Philip K. Dick is the North American Borges (and if that doesn’t mean anything to you Ariel, don’t worry, Jorge Luis Borges is coming up soon…) Philip K. Dick (like Borges) is obsessed with the nature of reality. Dick tries to look behind the surface of things (behind the cars and jobs and furniture, behind politics and status, jokes and gravity, faces and skin) - behind the assumptions we make without even noticing we’re making them. Dick thinks that when we think we’re looking at the world, we’re merely looking into a mirror that reflects our own beliefs and prejudices. Dick, like Borges, believed there was a world behind that mirror, hidden from us, that was infinite and strange. That contained patterns which connected the points of chaos we perceive as life.
And their main vices are, appropriately, mirror images of each other. Borges wrote too little (his collected fiction makes a single fat book). Dick wrote too much (over seventy titles).
Philip K. Dick couldn’t get his early attempts at “normal” novels published, so he ended up, almost accidentally, writing science fiction. (To fail at being normal is to succeed at being weird.) Science fiction was the only publishing genre that saw the deep peculiarity of his worldview as a virtue rather than a vice, but SF didn’t pay well. (Its word-rates assumed you were pumping out disposable industrial product, as many SF writers were.) And so Philip K. Dick wrote fast, on speed, for money. At his speediest, he wrote eleven books in two years. As a result, many of his books have wonderful philosophical ideas, undermined by clunky, first-draft prose.
The Man In The High Castle is one of the few books he had time to rewrite and polish, so it reads better than most of his work. (And it won him his only award, a Hugo). It’s an alternate-history novel, where the Allies have lost World War Two. It’s set in a Japanese-occupied America. There are rumours that a reclusive novelist has written a book which describes the real universe, in which the Allies won the war… The hero tries to track down the writer, and the book. You slowly realise that perhaps neither of these universes is our own…
His other best book, from later in his career, is A Scanner Darkly, but you’d want to be in the whole of your health to read it. A book about paranoia that’s so powerful it can induce paranoia, it stars a man who goes so far undercover to investigate a drugs ring that he ends up ordered to spy on himself. It may be the best book about drugs ever written.
Reporting season for the big Wall Street banks this week. That'll be fun. "Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa..."
Something to watch out for: The US Federal Reserve isn't legally allowed save Bear Stearns directly (Bear Stearns is THE WRONG KIND OF BANK), so the Fed is pumping money into JPMorgan (which is THE RIGHT KIND OF BANK), and JPMorgan is pumping the money into Bear Stearns. (The Fed is essentially using JPMorgan as a condom.)
The emergency deal they've worked out only lasts 28 days, and is designed to give JPMorgan and Bear Stearns enough time to come to a permanent arrangement. (JPMorgan buy all or most of Bear Stearns for a dollar, most likely. OK, one-to-five billion dollars.)
Twenty eight days isn't long, to arrange such a big, complicated, forced takeover. But in real life, they've only got until the Asian markets open on Monday morning. So if you're in the NY pizza'n'coffee delivery business, get your butt down to 270 Park Avenue, and throw a stone at the lit windows in a few hours time.
I just wrote a long, complicated, fairly well-researched post about the collapse of Bear Stearns. When I went to save the post, it, for annoying technical reasons, vanished. Forever.
(I can hear you cheering from here.)
Obviously, the loss of a big, long economics post is good news for YOU, but I am unhappy.
I just made one of the world's shortest movies. Fourteen seconds, one shot. It's called Flesh Frame, and it's a brief and oblique tribute to J. G. Ballard. Filmed on one of the earliest camera-phones, if it were any lower-fi, it would be a single blinking pixel.
I won't tell you anything else about the movie, because its only function is to evoke a mood (or, in English, give you a feeling). And nothing wrecks a mood-film like an explanation of what you tried to do and exactly how you did it.
I'll tell you a little about Ballard, though. (Some of you will know all this already: fair play to you. Go get an icecream and I'll see you later.)
J. G. Ballard is one of the few great British writers of the past century.
You could also call him one of the most original and radical British visual artists of the past century. His "novels" are often a series of astonishing images, hypnotically encoded in words.
He spent much of his childhood interned (along with his parents) by the Imperial Japanese Army, in a Shanghai prisoner camp.
After Ballard's wife died (very suddenly and very young), he wrote much of his most extreme fiction in short bursts at the kitchen table, between sandwich-making and soccer practice, while bringing up three children.
The resulting classic of modern headwrecker fiction, The Atrocity Exhibition, was pulped a week before publication by his American publisher, Doubleday, after the head of the firm finally read it. (Doubleday were also my American publisher, for Juno & Juliet, which they loved. When Doubleday rejected my follow-up, Jude, with horror - they particularly hated Level 3 - I knew I'd finally achieved something really exceptional.)
Three years later he wrote Crash, a novel about sex and car crashes that is still sending ripples through the culture. (The shudders of orgasm? Or death?) Finally published in 1973, in print ever since, and about as influential as a novel can be, the initial reader's report to his UK publisher was "This author is beyond psychiatric help. DO NOT PUBLISH."
He is now seventy seven, and his prostate cancer has spread to his ribs and spine. He will be dead soon, and I would recommend that you read some of his work immediately, so that you can thank him by postcard while he is still alive. (He doesn't really do email or computers.) J.G. Ballard, Shepperton, England would probably get through to him at this stage. (Or just write care of his publisher: J. G. Ballard, c/o Fourth Estate, HarperCollins Publishers, 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, London W6 8JB, England).
If you don't know where to begin (I don't blame you, he's written a lot of stuff), I'll give you a quick guided tour of my favourites...
Feck it, I'll include links to Amazon while I'm at it, and if you buy one they'll slip me a shiny thruppenny bit. (Well, thirty or forty pence probably.)
A warning: Don't start with Crash or The Atrocity Exhibition, unless you're feeling well hard. They will do serious damage to your head. (Either you will throw the book across the room, or the book will throw you across the room.) Work up to them.(Yes, I know some of you ARE well hard. Fair enough, OK, go for it.)
A lovely place to start, if you're feeling at all delicate, would be with the short story collection Vermilion Sands, set in a desert resort full of cloud-sculptors and singing orchids. (One of his gentlest books, it is one of his own favourites.)
His most accessible and successful book was the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun, the story of an English boy's childhood in a Japanese prison camp. (Filmed later by Spielberg, yes. And, as with all Spielberg films, it would be a pretty good movie if you could remove the final 25 minutes of slush, in which Spielberg keeps trying to end it happily, against the grain of the story. Spielberg's strangely desperate attempts to end, to leave Ballard's dream without being changed by it, grow ever more conventional and sentimental, with each botched ending damaging the film more and more... it's fascinating to watch. As with Saving Private Ryan years later, Spielberg starts by telling us something true, and hard to bear, and then spends the rest of the film denying and rejecting that truth ever more hysterically, walling it off behind comforting clichés. Oooh, I could write a book...)
The followup to Empire of the Sun, The Kindness of Women, is a dreamy, wildly sensual classic.
The Crystal World is one of his early disaster trilogy, full of Max Ernst imagery. Crocodiles and jungle plants slowly turn to crystal. The world is dying beautifully. A man sails upriver, upriver, into the heart of lightness.
From his urban collapse period, Concrete Island is Robinson Crusoe on a huge traffic island, surrounded by lane after lane after lane of roaring cars. A man crashes there, and can't get off the island. Or doesn't want to. And then he finds a footprint... (I pay comic tribute to this in Jude: Level 2, when Jude spends weeks walking to London up the middle of a motorway's central reservation.)
The Unlimited Dream Company brings a dreamlike, William Blake, visionary end-of-the-world to the English suburbs. Banyan trees burst up through the pavement in front of the supermarket. People, after a difficult day at work, learn to fly, and are soon copulating with birds, high over Shepperton. Nobody seems to mind. (Anthony Burgess picked this as one of his Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939.)
And if you'd prefer something a little closer to a thriller, or detective fiction, there's Cocaine Nights. A death in a gated community. When all darkness and danger have been pushed outside the gates... is life still liveable, inside, as the sunshine bounces off the white concrete?
Those are my pick of the novels, but his short stories are among the best ever written. There's the Complete Short Stories (too heavy to hold in hardback, but sensible broken up into two volumes in the paperback.) The original collections... well they're all good (and mostly out of print), but I remember The Terminal Beach, in this edition, very fondly.
They'll hold you for now.
Seriously, pick one. Buy it. Read it. If you love it, tell him. He won't live forever.
A last warning: the reason J. G. Ballard doesn't sell like John Grisham is that Ballard's books knock you off balance and disturb you, annoy you. The language can be eerily flat. You can start to feel strange. Go with it. Get past it. It's worth it.
Met some very interesting people there. The other award winners included Gráinne Seoige of Irish-language TV fame, and Séamus Brennan, the current minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism (the ever-mutating government department which inspired the Ministry for Beef, Culture and the Islands in Jude: Level 1). As you can see above, I flirted outrageously with Séamus, while grilling Gráinne on the leading political questions of the day.
A fun night out, and Aengus has sent me many other nice pictures, which I do intend to put up on the site... But, right now, I'm more excited by the goings-on in the credit markets. You don't normally see the words "wild and inexplicable" popping up on the front page of the Financial Times...
I was given a sexy award (for my fab writing), in Galway this weekend. I may tell you more later, unless the glorious rush of life overwhelms me, as usual, and tumbles me so far into the blazing future that I can't be arsed rowing all the way back.
Michael D. Higgins (poet, philosopher, Labour Party President, and former minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht), a former recipient of the same award, also attended. As you can see from the photograph (by Aengus McMahon), Michael D and I took advantage of the occasion to publicly declare our love to the vast crowd of assembled dignitaries.
I'm reading at Bookslam, in London, on Thursday, February 28th, this year of our lord 2008. (That is, later this week). Please do come if you can. Or tell any of your London friends you think might enjoy it. I will not only read from, but also sign, copies of Jude: Level 1, while flirting with your disapproving partner. And I fully intend to end the night by disgracing myself thoroughly in a new and entertaining fashion.
I am operating on 2 hours sleep, so if this ends abruptly, it's because I've fallen asleep and my forehead, as it sinks gently to the keyboard, has posted an unfinished message.
I will awake in a few hours, with much of the alphabet embossed in small squares on my forehead, like a man punished by the Puritans for writing fiction.
(That's three paragraphs in a row that start with "I". A sin I wouldn't commit, even in a blog, were I sufficiently rested.)
Bookslam, for those of you too lazy to click on the hyper-link, is a kick-ass literary night out in London, with live music, a DJ, a poet and, on this particularly marvellous Thursday, me.
It's on in the west-end club now known as Neighbourhood, at No. 12 Acklam Road, London, W10 5QZ.
On Thursday, the culture will be provided by NOT ONLY Julian Gough BUT ALSO:
Zubz (known to his mum as Ndabaningi Mabuye), the Zambian-born, Zimbabwe-raised, South Africa-based MC, flying in, fresh as a daisy, from Johannesberg, with a feather in his flat but sexy cap.
Along with a few other writers (DBC Pierre, Howard Marks, Sebastian Horsley etc) I was asked to contribute some of my few surviving tattered memories to the current issue of Hot Press. The issue is a wonderfully exploitative and tacky DRUGS!!! special, with a coke-smeared model on the cover who happens to look a bit like the young Irish lingerie model, Katie French, who died recently after her coke-fueled 24th birthday party.
As the memories I contributed were from the same place and time as the Toasted Heretic gigs we've been discussing in the forum, I thought I'd repeat them here...
My earliest experience of drugs was as a member of a small tribe in Galway.
We would collect magic mushrooms in the traditional manner, on the sacred golf-course of Knocknacarra. Every season, Joe Seal, a priest of the tribe, would make magic mushroom wine. My first trip, the young men of the tribe gathered in a holy place in Salthill and drank deeply of mushroom tea. A heck of a lot of mushroom tea. Then we went to the Warwick. The night lasted several years, and I sank into the floor several inches whenever I lay down, which was often. Then it started raining in the Warwick. Then tribes of pygmies wandered across the dance floor.
It was unnerving, and many of our tribe fled. (Days later, we discovered that a busload of dwarves on holiday were staying in the Warwick: and that the place was so packed the condensation had been pouring from the ceiling.)
Some of us ended up in Spar, where one of our number demanded that the shopkeeper slice his Mars Bar into many slices with the bacon slicer. However, his urgent request was not understood, and our tribesman fled. Soon many of the tribesmen were in flight, through space and time. Several walked a number of miles out of town. One slept in a field. Another was found at dawn, still walking, past Spiddal, and was brought home by the forces of law and order.
They were the best days of our lives, and they destroyed many of us. Over the next few years, some of us achieved enlightenment. Some of us died. Joe Seal died in India. A girl I liked killed herself. A girl I loved lost her mind and never found it again, and is still lost. Quite a few of us ended up in psychiatric hospitals, or with terrible depressions… We didn't know what we were doing, we didn't take it seriously enough. As Philip K. Dick said of his friends, and of mine, "They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed - run over, maimed, destroyed - but they continued to play anyhow."
I have two very strong opinions on drugs. Those who are against drugs should take more of them: those who are for drugs should take less of them. Most societies make sure that their young people take dangerous drugs in controlled circumstances, very rarely, and with an experienced guide to make sure they come back with new knowledge of themselves, and of their relationship to the universe. We neck anything that's going, head down to Abrakebabra, and fight. Few achieve enlightenment in Abrakebabra.
The second image is of Yapa, Joel, JJ, Posen and Albi, visiting London from the island of Tanna, at the southern tip of the island nation of Vanuatu. It is from the acclaimed Channel 4 documentary, Meet The Natives.
The third image is a crop of a digital landscape called "Enlightenment", created using Terragen by the Arizona artist Pat Goltz.
I've been having a great, nostalgia-saturated conversation with Rachel King's sister Naomi, over on the forum. Apparently Naomi's first ever gig, aged fifteen, was Toasted Heretic in Clogs (the legendary pub in the legendary Galway Centre for the legendary Unemployed), in 1988.
That distinguished lecturer in linguistics at Trinity College Dublin, Dr. Breffni O'Rourke, is also chatting with us on the thread. Breffni may be better known to some of you as Toasted Heretic's chiselled-featured rhythm-guitarist in those early days (and resident Sex God, till Barry Wallace, now of The Rye, joined and took over that important role). It turns out Breff has a tape of the gig. He's a fountain of knowledge, I'd totally forgotten that decade, let alone that night. Apparently the original title of the song "Charm & Arrogance" (later the title track of our second album) was "Everybody Wants To Shag Julian Gough". Who knew?
So if you're into the intimate details of a particularly obscure Toasted Heretic gig in Clogs pub off Dominic Street in Galway city in 1988 (a gig so obscure even I'd forgotten it), by golly you've come to the right place. Click HERE...
Meanwhile, as I was reading the account of the Ireland-Brazil friendly unfolding on the Guardian's minute-by-minute live report, and as I threw in the odd email pulling the Guardian journalist's Offaly leg, I read (in the 83rd minute of the live report... the match must have hit a dull patch), that I had been, em... involved with his wonderful sister a couple of decades back, in Trinity.
As a result I am suffering an almost lethal overdose of nostalgia, and may need to do something terribly modern to get over it.
But by jingo, this is what the internet was invented for. Gathering round the global campfire, telling tales from the old days before electricity. Hurrah!
"A financial sector that generates vast rewards for insiders and repeated crises for hundreds of millions of innocent bystanders is, I would argue, politically unacceptable in the long run."
"The sophistication of the financial system had encouraged the major banks to engage in increasingly speculative activities. (...) So a crisis developing in the financial system has the potential not only to hit capitalists’ investments – it can hit workers’ consumption."
(The entire SWP analysis of the financial crisis is here.)
It's a measure of the almost comical enormity of the financial sector screw-up that the banks have managed to provoke the Financial Times and the Socialist Workers' Party into writing practically the same article attacking them.
Well, that bomb was dealt with immediately. The guy with the toothache probably still squezz in his appointment at the dentist's.
I said, weeks ago, that I was about to put up my next Great Book for Teenage Boys. Well, I've been trying. But for some reason I am blocked like crazy. I've written the damn thing three times, and not posted it.
Whaddya do? Writers are crazy. And the book is a head-wrecker, so no wonder it's somehow still wrecking my head. Great book...
Great excitement. They've found a World War II bomb around the corner, in Mulackstrasse, and evacuated the locality. The Rosenthaler end of Mulack Strasse has been blocked off! The dentist on the corner of Mulack and Gorman Strasse has been evacuated! Men with toothache wander about behind the barrier, disconsolate! Mighty entertainment.
Of course, as Silvio (the gifted hairdresser who works in Denny Gehrke's of Steinstrasse) sternly points out, there's hundreds of bombs buried in Berlin, so it's not really a big deal. But for those of us not born and bred here, it's a bit of craic.
Being around the corner, and thus protected from any potential blast, we haven't been evacuated, so we get the best of both worlds. Nothing like relaxing with a cup of coffee, with one ear cocked to hear the neighbouring flats lifted a hundred yards into the air. (Should they be so lifted.)
Ah, there’s nothing like a good, old-fashioned bombscare to add a little zing to city living. And what could be more old-fashioned than a World War II bombscare?
The reading in the cave was great. Conor Lovett IS Jude, which is a scary thought. And a tribute to the weird and timeless miracle of good acting. The first time I ever saw him act, he was totally convincing as an old man on the brink of death. Now, years later, he's totally convincing as an eighteen-year-old Tipperary orphan with two penises. Go figure.
(An aside: I know most of you proud and upright citizens avoid the theatre for religious reasons, but you might know Conor Lovett as Ronald, in The Mainland episode of Fr. Ted.)
We got great feedback from the assembled dignitaries (most of them theatre people, so their criticism was informed and knowledgeable). I was particularly happy with the negative feedback, because it was all stuff we can fix. The positive feedback was jolly nice too, though less useful. Most of the negative stuff was simply due to how brutally I'd edited it. I'd cut out so much to bring the reading down to 50 minutes that people, understandably, got lost. Scenes and characters weren't properly introduced. But the alternative would have been a two-hour edit where nobody would have got lost, but several would have died of hypothermia in the cave.
The finished show will be a lot longer, but the venues will be a lot warmer.
People laughed all the way through the reading, and the dinner afterwards was very jolly and went on for hours. A good start. One of the guests, Albert, reckons the cave is a lot older than the War, and that the Germans definitely didn't build it. As he fought his way across Europe back in the day, liberating Paris en route (he was in US Military Intelligence during the War), he should know.
He also liberated the very beautiful Micheline on his way through Paris. Sixty two years later, they're still married, and a heck of a good couple they make. Even Albert's family are beginning to think it might work out.
To quote the wise words of Jimmy "Bungle" O'Bliss, from Jude: Level 1: "Ah, Paris for love... Dublin for the Fumbled Handjob. Dublin for the Drunken Fuck... Paris for Love."
Anyone who can adapt The Unnameable (fondly known even by many Beckett fans as The Unreadable) into totally gripping theatre can do anything.
We spend all day underground, in a cave cut into the chalk hillside. Looking up at the chalk-and-flint arches above us, as a heater slowly warms the dark space, I feel rather as early Christians must have in the catacombs, if they ever put on theatre. ("Waiting for God", now in its two thousandth triumphant year!)
Conor and Judy think the cave was probably built by the German army during World War II, perhaps as a bomb shelter, perhaps to store ammunition. (The Germans also placed a rather large gun on the nearby hill, a couple of hundred yards away, overlooking the Seine. Didn't work, the Allies made their first successful crossing of the Seine about two miles upriver from here.)
We've invited some people out to see Conor as Jude tonight, in the cave. It'll be a short (55 minute) demo version, read rather than acted. Then we'll ask the audience for their responses, and suggestions.
Then we all go for dinner together. Theatre rocks! It's all talking and eating! Beats the shite out of sitting on your own, writing novels.
This is truly the World Cup Final of international financial meltdowns! America, staring defeat in the face, brings on super-sub Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve! He's on the pitch! He's scored a hattrick! Can he win the game???
Well, the US Federal Reserve panicked. Ben Bernanke cut interest rates by .75% an hour before the US markets opened.
Yes, to change metaphors, Ben wields the mightiest hammer in the world, and he has just struck the problem a decisive blow.
Trouble is, the problem is not a nail. No, it won't work. Markets will be heading south again within the week. He can only cut a few more times. Markets that need to fall can fall every day God made.
To change metaphor yet again (you can tell I'm a novelist, huh?), US markets have been permanently drunk for nearly two decades. Every time they were in danger of sobering up, the Fed poured more liquidity down their throats, to save them from a savage hangover.
That just put off the hangover, and ensured it would be worse when it came. Ben is pouring alcohol down the throat of a strong man who has finally passed out from alcohol poisoning.
... and the Asian markets continue to fall. India's stock exchange fell 11% in the first minute of trade this morning (Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008). Trade was automatically suspended for an hour before reopening. (If it falls 15%, there will be another automatic suspension).
So what will happen in the US when markets open? Well it's kinda hard to see them going UP. But on a day this volatile, there will be wild swings, as automatic trading algorithms are triggered to pump out enormous buy and sell orders (remember, some traders are making a ton of money by shorting this market... it falls, they win). So, wildly up and down, but mostly down. A serious opening plunge.
Should be a shambles. I'm guessing US markets will also be automatically suspended for a time today.
Well, Fitch did their best. They gave the US markets three days to come up with a plan. (They downgraded Ambac after the markets closed on Friday, just before the long US holiday weekend for Martin Luther King's birthday.) But what plan can you come up with? There's going to be a lot of forced selling into a falling market.
And there's no fixing the fundamental problem: a lot of the "wealth" created in the past few years, from insanely high house prices to comically complicated and poisonous derivatives rated a perfect AAA, was fairy gold, destined to fade away as we awoke from the dream of unlimited wealth for doing nothing at all.
On Friday, I predicted a massive multi-market meltdown as a direct result of the downgrading of the monolines. (Or, as I poetically put it, "if you ARE into economic meltdowns, this is going to be the World Cup Final of economic meltdowns, and Brazil are about to walk out onto the pitch...") On the next trading day (today, Monday), markets collapsed all over the world.
Or as the New York Times put it, with their usual blissful ignorance of what actually drives markets,
"Fears that the United States is in a recession reverberated around the world on Monday, sending stock markets from Bombay to Frankfurt into a tailspin and puncturing the hopes of many investors that Europe and Asia will be able to sidestep an American downturn. "
Isn't that beautiful? All the world's stock markets except the ones in the USA keel over (US markets are closed for Martin Luther King's birthday), and the New York Times report starts with the words "Fears that the United States..." and end with the words "...an American downturn." Everything has to be about them. Sigh...
Well, they captured about 40% of the truth (about the NYT average for any story that isn't about baseball or a quaint, family-owned deli that's celebrating its fiftieth anniversary by going out of business). Today's market collapses are, in certain respects, about the coming US recession. But they're more about the fact that on Friday, a ratings agency (Fitch) downgraded a monoline insurance company (Ambac) from AAA to AA, and put them on watch for further downgrades. For why that blew everything out of the water, see my previous post.
Why would that shake world markets enough to cause an avalanche of panic? Because there's only roughly half-a-dozen decent-sized monolines, and between them they insure between three and four trillion dollars worth of bonds. Call it three and a half. That's $3,500,000,000,000. Count the zeroes... Ambac was the oldest monoline (born 1971) and the second biggest, and downgrading it automatically meant downgrading over 100,000 different bond issues, with a total value of roughly half a trillion dollars (or five hundred billion, if you're into mere billions.) Bonds issued to build libraries in Stuttgart, or a bridge in Seattle. Bonds issued to fund corporate buyouts in Tokyo. And, recently, bonds stuffed with dodgy mortgages from who knows where... Bonds owned by everyone from investment banks to your dad's pension fund.
Ambac's slogan? "Financial peace of mind". And what prestigious award did it win one month ago? Global Monoline of the Year. Ah, I love the modern world, but it makes life hard for satirists.
Let's have a quote from a respected market insider, so you don't think I'm exaggerating the carnage(God forbid). This is John Authers, the unflappable, seen-it-all Investment Editor of the splendid Financial Times:
"On days like Monday, there is little to do but wait for the casualty count at the end. Even with the US on holiday, the sell-off was the worst single day for global equity markets since the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001."
The Financial Times' coverage of this ongoing credit debacle has been superb, before and during. Sigh. It's so superior to the Wall Street Journal that the continued existence of the Wall Street Journal seems to me evidence that there is no God. Or that he just doesn't care.
And the US markets open again tomorrow... That'll be interesting...
OK, my next prediction (these are going rather well): the collapse of the Chinese stock market, leading to widespread protests and social unrest in China. Timescale... Hmmm. Let me be conservative (I tend to be hasty and assume if something is obvious, it will happen right away). Well, over the next year and a half, almost definitely. But probably a lot (a LOT) sooner.
Much more than cut in half from its peak. Could go down to a third or even lower. There you go. More hostages to fortune...
Of course, a totalitarian state has powers of intervention undreamt of in the West, so it'll be interesting to see what the Chinese government will do in response to serious falls (which could well have begun, it's already slipped from its peak).
Look, I've got to talk about what's happening in the financial markets or I'll burst. Feel free to ignore it, I know almost none of you care, but I'm incredibly excited. And if you ARE into economic meltdowns, this is going to be the World Cup Final of economic meltdowns, and Brazil are about to walk out onto the pitch...
Well, anyway, for the few of you still reading... You might remember, I made a big, fat general prediction back in February 2007. I said, in this blog:
"At some point in the next five years (but my gut feeling is much sooner, within the next two years) there will be almost simultaneous collapses in the valuations of many unrelated asset classes across much of the world."
I also said:
"By definition, an unexpected collapse will be unexpected. It's impossible to predict the trigger, and foolish to predict the timing. But if it pops, the feedback loop which pumped it up will reverse and act to deflate it. There will be a horrible drying up of liquidity, a credit crunch, and a fairly general asset crash."
Bear in mind, this was six months before August 2007, when the current credit crisis started.
I also said, (as I outlined the historical process that leads to these things):
"Step one: A great idea. You can hedge risk by buying a derivative: for example, if you own General Motors bonds, you can insure against the risk that General Motors will go bust by buying a credit default derivative for those bonds. The derivative will pay out if General Motors goes bust. Voila! You now have no risk. Ultimately, either the bonds will pay up, or the derivative will pay up."
That was the theory for the past insane decade, and a very sweet and charming theory it was. But it was bullshit, and here's why...
Somebody has to be on the other end of that bet. Someone has to sell you that credit default derivative (let's call it an insurance policy). And if the bond does default, if General Motors does go bust... That someone who sold you the insurance has to have the money to pay you. And if that someone has mispriced the risk... has sold everybody around the world cheap, cheap, cheap insurance, firmly believing the policies will never have to pay up... And suddenly has to pay up... The money isn't there. The premiums were not enough to cover the risk.
The ultra-cheap insurance made everybody (banks, companies, hedge funds, private equity firms, individual investors, your mamma) happy to take on too much risk. Taking on too much risk, they eventually collapse. Collapsing, they trigger the insurance. Which bankrupts the insurance companies.
Which wipes out everyone's insurance, which causes banks, companies, everybody, to default, collapse, implode, as they get downgraded by the ratings agencies, and investors run like rabbits for the hills.
Well it's happening, right now. There are only a few big companies who insure all the bonds issued by everyone from IBM to your local town council. They are called monolines. And, in my opinion, they have been technically insolvent (or broke, as we used to call it) for months. But the ratings agencies haven't had the guts to downgrade the monolines' ratings, for fear of the consequences. This cannot last forever: the monolines ARE broke, and they WILL go bust (unless some generous soul from outside intervenes and bails them out), and the ratings agencies cannot pretend they're OK indefinitely...
Ah, enough for tonight. (It's not like anyone reads my economics stuff anyhow.)
Recycling is boring. It turns people off. If the future of the planet depends on recycling, we're screwed. It might be good for the climate, but it's anticlimactic. You go to all the trouble of carefully sorting your rubbish into categories - a lid here, an eggshell there - and what do you get for your trouble and pain? Depressed men grab your bin, haul it to a lorry, and tip it in. They don't even look at your rubbish! And you spent all that time arranging the orange peels, coffee grounds and old tagliatelle to look like a Jeff Koons oil painting! It's a slap in the face.
No. Recycling needs glamour. It needs danger. You need some sort of immediate reward, a payoff, for bothering. What it needs is something like, oh I don't know, wild animals, say, tearing apart your rubbish, and eating it before your very eyes.
Well, Germany has been leading this exciting new field for quite a few years now. Here in Berlin, you leave out your old Christmas trees on specific days in January for collection, and the Berlin council workers bring the trees to the Zoo, and feed them to the elephants.
As Ragnar Kuehne of Zoo Berlin told Reuters last January,"Elephants around the country will enjoy a delicious lunch today consisting of about five Christmas trees each."
Apparently, pine resin is good for their digestion. The camels and deer also get to join in the January feast. It's been a huge success, with public and animals alike. Indeed, there are rumours that soon, for a little extra, they will bring a baby elephant to your house, where it will eat your Christmas tree, live, in front of your cheering children.
Once the private sector gets involved, there'll be no stopping it. Across Prenzlauer Berg, wild, proud mountain goats will leap from bin-top to bin-top, pausing only to eat your old cardboard and newspapers. Already, in certain high-class restaurants here in Mitte, hyenas are being trained to lick your plate clean after the meal.
We will be back with A hundred thousand great new Syllables, after
This break.
Julian Gough
The website of Julian Gough, author of Connect, Juno & Juliet, the Jude novels, and the ending to Minecraft. He is also the author of the Rabbit & Bear children’s books (illustrated beautifully by Jim Field).
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