Posted by Adrian Toll on April 8th, 2009 - Add a comment
Reading about the unfolding credit crunch, a name which now seems rather quaint given the burgeoning catastrophe throughout world markets and personal finances, has been rather like rubbernecking a car crash around the corner, only to realise too late that the car in front has slammed it’s brakes on and you’re about to plough into it. As the consequences of the crisis in financial markets trickle down into everybody’s lives (”trickle down economics” never before contained such bitter irony), it seems an appropriate time to survey some of the more readable and enlightening articles about the crisis, while taking a look at what happened, what’s happening now, and what might happen in the future.
In the first of three articles we take a look at what happened and how, despite the financial arrangements being characterised as almost immeasurably complicated, it is in fact pretty easy to understand what happened.
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Posted by Adrian Toll on March 6th, 2009 - Add a comment
John Lanchester, in the New Yorker, reviews what sounds like a fascinating book “Lords of Finance” by Liaquat Ahamed, which takes a timely look at the role of central banks and central bankers in the world’s financial markets: Heroes and Zeros
The portrait of Montagu Norman, the governor of the Bank of England from 1920 to 1944, reminded me of a piece from the notebooks of Geoffrey Madan, a well-heeled London socialite with many artistic friends. (Harold Macmillan, in his introduction to the notebooks, described Madan as having “something of the look of those young men who stand about to no apparent purpose in Renaissance paintings”).
This morning I saw a magnificent sight. I came up to the City in the Underground rather late, about half-past ten. At Bond Street a man got in whom I just know, and have spoken to three or four times in my life.
He wore loose clothes, a ringed and jewelled tie, a crumpled black hat. His general presence made a most distinguished effect, suggesting all manner of romantic things: a Restoration poet, a historic French admiral, a bearded nobleman of Spain – the ideal which everyone would like to think his own great-grandfather attained, to adapt a famous obituary phrase. This strange being was in a state of high tension. He lay back looking half strangled, as it fallen from a great height, or praying to be supported in some heavy trial; darted a glance away, focussing a distant passenger and slowly dropping his chin; glared round with the queer look of a man swelling with laughter and longing to share it with someone else; or groaned aloud in pain.
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