It's like the Wall Street Crash all over again - but far worse
Good morning, and welcome to my boudoir of doom and gloom. I've had some pretty depressing conversations recently; let me share the thoughts which have resulted.
However, if you are in any way impressionable, read no further -- for what follows is the most dismal column in the history of journalism.
Firstly, let me begin by announcing the cancellation of the silly season. Journalists call it this because, with the courts and parliaments closed in August, very little that's newsworthy happens.
Well, from now on, news editors won't be turning the malfunctioning supermarket-trolley or the blunted lawnmower into the headline of the day.
For we are shagged; comprehensively, pillow-bitingly, systematically and rectally shagged, with hideous news stories pouring out of every orifice.
A major Irish bank will fail this year, and will go cap-in-hand to the Government.
But of course, the Government has no money because it is being bled by a bloated, union-protected public service, which is sucking up every penny paid in tax.
Soon, we'll be back to the 1980s horrors of Haugheynomics, in which we borrow squillions merely to pay off the burgeoning dole-queues and an insatiable civil service.
Meanwhile, inflation is about to make what few savings we have perfectly valueless, just as the opposing teeth of rising prices meet those of plummeting property values, right in the middle of the floating white torso of the Irish economy.
Remember all those multi-storey projects which were going to transform the Dublin city skyline?
You do? Good. Now forget them.
But stay! The issue is only partly Ireland.
The world is sailing into the 21st century's equivalent of the Wall Street Crash.
The real problem with the 1929 Crash wasn't the fall in share prices so much as the fatal blow it inflicted to world financial confidence, and the panic it spread through governments.
This triggered a hysterical protectionism, which crippled global trade.
What do we not need now? Protectionism.
And of course, with our customary, feel-good stupidity, this autumn we'll all be cheering for Barack Obama.
He's a Democrat, and he looks nice, and he's half African, which hits all the right buttons.
But more to the point, he is also a protectionist.
And the world needs protectionism in the White House like a kindergarten needs plutonium in its play-dough.
Moreover, he has been simultaneously raising US expectations of a swift end to the war in Iraq.
But the conflict now under way is to be measured in generations, not administrations, and Iraq is only one component of the Perfect Storm that is gathering.
For Afghanistan is about to fall to Islamic insurgents, because Europe refuses to stump up the troops necessary to stabilise the country.
In which case, Pakistan also will probably follow.
Thus a very pretty picture: Islamicists, of one kidney or another in power, in an unbroken swathe from the Caucasus to the Himalayas.
And how would an Indian government respond to an Islamicist regime next door -- one that is armed with nuclear missiles?
Will it wait until Pakistan finally settles the Kashmir issue by turning New Delhi and Bombay into sheets of molten silicates? Would you?
Competition for scarce resources is driving the prices of oil, gas, meat and carbohydrates through the roof, soon triggering famines across the developing world.
Yet the lethal pathogen of an international brainlessness has been causing people to obsess instead about silly irrelevancies, such as global warming and the Lisbon Treaty.
But mankind can do absolutely nothing about global warming without exacerbating the forthcoming economic collapse.
Indeed, the diversion of agriculture into "green" biomass fuels has already had a catastrophic effect on world food prices.
As for Lisbon, oh please. Depressed? Don't be. I've only just started. China has amassed a trillion US dollars in Treasury bills -- no one has the least idea about its indebtedness or its fiscal stability and, in trouble, it could play merry hell with the US economy.
Even if it doesn't, China is building a blue-water, carrier-based navy and is expanding its commercial and demographic interests across South America and Africa.
In this latter, charming continent, uncontrolled population growth, deforestation, and collapsing states are soon certain to propel millions and millions northward, across the Mediterranean.
Europe's resultant African crisis will probably be resolved around the same time that Malawi puts a giraffe on the planet Pluto.
Which reminds me: Pluto's discovery, the renunciation by the world's major powers of all war as "inhumane", and the proposal by the French prime minister, Briande, for a united Europe; why, all these happened within a few months of the Wall Street Crash, 1929-30.
Odd how such things work, isn't it?
For Pluto was recently debunked as a planet; the world recently renounced cluster-weapons as "inhumane"; and yet another French leader, this time Sarkozy, said we should have a united Europe.
So, just to cheer you all up -- in 1928, Hitler secured 800,000 votes in German elections; in September 1930, with the German economy having collapsed almost overnight, he got 6.5 million votes.
Is there a Hitler out there now?
By 2010, we'll probably find out, maybe as NATO is dropping cluster-munitions on Islamicist insurgents in Armenia and Kosovo.
Okay, wake me up someone, I've had enough.
kmyers@independent.ie
- KEVIN MYERS
