The Sketch: A poetic end to boom and bust, with no rhyme or reason
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Your support makes all the difference.But in fact he's got away with it. He announced the largest number the crisis has yet produced. It's very important to be first with these figures, and he crossed the line with $5trn. That's a lot of trillions. He also had another trillion to be disbursed through something I heard as the International Summitry Fund. A clear win over David Cameron (who wants to do nothing, you know).
Also, the PM looks good: earlier, he had a face like an old dishcloth but yesterday he was smooth and tanned. They put the pancake on with a palette knife, but he carried the day. He's had a wonderful time – and it's hard to dislike anyone enjoying themselves that much. It was like old times. He even promised an end to boom and bust.
He did, I promise you. He told us his G20 agreement would "prevent such a crisis ever happening again". Then he told us, "This time it's different" – the motto of boom-riders everywhere. He says they're going "to kick-start trade". I'm not sure that's how trade works but we can wait and see. Another questioner told him he wasn't offering "an economic stimulus" but "loans and guarantees". That didn't sound good but none of us knew why.
And there didn't seem to be much about how these banks were actually going to come right in the end. May I suggest we ask our leaders what they think is the dollar value of the banks' liabilities – it still seems to be too mysterious to think about trying to guess at.
But as Gordon said, the fundamental problem is that "the banks froze up". If that is true, the elusive figure will reveal the start of the solution. It can't be bigger than Gordon's $5trn, can it?
Enfin, it's a triumph of "doing something not nothing". We're opening up history's largest line of credit to eastern Europe and the Third World. So, the crisis caused by lending money to people who couldn't pay it back is to be solved by lending money to countries that can't pay it back. It'll be fine. We'll write it off, print some more and the people who lent it can get seven-figure bonuses paid into their named and shamed tax havens.
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