I just checked the news again and aparrently there’s a financial crisis on. Still. The ‘credit crunch’ as it’s being called is the biggest gift the world could ever have given to the 24-hour rolling news readers, economists and other financial pundits, it’s pretty much all I hear: morning, noon and night. Whilst watching BBC News 24 the other day I heard a news reader ask a guest economist, “so what do you think about what we think is going to happen”? They’re paying people good money to speculate about things then paying other people to come in and speculate about the consequences of the original speculation - clearly with a US election and a financial crisis the 24hr newsmonkeys are like pigs in slop. The most annoying part of the whole process is that the news programmes these days seem to follow the same basic formula:
- Financial Crisis x 15 minutes.
- Political stories (usually related to the financial crisis) x 5 minutes.
- Skateboarding horse (or some other “and finally” story) x 2 minutes.
- Sport x 5 minutes.
- Weather x 2 minutes.
- REPEAT
There’s probably a stack of interesting stuff going on elsewhere in the world or even in our own countries but we never get to hear about it because of the dreaded Financial Crisis. It’s a close call but I think that the Credit Crunch is on course to absolutely destroy the previous orgies of pointless repetition: the deaths of Princess Diana, Pope John Paul II and the Queen Mother. There should be a Guinness World Record for the number of times the same fact has been repeated on a 24-hour rolling news programme, if anyone actually had those numbers it’d be scary. Another piece of sloppy journalism I heard the other day was a reporter stating that “because the banks are unwilling to lend money there will be businesses who can’t get loans to pay their staff”, surely one point that stands out there is that if a business has to borrow money to meet it’s own payroll then it was pretty screwed in the first place!
That’s not my sole beef with the media either, I’m still reasonably certain that the media have played a very strong hand in exacerbating (if not actually causing) the current financial brouhaha. Initially there was a problem with the banks and only the banks, a whole industry of people had sprung up taking crappy mortgages, bundling them up into crappy (but shiny new and exciting) financial securities that were then sold to a bunch of greedy fools. This kinda went wrong and a few banks became a bit wobbly (notably Northern Rock in the UK). From this point onward the media was absolutely full of doom and gloom at every turn and has set out on a crusade to destroy whatever consumer confidence the world’s developing countries had left. Well, it’s worked and they’re still raking in the air-time and the (consistently diminishing) advertising spends from major marketing companies.
In a way I can forgive the media a little bit because despite all the blustering and headlines not much has actually happened. Sure, a few bankers have lost their jobs but I personally don’t know one single person that’s lost their job or suffered any negative impact from the current financial climate, in fact I have a colleague who just last week walked into the bank and within half an hour came out having doubled their entire credit line (and I’m not talking small change). Sure, house prices are lousy at the moment but that’s been hapenning for ages - despite all the crap in the news it wasn’t caused by the current state of the economy - if anything it’s an actual cause.
I’m off to see if I can make shoe-leather soup out of Vegetarian Shoes, gotta save those pennies somehow!
