MAIN EVENT:
Remember all the smug tossers you went to school with? You know, the ones that make you drift off into your own mental world when you meet them at parties, the unfortunate souls born without personalities, who all went into phenomenally well paying jobs in the city. Well those guys have been a little worried recently. Yeah I know, I didn’t care either, until I found out that what’s worrying these guys is probably pretty bad for us as well.
It’s called the credit-crunch and it’s causing a global tidal-wave of recession that is apparently set to send us all back to a 1970s standard of living, if we’re lucky. Those of us in retail/media/arts and therefore without unions, will more than likely end up in Dickensian poorhouses, with wooden teeth, sending our girl/boyfriends out whoring and begging Mr Fenniwinkle for another week to pay the rent. I’ve already bought my stovepipe hat.
NB: If you were foolish enough to buy a house you’re especially fucked. Ha ha – Not so grown-up now are you?
The most annoying thing about an economic crisis is that despite the fact that everyone is totally fucked nobody has any idea why. It’s like sharing a studio apartment with a complicated robot that doesn’t have an off-switch, whose sole purpose in life is to poke you in the eye as soon as you fall asleep. However, as someone who once, for three whole weeks, worked in Canary Wharf – or ‘Satan’s Cathedral of Evil’ to give it its full title – I feel qualified to spare us all this indignity. So prey silence for...
The No One Really Likes Jazz Guide to our Impending Doom
Like all good international fuck-ups, it began in Washington. The hilarious Bush administration, during one of their seltzer-bottle and custard-pie meetings, decided to give every Yahoo and Yokel in the country their very own mortgage. Unfortunately, they’d forgotten that thanks to the free-market economy, the peasants were employed in low paying and precarious jobs, and that due to the school system that they’d forgotten to fund for eight years, they were too stupid to look after their own teeth, let alone their own home.
So the Federal Reserve gleefully handed out credit to every slack-jawed commoner that wanted it assuming that it had enough spare, unfortunately it had already given most of it to contractors in Iraq, who blew it up, and Saudis, who fired it into the air in celebration.
When the Fed realised this, they dispatched every employee to the corners of the country to look for more credit, unfortunately this included the bloke whose job it is to hold onto the guy-rope that keeps the dollar down. Due to inflation the dollar soon over-inflated and slipped its moorings, sailing off into the sky. The yuan, who copies everything the dollar does (it’s so cute), followed suit and soon the currencies of the world’s two superpowers were racing each other to the moon.
For a while the pound and the euro simply drank coffee and giggled, marvelling at their newfound buying power. However, they soon realised that the US could no longer afford to buy their stuff and began to cry, which sent their own economies into a downward spiral.
At lavishly catered board meetings across the continent, executives agreed that action must be taken. Strangely, nobody suggested that they take a temporary pay-cut and put funds into marketing and R&D to sure up their market share. Instead the decision was taken to drastically cut jobs in everything but core departments and adopt a zero risk, zero growth, siege mentality – the corporate equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and going la la la la la until everything’s alright.
The upshot is the sorry situation we’re in now. So basically, you should switch down a supermarket class - Waitrose to Sainsburys, Morrisons to Lidl etc –, forget about that holiday and not expect many scientific advances in the next decade. Sounds fun huh?
Now get back to work before they sack you.
