Now they're all at it

Gordon's pumping our money into sustaining house prices and risky mortgages as fast as he decently dare (only pausing long enough to promise the precise opposite, affordable housing for all). Despite all that, it's definitely not been a good week for him at the polls, and that's an understatement if ever there was one.

It could be worse. We could be living in the US right now. They only have two big mortgage companies writing new business, they're all so nervous about their housing market. Their currency's getting to be like Monopoly money, no longer the mighty dollar of old and unlikely to be so again. So maybe George Bush is starting to grasp that if you cut taxes too far, and give your wealthiest supporters tax breaks with loopholes big enough to drive Fort Knox through, however rich your best mates end up, sooner or later your economy is going to suffer regardless of the mortgage industry; if you haven't got the money, you can't bail anyone out, however much you want to, or your currency just keeps falling. So what's he doing about it? You'd scarcely credit it, but he's looking for the European Central Bank to pump money into propping up the dollar. This of course is the same Europe he lambasted not that many years ago because they considered his Iraq invasion ill-judged, and told him so. Why on earth should they help him out?

Well, help him out they probably will, because several European countries, France in particular, are worrying over the rapid decline in exports to the US. So we have an absurd merry-go-round, everyone propping everyone else up, money bleeding from every orifice; will it make a difference? Of course it won't. You can't buck the market, that's what they said not that long ago, and there's a lot of truth to that. Remember Black Wednesday? Norman Lamont making the same futile attempt to save the Tories from the consequences of a series of bad economic decisions? Right now our overheated economy is going from boom to bust, something Gordon promised to put an end to eleven years ago. Exactly the same for our coalition partners; since their economy is bigger the collapse is going to be more spectacular.

Only one thing can save us now. The sooner we get our hands on all that Iraqi oil the better.