Thursday, Jan 15, 2009
could just slash the cost of borrowing and print a load of money to get the old show back on the rd
Telegraph: This crisis is our chance to get off the consumerism treadmill
Remarking in 1959 that the Chinese word for crisis was composed of the characters for danger and opportunity was factually wrong. But his focus on the possibility of positive change emerging from even the bleakest situation was spot on.
Posted by holding out @ 09:26 AM (813 views) Add Comment
17 Comments
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1. tudorian said...
I agree that money management, personal savings and investment should be taught in schools. For the last 30 years we have produced school leavers / students that are unable to manage their personal finances and live by a spend now pay later philosophy.
2. Charlie Brooker said...
"Remarking in 1959 that the Chinese word for crisis was composed of the characters for danger and opportunity was factually wrong."
Weirdly this was a point made in Al Gore's The Assault on Reason I was reading about half an hour before I read this story.
Bizarrely in one fo the threads about cars some makes a point about men wearing business suits on a beach and how silly it looks. I was actually going to do just that for a light hearted promotional video I was making earlier this week. How f*cking weird.
This Earth. Its not just a coincidence you know.
3. str 2007 said...
True tudorian - to a degree.
One problem though, the philosophy when I left school was that you started a pension as the earlier you did the less you have to put in and to get a reasonable return etc.
Problem is the pension funds, endowment funds etc etc simply haven't performed, some have even gone bust.
If this country wants to get itself in order it will need to start with some basic trust.
The City looks after peoples money and frankly it's operated by a bunch of money grabbing sharks who put bonuses way ahead of any kind of performance.
In fact if I was in government I would encourage financial education but with it I'd make investing (particularly in British Companies) far easier, safer and more transparent for the man on the street.
I have more interest than the majority of people I know and find the whole thing a complete mine field and very complicated - it needn't be.
4. mark wadsworth said...
This whole railing at 'consumerism' meme has got completely out of hand, and is beloved by left wingers and right wingers alike.
People should be allowed to spend, save or invest their money as they please. The topic that they are all cheerfully ignoring is the fact that people have been tricked into vastly overpaying for houses over the last ten years, that's the source of all the debt. If people couldn't do all this MEWing then they wouldn't have spend so much more than they earned.
5. troy said...
Whatever else, China's continued growth depends upon continued ramant global consumerism
which appears to be falling off a cliff. ~~~~ or is it?
6. letthemfall said...
Some good points in this article, especially the one about consumerism, which I consider produces a vacuous (and now close to bankrupt) society. Consumerism is more than allowing people to spend their money as they wish. It is about the exclusive pursuit of wealth, spending on stuff you don't really need, ostentation, and inevitably the transfer of most of the country's wealth into the hands of a shrinking proportion of the population. It is about borrowing and soaring asset prices, second-home ownership (standing empty most of the time), environmental degradation and gleeful laughing outside the school gates at the cheapness of air fares to Nice.
And if I go for a holiday in Cornwall and stroll through a small harbour town, the last thing I want to find is a bunch of loud Surreys (DARLING, did you put my golf clubs in the 4X4) parking on the pavement, booking a table at Rick Stein's place and telling everyone how delicious the £5.99 bottle of Sauvignon Blanc from Waitrose was.
Yes, I have my prejudices too.
7. mrmickey said...
It seems that this is a generational problem, the generations that lived through WWI & II are nearly gone and their influence has gone with them, this leaves a generation who have never know war or real hardship and live life accordingly, they think the good times are the norm. Also young people are brought up to believe war is fun depicted in films and computer games & nobody ever really gets hurt, how long is before were all calling for another war which will be over by Christmas.
8. troy said...
letthemfall
I was lucky enough to see Padstow first in 1967 but sadly have watched it being progressively trashed (along with opportunities for homes for locals) by the people you speak of ever since.
It may be that current events will make this worse not better.
9. letthemfall said...
mrmickey: Yep, I think you're right. We live in shallow times. To some extent hardship is good for the soul and society. But only to some extent.
troy: I saw Padstow first in the sixties too, though it is a very dim memory now. The last time I was there, about 10 years ago, you couldn't move for people. I think the locals see tourism very much a mixed blessing. Incidentally, RS's deli was too packed to get into.
10. need-a-crash said...
@3. Mark Wadsworth
To be fair to the article it does make this point "...and they will question a national obsession with property speculation that steals from our children in the good times and throws an unfortunate few on the street in the bad ones."
Although generally I agree that over-paying for houses over the past decade is still the elephant in the room as far as most commentators are concerned.
11. mark wadsworth said...
@ n-a-c, fair point, I stand corrected. I suppose it is because a flat screen telly or a new car is something visible and tangible, whereas a house price bubble is rather abstract.
Another elephant in the room that winds me up is every now and then the MSM highlights a family on the dole that gets £15,000 a year in benefits (or whatever). OK, I'm not happy with the welfare system as it stands, but to be honest I'd rather pay for 8 families to sit happily watching TV all day (and leaving me otherwise in peace) than for one Quangocrat like Trevor Phillips who gets £120,000 a year (or whatever) for telling us how to run our lives and businesses.
12. stillthinking said...
What consumerism? In his group maybe. Most people don't own large plasma tvs and their cars aren't new. Most people are just poor. Not poor with lots of consumer goodies, just poor without them. Most media commentators see owning a mobile phone as evidence of rampant consumerism, but they aren't.
Perpetuating the myth that we bought too many goods, actually no just property, taxes, travel costs etc have been and are poverty inducing expensive.
13. bellwether said...
In fairness so called equity withdrawl on inflated house prices was what really drove the boom. Think it was something like £272 Billion from 2001 until begining of 2008. Apparently without this (and assuming we hadn't tried to be productive in other ways) the UK would have had negative growth for most of this decade.
14. bellwether said...
am talking about consumer boom in previous post if that's not clear
15. growler said...
@ Mark 3 and 10.
And looking further afield, we need to look at the causes of the bubble. Yesterdays BBC 9pm Evan Davies item was very good - and stated in comprehendable english. Hopefully people will see that securitisation and the subsequent CDOs and packaging and rating of them to appear better than they were is seen not just as a failing, but as one that requires legal action to rectify.
If you describe your car as never raced and rallied and one lady owner when it isn't, you can be sued if it's proven false. The CDOs and related derivatives are well regarded as nowhere near the AAA rating given. We need the people paid to market financial assets who fail to do this job to be the subject of LEGAL action at least negligence, most likely FRAUD. Make this action stick, and all of a sudden other "professionals" might take a lot more interest in accuracy. Hype causes bubbles - and hype needs curing.
16. letthemfall said...
stillthinking:
Isn't that perhaps the point? The pursuit of wealth does have this effect, directly or indirectly - the transfer of money from the majority to the minority, so that most people are either poor or at best on modest incomes, while the wealthy consume the lion share of resources, the poor forced to take the consequences of their consumption - living under flight paths, on busy roads, on cruddy new housing estates built above the hill of that pretty Cornish village bought up by the rich.
Before the housing boom we had the dotcom boom, in which people thought they could accumulate riches buying and selling one asset. An EA (who else?) once told me about some friends of hers who got their fingers burned over dotcom share, so decided to put their money into - property of course. Wealth acquisition rather than wealth creation. Money for nothing.
17. shipbuilder said...
3. mark wadsworth said...
"This whole railing at 'consumerism' meme has got completely out of hand, and is beloved by left wingers and right wingers alike.
People should be allowed to spend, save or invest their money as they please. The topic that they are all cheerfully ignoring is the fact that people have been tricked into vastly overpaying for houses over the last ten years, that's the source of all the debt. If people couldn't do all this MEWing then they wouldn't have spend so much more than they earned."
Of course people should be allowed to spend as they please. Consumerism, though, is actually the opposite of that, in my view. It is the buying of meaningless tat in order to feel wealthy, a substitution for the real wealth of security and satisfaction in one's life. This security is undermined and the upset exploited by corporations and business (through marketing and advertising), supported by the government (through fear-mongering) in order to make more money, the ultimate aim.