorates round to brutal budget cuts, they would do well to look to the experience of Japan.
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I scan my memory, jumbled and blurred by hangover, jetlag, lifelag. Got it – he’s a media figure, fronts up current affairs programs, TV and radio. A real pro, and a nice guy too. “You’re looking well,” I respond.
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“When my mother was 10, she was evacuated to Sendai and saw the whole town get bombed flat. My father experienced the big air-raids on Yokohama. Their generation started out when there was nothing left of Japan but smoking ruins. Don’t worry about us – we’ll definitely recover this time too.”
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John Veals is the villainous hedge fund manager in Sebastian Faulks’ best-selling credit-crunch novel “A Day In December.” He is a man with no friends, no culture, no interest in anything other than making money. His nefarious machinations lead to the failure of a major British bank, enabling him to make huge profits from his short positions. Other characters in the novel include Gabriel Northwood, a virtuous lawyer, and Roger Malpasse, a retired banker of the old school.
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Shabu shabu is a simple but delicious Japanese dish in which transclucently thin slices of beef are dipped into a boiling broth of vegetables and tofu. A few seconds will do; just enough for the meat to turn pinky-grey.
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It’s the end of a quarter of a century of Reaganomics. It’s the end of equities, of globalization, of capitalism itself. We need a new system, a new economics, a whole new set of values. The bull market in overheated rhetoric is in full swing, and as is so often the case when a bubble bursts, there is a strong reaction against the intellectual foundations of the era that spawned it, spiced with rage against the people who benefited so handsomely.