London and the Credit Crunch and Financial Crisis
Sunday, March 1st, 2009It was with a pint of Leffe in my hand that my friend pointed out the hordes of too-cool-for-school youngsters streaming from Farringdon station to Fabric, the uber disco with a subconscious only-under-21 y.o. entry regime, that London wasn’t always like this. On that night, at about half past eleven, even around Farringdon was pumping, and the buzz, my London friend explained, in this part of town at least, was not completely normal. It was boom town. Ten years ago it was depressing, blame Thatcherism or militant unions, who cares, but it was miserable. Come 2007 – party on! Flash that cash! Live it up! And then came reality: the global credit bill. A party is only as good as its hangover. Now I don’t know where the raving kids go to drop disco biscuits and what dance moves they do or where the latest clubber experience is, I am over thirty, and have left London town, but the poignancy remains: Before the crash, there was a boom. London is no stranger to either.
It’s hard to understand how good it is until it is over, and I am happy to say I enjoyed the boom that it was, foresaw the credit crunch, and failed like most others of my generation who had never encountered a losing streak of this magnitude, to avoid the crash. But the crash is not so bad; if the great depression is a benchmark, and the dot-com bubble blow-out is a yard stick, then so far so good. The media can beat up a storm, the newly unemployed can moan, and hopefully, prices will go down, not just in over-priced London, but in other over-valued quagmires of value distortion.
The most striking thing about living in London for a few years up until 2008 were the prices – always expensive and always rising. Typical, in hindsight, of an untenable bet. Rents were exorbitant, restaurants microwaved average dishes and proclaimed it as organic feasting, the Government charged what they could to those that had to pay, hiking the prices without a care in the world. Then there was the finance industry, which I had the pleasure of observing from my limited capacity. From the Square Mile, to Fleet Street, Mayfair and Pall Mall, the finance crowd were ruefully aware of their superiority at extracting other people’s money and splashing it around on their gloabalised monopoly board. I knew the lies, and wide-eyed believed a few, and now the house of cards has tumbled. I was riding in a Black Cab and laughing with the driver, because like it or not, when Northern Rock was nationalised, we the tax payers, were now the shareholders.
Jokes aside, finance is all about privatising the profits and socialising the loses. I paid my taxes and although I calculated £900 of my taxed cash was pumped into a bank, there’s no return for me, ever, and a day. Who to blame? Don’t bother. Many out of work finance drones, who were once fretted as the brightest and smartest of the universe, now find that they’re unemployed, and back in the real world, the real valued world, their skills at washing other people’s money behind a veneer of superiority, holds very little currency. So, they can’t afford their rents and mortgages, they add to the property crash, and I find it hard to care. Everyone else suffers somewhere along the line.
But all this is history, repeating itself. It’s dead easy to blame the bankers, and too long sighted and hurtful to understand the real causes of the Credit Crunch, the Global Financial Crisis, the what ever they call it next. Great Depression 2.0. Recession 9.3. Who cares. We were all in it, and if you follow it through, it is only human to ride these cycles, after all, it is our collective history. Very few people can say they were above it all, and that they knew better. It is our reality, enjoy it. Funny thing is, it is not quite as exciting as the fall of the Roman Empire, but then again if Obama doesn’t save America, it could be! The most serious casualty of the economic meltdown could be the belief that held it up: Freedom. I once believed what I read, from both sides, and with a grain of salt. Now I don’t believe anything. As the red faced finance industry leaves the poker table to fight another day, the government steps in to clear up the mess and claim they always knew best. You can’t trust either party: One just wants your money and will lie and belittle you to get it, the other wants your vote and then takes your money (tax).
London before the crash was a snippet of history. Ever since the Romans rode the tide up and set up shop on the Thames, London has always been riding high on low on the global markets. Read up on the South Sea Bubble and the Dutch Tulip Bubble and have a jolly old laugh. Globalisation is a new term for an old necessity. And even though there is the usual talk about the global meltdown causing this and that, it is all rubbish: Life goes on. To the pundits who predict the worse, I ain’t listening. I’ve heard it all before, except in reverse: Buy! Buy! Buy!
