ECONOMICS 101

 

There are certain phrases and sentences that have stayed with me over the years but, even with the prosthetic memory that the internet has become, I can’t track them down. One such is ‘women don’t look for good-looking men, they look for men with good-looking women’. It sounds like Raymond Chandler, but I have read all his novels and never found the offending – and brilliant – one-liner.

Another of these elusive snippets has been attributed to Bernard Lewis, but he is best known as a scholar of Islam, and again I can find no proof that this gem is his;

‘Alchemy became chemistry. Astrology became astronomy. I wonder what economics will become’.

Whoever it was must claim their place in those compendiums of famous phrases, because the economists currently running the West into the ground have proved, if nothing else, that economics is not a fully fledged science even if technocrats insist that it is.

When US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen effectively changed the definition of ‘recession’ last year I though, oh, here we go. They are doing to language what the Trans crew and the race hustlers are doing with their pet words, just redefining them to taste. The Western economies, according to the cross-sectional mix of economic blabbermouths and sane people I have consulted, are an out-of-control train heading for the silent-movie bridge with a train-sized gap in the middle.

Every time I see a politician proudly announce the release of more millions, billions, and even trillions for some absurd ideological junket, the more it resembles watching your buddy doing a string of shots in a bar. He’s having a great time now, but the booze will catch up on him and he will soon be a man down.

What will happen if there is a dustbowl recession? We haven’t even had the roaring twenties as some sort of compensation. Britain, for example, pays around £6 million per day to house illegal immigrants. What if that money is no longer available? If you want some serious civil disturbance, just take the perks away from illegal migrants, some of whom are already unhappy with the hotel accommodation they have been given.

Quantitative easing – that’s printing money to you and I – produces inflation and perhaps goes a stage further to become hyper-inflation. That’s the bad one. Just ask Venezuela – inflation rate currently 436% - or Argentina or Zimbabwe. Or look back at the Weimar Republic. You can only keep the plates spinning on the long bamboo poles for so long.

It’s too depressing. I must refer you to the lyrics of The O’Jays classic For the Love of Money.