Some people, who should know better, like to think of themselves as actors. Take the classic case of the bald, plump bank manager who insists on playing the romantic hero in an amateur musical production.

Fred Astaire famously said, “Can’t act, can’t sing, can’t dance” — but everyone knew he could.

Gordon Brown is more like the bank manager, “Can act, can sing, can dance” — but everyone knows he can’t.

This is prompted by a risible clip shown on TV this morning of our theatrically-challenged PM leaping onto a dais to make a speech with such force I thought he might overshoot and fall off the other end.

He was, of course, sending out the message to us in his clunky way, that he is an athletic sort of guy who should not be messed with. The reality is he’s a portly, middle-aged loser who couldn’t act his way out of a ricepaper bag.

It might be rather endearing, except for the fact he’s wrecked the economy, ruined the country, and all but destroyed our Parliamentary democracy. Nothing amusing about that.

Give up the day job, Gordon. An acting career beckons.

Kate Hoey seemed to suggest this morning that the Queen should dissolve Parliament and call a quick General Election. She added, it’s only a convention that HM waits for the Prime Minister to make the first move.

Actually, the Queen has form on this. In 1974, on the advice of the Australian Governor General, John Kerr, she sacked the Labor government of Gough Whitlam, who was running up an enormous Federal budget deficit by spending on dead-end projects. Ring any bells?

It left a nasty taste in the mouths of many Australians, though, and prompted the subsequent referendum on the Monarchy, which the Queen won handsomely.

It may be that HM will remember the unpleasant aftermath of that incident and exercise extreme caution here.

However, I believe a large majority of people in Britain would welcome the cathartic opportunity to lance the multitude of boils popping up all over the body politic now.

Voters can’t be left out of this for much longer or there really could be violence on the street.

With the political class in deep trouble with the electorate, the Queen would be seen as a great redeemer if she acted crisply to transfer the reins of power back to her people in these dangerous times.

Go for it, Ma’am.

Bryan Appleyard has a thoughtful piece in today’s Sunday Times News Review about the effects of the internet, and Web 2.0 in particular, on society.

Surprisingly, for a man who writes extensively about science, he doesn’t really like it very much. By offering almost everything free, he writes, the internet is destroying real-world institutions, like newspapers, that bring together the talents of many specialists, and deliver a much better analysis of events than bloggers, twitterers and other individual efforts can.

The everything-free culture is also deflationary and may have played a part in the current dangerous round of deflation in world markets.

I’ve always been wary of “the wisdom of crowds” myself, since it’s easy to start a psychological contagion, as we saw recently during the “spend, spend, spend” trend that gripped the world prior to the crash. On the other hand, dictators are almost always brought down by popular uprisings.

It works both ways. There are beneficial contagions as well as disastrous ones, but many more of the latter.

The internet can indeed be dangerous to those susceptible to faceless faces and placeless places. On the surface, it appears to strip away many real-world threats, and often presents a sanitized version of events. Dig deeper, though, and it’s not long before you reach the land of psychotics, hate merchants, and lost souls.

The real danger of Web 2.0 is psychological. If you stick with intelligent users and websites, you may enhance your life in many ways. But stray a little to where the mass of players congregate and you could be in trouble from weird thought-forms and cultish behaviour that can take over minds, and even turn you away from friends and family. It’s the young that suffer most from this.

As with all such articles, the question left hanging in the air is: We can’t abolish the internet, so what do you suggest?

Inevitably, the answer is: Nothing.

We’re stuck with it. That’s life.

Europe is in a frightful fix, with Germany tipping off a mountain and the Club Med countries, plus Ireland, in virtual freefall.

After the bankbath, the next hurricane will be the autumn defaults of trillions worth of corporate debts which can’t be rolled over. Anyone invested with highly-leveraged private equity deals should follow the rats overboard before the owners wake up.

In many ways the worst is to come. The world financial system is utterly flakey and lacking in strength. Further crunches will only weaken it further.

Green shoots should be consumed now before the scorched earth returns.

Europe is in a bigger mess than most other regions because of huge exposures to the bust economies of Eastern Europe, and the dismal truth that EU banks have declared much less of their toxic debt load than the Americans.

It all sounds like an approaching death rattle in the throats of a preening Euro elite that boasted of its superior management and prudential skills to those pesky Anglo-Saxons.

What a pity Gordon Brown left nothing in the kitty for a rainy day. We would be sitting pretty compared with our continental friends, who would still be watching us enviously for our … er … prudential skills and superior management.

Stuart Bell has just expressed the view that House of Commons Speaker, Michael Martin, will stand down tomorrow to avoid being kicked out in a vote of MPs. What a relief, one down, one to go.

In the British system of Government, the top three personages are:

The Queen
The Prime Minister
The Speaker of the House of Commons.

In that order of precedence. Two of those three are corrupt and entirely self-serving, with no thought for what’s good for the country. You may be able to guess who they are.

With his close ally and fellow countryman gone, how long can Brown last? Surely the Queen can now prod Brown into calling a quick, refreshing General Election.

If HM points out that, since Brown usually ignores all conventions, she can too, and will not hesitate to dissolve Parliament as a matter of national emergency.

Tuesday evening’s audience at Buckingham Palace will be fascinating. Maybe Her Maj will sell tickets to raise money for a worthy cause.

A Euro-wag says there are only two well-run organizations in Europe: The ECB (European Central Bank) and Manchester United.

Man U may now have more spare cash than the ECB, especially if they sell Ronaldo.

When can we expect Jean-Claude Trichet to approach Alex Ferguson for an emergency bailout?

John Evans

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It used to be said that central banks were the most profitable businesses on earth. They chop down a $1000 tree, pulp it into paper, cut the paper into strips, print on them, and call it a billion dollars.

There’s money in them thar trees

In America this is now happening on a grand scale at the Fed — electronically, at least. The practice will be coming to Britain before you know it. The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street is already gathering up her skirts and sizing up her lumberjack outfit.

Even the austere Trichet of the ECB has been caught lasciviously eyeing up the axe. The Black Forest may not have long to live.

Gordon Brown, who famously once shared a bed with a lady called Prudence, will soon adopt policies widely recommended by Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.

The world has succumbed to the Zen-like contradictions of Wonderland. Alice has finally gone through the looking glass.

Almost anything could happen … and probably will.

John Evans

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Just a few weeks ago the world was wondering if we were about to be pitched into a deadly Black Hole created by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Europe.

Relax. The machine has broken down and will not be cranked up again until the spring.

Strange then that another Black Abyss stretches before us today in the shape of a virulent debt deflation of almost unimaginable ferocity.

Take these words by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in today’s UK Telegraph:

We face extreme danger. Unless there is immediate intervention on every front by all the major powers acting in concert, we risk a disintegration of global finance within days. Nobody will be spared, unless they own gold bars.

In case you think that smacks of hysteria, this is a man who has called this crisis correctly ever since the late summer of 2007. He adds:

“During the past week, we have tipped over the edge, into the middle of the abyss. Systemic collapse is in full train. … Central bankers still paralysed by a misplaced fear of inflation – whether in Europe, Britain, or the US – have become a public menace and should be held to severe account by our democracies. The imminent and massive danger is now self-feeding debt deflation.”

What this crisis shows is that world prosperity was built on a giant illusion: that there was real value in other people’s promises to pay at some future date, and that you could pass the parcel at a vast profit.

Time has run out and a bubble the size of an asteroid has landed and exploded in the centre of our civilization — the banking system.

The Sage of Omaha, Warren Buffett agrees, “In my adult lifetime, I don’t think I’ve ever seen people as fearful.”

Evans-Pritchard is lacerating about the EU and its Central Bank. It offered no “cover” to the Fed when Ben Bernanke slashed rates to 2 percent. The ECB simply raised its rate to 4.25 percent into a steep downturn, making oil inflation even worse.

As a last resort, it seems, the American authorities will use Bernanke’s famous printing press “to expand the menu of assets that it buys.” In the worst case, that could lead to a massive run on the dollar by foreign creditors and no end of misery for us all. But it may be necessary nonetheless.

At home, I have absolutely no confidence in the British government under Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling. They have been woefully slow to act, their policy to hide their heads under a pillow hoping it will all go away.

If Brown had even a small slice of a leader’s courage he would put together a massive package to recapitalize the British banking system; disown the “mark-to-market” accounting agreement, which forces banks into insolvency by estimating their assets on depressed valuations; take immediate control of interest rates by reducing them to 2 percent; begin to prepare for withdrawal from the useless European Union; and work closely with the Americans, who are, at the very least, fully aware of the immense dangers we face.

The Kraken is awake and bearing down on us fast. Over coming months and years we may wish that the Hadron Collider had swallowed us all up when it had the chance.

Update: The British Government has announced a variety of measures to recapitalize the banks and get the inter-bank lending markets working again. It amounts to a $900 billion bailout, eerily identical to the Paulson Plan for a country five times the size of Britain.

John Evans

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Hard times or better times?

The glib phrase “chickens coming home to roost” is about to spread across our media like a contagious rash.

The words are used to convey very bad times indeed, and place the blame on those responsible for keeping the cocks and hens busy doing something else.

By October, probably even September, the West could be in meltdown, with stocks and credit sinking to record lows. During the summer, unemployment will start to rise inexorably as various “crunches” combine in the perfect storm long anticipated by some of us. The knock-on effects could be extensive for most people and some businesses.

Last week, Bank of England Governor, Mervyn King warned Parliament that no family in the land can avoid significant cuts in their standard of living. Take it on the chin and adapt, was the essence of his message. It was the kind of sentiment you would normally expect from a leader announcing the country was at war.

New figures also show that British personal debt now stands at 173pc of annual income — a number so scary that even allowing it in the same breath as rapidly falling house prices is enough to make stout hearts leap from skyscrapers.

Bob Janjuah, RBS’s credit strategist, warns, “A very nasty period is soon to be upon us — be prepared. … Cash is the key safe haven. This is about not losing your money, and not losing your job.

“Globalisation was always going to risk putting G7 bankers into a dangerous corner at some point. We have got to that point. … The Fed is in panic mode. The massive credibility chasms down which the Fed and maybe even the ECB [European Central Bank] will plummet when they fail to hike rates in the face of higher inflation will combine to give us a big sell-off in risky assets.”

Oil prices should start to fall back as output is increasingly depressed. Next year it won’t be inflation we will have to worry about, but debt deflation.

Over the next decade, small children may start asking their mothers, “What do chickens do when they’re not roosting?”

Gold rushes come and go in the world’s innovation capital, California, but when they go … they really go.

We’re hearing that the City of Vallejo has filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy, apparently a first for a municipality. Half Moon Bay, home to a few internet big shots, may well be next. According to John Moorlach, Orange County board chief, “This is the tip of the iceberg: everybody is going to line up for Chapter 9 in California.”

What can it mean to people on the ground when their city goes belly up? What of their assets, houses etcetera? It will be interesting to watch this pan out.

According to Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers American house prices are likely to fall 25pc from peak to trough. With between 10m and 12m households in negative equity already, there’s still a way to go.

Shares across the developed world are set for big falls too. Albert Edward Société Générale’s global strategist says, “Nowhere and nothing will be immune. We are on the cusp of an equity meltdown that will slash and shred portfolios. We see a global recession unfolding. Liquidity will drain away and crush the twin emerging market and commodity bubbles. The recent hope that ‘the worst might be over’ is truly staggering. Profits are disintegrating.”

Ambrose Evans Pritchard of the Telegraph (UK) — ever the Cassandra — says pointedly, “Britain, Europe, Japan, and China will go down before America comes back up. This is turning into a synchronised bust, after all. The Global Slump of 2008-09 is under way.”

The Bank of England and the European Central Bank are still stubbornly refusing to cut rates because of inflation fears, which will be the least of our miseries in the next two years and should abate soon as global demand falls off the much-imagined cliff.

It’s probably true that Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve has saved the U.S. and other countries from another Great Depression. But nothing can stop a slump now because it’s already happening.

The European Central Bank (ECB) remains obdurate about cutting its 4pc interest rate despite the Fed going to the brink of its powers in Washington.

U.S. rates are expected to be cut by a whopping 1pc to 2pc today giving America an effective zero interest rate when inflation is taken into account.

The flight from the dollar will only get worse, especially with the ECB giving a two-fingered salute to the American authorities. It’s said that the eurozone (which does not include Britain) is in no mood to help the Americans — a situation similar to 1987, when the Bundesbank let the dollar slip into freefall, spooking the markets into a catastrophic drop.

Let’s not beat about the bush, Europe is engaging in a financial war with the U.S. As long as the ECB refuses to join in the rescue package, the dollar will fall spreading even more gloom around the markets. Some very senior commentators in the UK are now discussing the potential for a collapse of the entire banking system in the West and elsewhere.

Jean-Michel Six, Chief Europe Economist at Standard and Poor’s says, “There is a monetary war going on. The ECB view is that the Fed is a victim of its own mistakes and should pay for its past crimes. Frankly, they don’t see why they should be cutting rates when inflation is accelerating.”

British inflation measured on the CPI index, which doesn’t include mortgage costs, has risen to 2.5pc this morning. However, core inflation is down to 1.2pc, indicating that, apart from headline price rises in food and energy, deflationary pressures may be the real enemy in the months ahead.

Bernard Connolly of AIG thinks the ECB is making the same mistakes that led to the Great Depression in the 1930s. “The ECB represents the 1930s element in world central banking right now. It is adding to the atmosphere of panic in the foreign exchange markets and ensuring the collapse of the credit bubble in southern Europe and Ireland will be even worse.”

How long before cries of “Cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” are heard once again?