Look out there's a monster coming

A vicar was telling me about a close encounter this week with a city trader. The guy’s face was Pale Grey. We are now definitely in uncharted territory, apparently. On Thursday Andrew Brown drew attention to a new form of “socialism” that, having privatised the profits is now socialising the losses. Commenting on an FT Editorial Andrew suggested:

Extraordinary to reflect that I have lived long enough to see communism die and then the capitalism that replaced it too; to see the nation state and the empire wither away in Europe, and now to return in Asia, and that I have managed to do this without getting very old at all.

As various big UK names hit the skids, naturally, action is being taken to see if financial institutions can renormalise everything. Short Selling was one way institutions seemingly alchemized increased profits (“fertilizer”) out of falling prices (“manure”). Now it’s off the UK menu until next January.
Can the various other ripping wheezes that have inflated fantasies all round get us all back to where we thought we were?

Striding towards canary Wharf from just below the horizon, come various other Bogeypersons, threatening the way things have been:

• An increasingly embattled dollar, withering as the oil-based reserve currency.
  
• New energy world order, with big fresh competitive demand from the East, in which state owned big players marginalize the cosy old “Seven Sisters”
  
• Debt crisis — stoking trillions of housing loss into mushrooming US public debt, the eventual burden supercharged by desperately socializing AIG insurance losses as well as FM/FM bad debt.
• Climate Change adjustments about which it becomes increasingly difficult to pretend
  

Big lumbering monsters, all these, and peak oil? Is this just me, or is it all beginning to look slightly precarious, à la Ezekiel 28, out there?

PS (h/t Kendall Harmon) the NYT reports that the US treasury is likely to pick up the tab on foreign banks’ US debts... Richard Lindsay of HSBC says “this is a positive step forward but it won’t solve the problems of an overleveraged industry...” Hmmm.

Game of Two Halves?

You can’t always get what you want. So, for those who don’t believe in the possibility of trampolining elephants, here’s another future for the dear old C of E, from the ghastly, but compelling, Criss Angel:
h/t to Nick (Wilson) for showing me this.
PS Don't have a cow. It's been like this (Trust me — I am Cambridge trained historian, yes?) for at least the last 1300 years...
PPS CA must use little/ exceptional people n’est-ce pas? Or ET?

Back to the Future?

Paleo-Future (Palaeo-future?) is for history junkies who wonder how the future looked from the past. Relish thought-transmitting headgear for women, paperless offices and personal hovercraft! here at home I treasure a yellowing cutting from the Times of July 1971 claiming, as a mathematical certainty, that all vestiges of organised religion would have disappeared by 2011.

Our forebears didn't always get it wrong, however. Some 1900 cards from the French Government's national collection certainly ring a few bells...

The UK National Curriculum?










Cable TV Porn channels?










The Iraq War?










Without launching into a great Rumsfeld "unknown unknowns" thing, this proves the Mark Twain principle that what makes a monkey out of you isn't what you don't know. It's what you think you know, but it's wrong!
What false certainties do we cherish about our future, or, for that matter, our present?