pandora's box

And it's right.

I love this post!

Alternatively: the golden goose hadn't realised the potential of what she had laid.

Spot on, and I would love to read a convincing counterpoint.

Is that so? If the game is 'devil take the hindmost', your analogy may be faulty.

If you're going to apportion blame, try to think it through first.

Did you decide on the term deluded before or after you read his article?

I don't know. But if ever their time had come, now is the time.

It is, but must it always be? Imagine if someone with genuine vision and humanity came to power and succeeded. It's not impossible.

Plan A failed and Mervyn King can't deliver on plan B. The GDP data release for the fourth quarter of 2011 has got the government and its supporters rattled. At PMQs yesterday, George Osborne looked dishevelled and seemed out if it; shocked, presumably, from the shellacking he has been getting from the media -- and Ed Balls -- for his reckless and failing austerity policies. His response that this was all down to the weather is absurd. New Statesman

The French president launched into a broadside accusing financiers of behaviour that he said had caused the crisis. "The world has paid with tens of millions of unemployed, who were in no way to blame and who paid for everything," Sarkozy said to Dimon. "It caused a lot of anger." "The world was stupefied to see one of five biggest U.S. banks collapse like a house of cards," he told a plenary session of the Davos Forum. "We saw that for the last 10 years, major institutions in which we thought we could trust had done things which had nothing to do with simple common sense. That's what happened." Sarkozy said bankers were wrong to resist tough rules. "There is an ocean between flexibility and the scandal we saw," he said. "So if people present me as obsessed with regulation, it's because there is a need for regulation. "I don't contest the principle of securitisation, but when one offshore country guaranteed 700 times its GDP, are we in the market economy or in a madhouse?" Finally, the French president took aim at bank bonuses. "Bonuses don't bother me, provided there are also ... draw-downs when there are losses. When things don't work, you can never find anyone responsible. Those who got bumper bonuses for seven years should have made losses in 2008 when things collapsed." Reuters link

Governments across the developing world are stockpiling food staples in an attempt to contain panic buying, inflation and social unrest. But the hoarding is driving agricultural commodity prices even higher. The cost of wheat, the world’s most important staple, reached a fresh two-and-a-half-year high on Thursday, after countries from Algeria to Saudi Arabia announced extraordinary purchases. FT link

If you are being ironic: very witty If you are being serious: tosser.

Who can afford nonchalance nowadays? No one.