One rule for them….

For everyone’s information the 2nd world war ended 66 years ago. Angela Merkel was born in 1954 which by my calculations is 57 years ago. I only say that because I sense that some of the hysterical comments concerning Germany’s recent EU pronouncements owe more to events that happened in the last century than those that are taking place in the current one. 

If your father/mother/aunt/uncle or whoever were to help you to sort out your finances I suspect they would not then allow you to continue to live the lifestyle that led you to seek out their help in the first place. They would probably want to place a few restrictions on how you lived your life to ensure that the same problems did not recur in a few years’ time, even if you did not particularly like the idea. The German reluctance to write a blank cheque without conditions does not seem unreasonable in this context.   

Modern populaces want all the good things but believe that other people, better known as “the rich”, should pay for them. Politicians know this. Equally they know that “the rich” are much harder to tax than the not so rich. Therefore when borrowing was cheap and plentiful surprise, surprise that is what they did. Now it is all coming back to haunt the future generations that will have to suffer for it. 

Or maybe all along it was an elaborate new way to redistribute wealth. Fleecing “the rich” through loans that would never get paid back. Except of course it wasn’t just “the rich” that wouldn’t get their cash back. It would be all of us, via our pension funds or withdrawn essential public services that we reasonably believed we had paid for through our taxes.

We can of course once again blame the bankers. Given that there still seems to be little holding to account of those who’s reckless gambling and connivance in concocting the financial packages for both the public and private sectors that have subsequently unravelled that is an understandable reaction. However we all know that there was more to all this than the “greed is good” brigade.

The sad accountant in me is still trying to get my head around how the various debtor countries will ever pay back what they owe. All are still running annual deficits, and will be doing so for some years to come, which to my mind implies that they need more cash to fund these as well as refinance all the borrowings that need to be refinanced. Simple mathematics dictates that unless something drastic happens, sovereign debt crises will persist for the foreseeable future.

In our world of course businesses in this position would simply go bust, and given such a spectacular insolvency, those involved would find themselves at the very least banned from being company directors for a considerably long time if not facing more serious consequences. Maybe it is not possible for countries to manage their finances like Enterprise Britain has to, but hey we can dream can’t we?

The Nero Tendency….

Hackgate rules. The chattering and twittering classes are highly active, providing their followers with instant updates on the situation. By the time you read this perhaps more heads will have rolled. Forget Jeremy Kyle. The parliamentary select committee is now essential daytime TV viewing.

I have no sympathy with Murdoch et al (those who live by the sword etc.). Clearly there was a culture of anything goes in pursuit of a story, even if it wasn’t officially approved. However the sound of scores being settled often by people who in the past have been (and possibly still are) content to take the Murdoch shilling is equally unedifying.

Meanwhile, as these modern day Neros fiddle around with events that happened some time ago, Rome is burning. The euro debt crises has reached Italy a lot quicker than anybody thought it would.  The collapse of the Euro in its current form is once again a serious possibility. The fragile UK economic recovery is even more under threat.

One would like to think that the minds of our politicians and media would be focused on the serious risks to the UK global economy, working up scenarios, and devising various contingency plans to cope with whatever happens. Perhaps they are, although I suspect not. If there is fire fighting taking place at the moment you can bet that the hoses are trained on Wapping rather than Rome.

I came across many examples of what I would call the Nero tendency in corporate life. It invariably involved career and company obsessed individuals, for whom their own little world was all that mattered.  Some internal irrelevancy of theirs would occupy hours of management time to the exclusion of everything else. Meanwhile important external facing issues would be neglected.

One of the benefits of working with smaller businesses is that although the individuals involved are obsessive and focussed in their own way, they never forget that it is the outside world that makes them their living. They can’t afford to be distracted by internal issues. Indeed one of the challenges is to get them to realise that that their back office needs to keep pace with what they are doing to grow their business.

However for me that is a nice problem to have. Equally when I work for larger clients I can observe the Nero tendency when I come across it with a detached air, knowing that I no longer have to worry about such things as I can disappear into the real world whenever I choose. It is a good feeling, believe me.