Thursday 27 October 2011

It probably seemed like a good idea at the time...

We've all been there, the party gets a bit out of hand and you end up daring each other to do all sorts of stupid things, sometimes it's enormously good fun, at other times, somebody ends up in hospital or seriously embarrassing himself.

But I wonder what bizarre sequence of events led up to this: From The Evening Standard:

French president Nicolas Sarkozy announced at 4am that he will call Chinese president Hu Jintao today to discuss China contributing to a huge new bailout fund... Analysts said China, which has grown rich from mass exports to the west, would be wary of handing over money without assurances. Shen Jianguang, a Hong Kong-based economist for Mizuho Securities Asia Ltd, said: "China will need time to evaluate this plan very carefully."

Presumably Angie had already flashed her bra at passers by, Berlusconi had ordered fifty pizzas for 10 Downing Street, and the Greek PM had vandalised Rumpy's office, and now Little Nicky's challenge was to ring up Hu Jintao in the middle of the night* and ask for a trillion Euros while keeping a srtaight face.

* Or mid-morning, from Hu Jintao's point of view, but you don't think about things like that when you're really merry.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

For one moment I thought the heading referred to you seeing the light concerning LVT (the route to HOME theft)
Silly me.

Bayard said...

Hi, Fukov, are you going to answer my question about what happens to your HOME if you don't pay your income tax?

Mark Wadsworth said...

Anon, yes, silly you.

The Home-Owner-Ist cause which you espouse is just welfare for the middle classes*, and which sustains itself only by robbing others of their income via high house prices and via the tax system, all of which requires to force of the state to back it up (NIMBYism, bank bail outs etc). They are the people who are being robbed of a potential home.

Y'see, unlike you, I genuinely believe that having the widest possible spread of owner-occupation, combined with low or no taxation of incomes and a minimal government/forced wealth transfers are Good Things.

*We can match that up with welfare for the 'elite' (quangocracy, corporatism, EU and so on) and welfare for the bottom twenty per cent and we establish that, apart from a few million young people who are working as hard as they can but still have to accept lower living standards than their parents, the whole country is now basically thieves.

Anonymous said...

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/china-lays-out-conditions-under-which-it-will-bail-out-europe-does-not-want-be-seen-source-dumb

” One condition China might ask for is that its contribution be at least partly denominated in renminbi, which would protect its investment against currency fluctuations. China would buy euro-denominated bonds but repayments would compensate for any changes in the value of the renminbi, which has appreciated nearly 20 per cent against the euro in the past three years.”

AC1