Waking to birdsong

 Subject: Waking to birdsong

Waking up this morning to the sound of the BBC news on global affairs one is struck by the perilous nature of our world as we exit 2021 into 2022 and its hard to know which potential calamity is worse.

(a) Russia assembling its army on the boarders of the Ukraine, 

(b) the destruction wrought by global warming, 

(c) the financial consequences of debt caused by quantitative easing, 

d) the effects of Brexit on our fragile economy, 

(e) global supply chains dissolved  as trade sanctions are used to resolve poor decision making in the West over the last decade and 

(f) inflation to hit our pockets after years of almost negative inflation.

It’s a sorry story after the seemingly benign years following the end of the Cold War period. I suppose the turning point came with the banking crisis in 2008 when, despite a financial sticking plaster to save the banks from collapsing they simply reinforced their balance sheets, not their banking practices and the vulnerability of the west’s banking system was revealed. Successive doses of quantitative easing were required to disguise the fact that the books weren’t balancing and then China stepped out of the shadows to reveal how in hock we were to her as she manufactured 80% of our consumables. With the  imbalance of international cash flows and a reluctance by America to stimulate its own productive capacity a huge cash reservoir built up in China and started the Chinese world wide investment strategy called, “One belt, one road”

This financial colonisation process tied many poor nations to the cash cow that is China and like the dollar era, after the Second World War with lease lend, the claims made by the Americans on indebted nations like ourself, to tow the American line is now repeated by China with debt compliance through infrastructure projects which the poor countries require to enter the global export market with their raw materials which are needed by the advanced first world.

There have been equally worrying times in the past but today we have become very vulnerable by populist decisions made, on the one hand by weak government and on the other by tyrants.

As the common man or woman, events are largely out of our hands but we still have a voice and a vote as the surprise but refreshing trouncing of Boris's party yesterday proved. Was it a backlash on their duplicity, a disgusted cry to say enough is enough, let's put the grown ups back in power and Boris and his mob let loose to write their obituaries.