Double-Dip Recession – the View from Private Frazer

Royston? It’s me, Private Frazer from Dad’s Army, speaking to you from this horrible place beyond the grave.

What a complete bunch of bananas you wrote yesterday about double-dip recession, Royston. Do you really think that anyone will be taken in by your sentimental hogwash?

It’s easy for you to pontificate about the natural order of things and finding happiness in small ways – most of your life is behind you, and you don’t have to worry about the horrors that will face your children and grandchildren.

Not everyone is into golf, and anyway, what will become of the golf courses when food wars, water wars and rare earth wars will join the inevitable energy wars? And don’t you realise that we are delicately poised on a cliff-edge? If we – the major economies of the West – slip back into recession, we will unleash a domino effect of instability, the likes of which you will never have lived through before – assuming you live long enough to see it, of course.

When will you get it into your head that the only reality that keeps our society together is perception? For a prisoner in the gulag, happiness was a whole fish head in his watery soup as opposed to a few gelatinous bones. If we perceive, or are manipulated into perceiving, that there a problems way beyond our ability to solve, and that our personal livelihoods are under threat, then we will naturally take defensive measures that will trigger a collective domino effect.

If, on the other hand, enough of us kid ourselves into thinking that our bankers and politicians, idiots though they may be, will find a way to muddle us through the present crisis, then we might, just might, be able to avoid the inevitable comeuppance for a few more years.

But even if we manage to boost our economies by using the money our governments will print on  new TVs and patios, the reckoning will surely come soon enough. Don’t think that China and India, with their booming economies, will pull us through either. They are reliant on their exports of things and people. If there is a weakened demand beyond their borders for what they have to sell, their bubbles will burst, and their societies implode in a fury of unrest. So we in the West are not the only ones gripped by fear right now.

So quit this talk right now about double-dip recession not being a disaster.  And join everyone else in hoping that enough people, and most of all the shadowy collective known as the financial market, buy sufficiently into the illusion known as confidence – the twin brother of fear – to give us the time to pack up our belongings and head for the hills.

So there you are, Royston, a nice dose of healthy pessimism. You know you wanted it, don’t you?

As I told ye thirty years ago, and ye didnae believe it, we’re all doomed!