Not just cuckoo clocks and Alpenhorns.

Not just cuckoo clocks and Alpenhorns.


And nor just banks for those who want to keep what they have earned, but hard talk and common sense. Swiss minister for the Interior Pascal Couchepin has lambasted the G20 and likened the OECD to ‘a restaurant guide’.

‘In this crisis the OECD shouldn’t be dishing out stars to good and bad states like a restaurant guide. It should instead serve them as a research centre, studying the causes and consequences of the crisis,’ Couchepin is reported as having told the Swiss ‘Sonntag’ newspaper. (This relates to the G20 getting their collective knickers in a knot regarding those few remaining states that provide confidential banking facilities.)


In further but more general criticism about the G20 Couchepin is reported as saying ‘Money isn’t the answer to this crisis,’ and that ‘that the sums discussed were like the G20 itself – forgotten three days later’.

And he’s right. Borrowing astronomical sums by nations that are in what really amounts to Chapter 11 protection isn’t going to solve the root causes, all it’s going to do is postpone and worse yet worsen the inevitable.

He further went on in a very hard hitting series of comments that trying to create jobs overnight as a means of starting up the economies, a policy being pushed by Brown and Obama but being much resisted by the majority of European leaders, will not cure the fundamental malaise.

And he’s right. Brown’s Micawber like mindset combined with his staggering arrogance (and incompetence) is so obviously inappropriate for the job he holds it’s hard to believe.

The issue isn’t the internal economic activity of a nation. It has to include the external economic activity, and until the balance of trade imbalance is resolved the situation will simply continue to worsen.

I do wonder if Brown’s real strategy is based on something closer to a Chapter 11 process than it at first appears. A strategy including the CEO bailing out before the process comes to an end and with the new CEO then taking the blame when the period of Chapter 11 protection ends and the corporation goes tits up anyway.

Or the incoming CEO having to do all sorts of awful things to prevent it and end up taking the blame for what had to be done. It’s happened before with the Thatcher government.

Perhaps the well known NIMBY (not in MY back yard) now needs to be joined by another acronym,

NIMTO.


Not in MY term of office.


Rog