I’ve long been an adherent of what I call, Up-To-A-Pointism.

If something works, it only works up to a point. Thereafter it yields diminishing returns, followed by negative consequences.

Government intervention is like that, as are free markets. Both have a limited bandwidth within which they operate well.

Politicians are largely unaware of this iron rule of nature. They should be. Our future rests on it. It is vital that attempts are made to determine the limits that constrain every policy decision.

The Alan Greenspan era, which finally collapsed in upon itself on August 9 2007, was the last hurrah of Reaganomics: scant regulation allied to free market economics, especially in financial markets.

It passed its point of usefulness around the turn of the century when some Asian countries were shipwrecked by massive money flows in and out of their economies. By then, the essential principles had become inflexible dogma, crowding out necessary evolution of the system.

The Left always brings settled dogma into government. Its methods are already written down by past socialist heroes, so they must be true, mustn’t they? That’s why the Left invariably fails in office.

Blair and Brown knew that in 1997. New Labour presented itself as the champion of free financial markets, just as the notion was beginning to shapeshift into corrosive insanity.

In the U.S., George W. Bush, thanks to Dick “deficits don’t matter” Cheney, was trapped by the dogma of the Right and its sorcerer’s apprentice, Alan Greenspan. A little Up-To-A-Pointism would have gone a long way at that time.

The same can be said for globalization. Up-To-A-Pointism should have been applied long ago to the idea that “the world is one and the same.” In political and economic terms, it isn’t. It never was, and it never will be.

Today, Gordon Brown’s shiny new big idea — riding on his newly-found sense of invincibility — is to summon a meeting of “world leaders” — shades of Bretton Woods — to reshape the global system in accordance with the old puritan’s post-war, iron-clad viewpoint.

So it’s back from Greenspanomics to Truman and Attlee — or Churchill and Roosevelt if you believe Gordon Brown. Remind me, what happened to the Bretton Woods agreement on global fixed exchange rates? I seem to recall it foundered irretrievably in 1971.

New dogma is replaced by the old stuff. Democracy is ditched for governance by foreign leaders, unelected by us, and unaccountable.

On a global scale, and at regional level — the EU in Britain’s case — we are ordered about by layers of oligarchy, lacking knowledge of who we are, and uninterested in our wishes and cultural preferences.

More than anything now, the world needs Up-To-A-Pointism to refresh its grasp of reality and to grapple back our basic freedoms from the hobgoblins who would rule over us.

If we’re looking for an iconic figure for the new age of austerity, it should be Edmund Burke not Leon Trotsky.

John Evans

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This Saturday I’m impelled by an urge to write about something less gloomy than the world financial meltdown. So I’ve chosen:

The death of the database.

Bear with me, it’s not as dark as it sounds, and is much more interesting than it seems. In fact, if you’ve ever struggled with a database, like Microsoft’s Access, you may be forgiven for throwing your hat in the air.

First principles first. When we begin playing around with computers, we become aware there are two types of memory — the stuff that disappears when the computer is turned off, or during a power cut, this is Random Access Memory (RAM); and secondly, the hard drive onto which we save our work to preserve it when the computer is shut down.

We learn to be wary of RAM because most of us will have lost chunks of work when something goes wrong. We place much more faith in the hard drive, even though they can go pop too.

Hard drives are run by databases — a form of software that organizes data so that it can be retrieved from a number of different angles. Databases are the worker bees of almost every software application. They purr away in the background while we type — paging, fetching and carrying all manner of information at our bidding.

Syntagma is powered by Wordpress software which operates dynamically, making constant calls to a serverside database to construct pages on the fly. It can be a slow process sometimes and is prone to error for the slightest of reasons.

So how is it that a Google search produces millions of results in a fraction of a second? We know they have all of the internet on millions of computers in various datacentres around the world. Could it possibly be done with a massive distributed database threaded over countless Dell boxes?

The answer, obviously, is no. But the surprising fact is that they hold the entire internet in RAM memory. That’s what makes the process so lightning fast.

I must admit I was slightly dumbstruck when I heard that piece of information.

And that’s the shape of the future. Cloud computing, as it’s called, rather poetically, makes a local hard drive redundant. In future, if Google gets its way, we will work almost exclusively through our browsers, with applications in the “cloud”, that’s to say online in a form of super-RAM memory. Hence, the death of the database as we’ve known it.

The British Government is addicted to creating endless databases containing every fact about us. Most of them don’t work, and they leak information faster than the Colorado River leaks water. Ministers might like to consider cloud computing as a cheaper alternative.

Of course, it may seem a bit risky to entrust all your information to a single company holding it in the most fleeting form of remembrance possible, but that’s what the future looks like.

Imagine not having to keep offsite backup copies of everything on a second drive or memory stick. Think how cheap computers will become if they don’t need hard drives or massive operating systems, like Windows. Conjure up a world where everything can be done on a small box — any small box, anywhere in the world — and with the minimum of equipment and maintence. In fact, think smartphone, enlarged for more comfort and ease of use.

Clive Sinclair used to claim that you could run a nuclear power station on his little ZX80 computer back in the early 1980s. I always refused to believe that, but he may have been right. In the next decade we’ll be able to run the world from a BlackBerry.

Clouds and blackberries. William Wordsworth would feel very much at home in the 21st century.

John Evans

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Yesterday, a senior Conservative was said to have exclaimed, “Good grief, this is Brown’s Falkland’s moment.”

He was referring to the Falkland Island’s war in the early 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher was way behind in the polls and presiding over a country ravaged by recession — some of the pain inflicted by her own monetarist policies. She went on to win the next election with ease.

Watching Gordon Brown yesterday I sensed a smug belief that “this is my moment. At last I’m fighting on my terms and my territory.” Since many of the problems we have now can be traced to his door, that attitude is hugely condescending to most of us.

While Margaret Thatcher was correcting years of Labour incompetence and waste, her creative destruction is defensible. By contrast, Brown simply squandered the best economic inheritance given to any incoming administration in more than living memory.

As a corrective to his wild decade-long spending spree, Brown has put at risk £500 billion ($900bn) of our money. Note how a country one-fifth the size of the U.S. needs the same quantity of money to bail it out.

Although the package is an ingenious assemblage of prods and winks, Brown is not doing what the Fed announced yesterday, buying up commercial paper (corporate bonds) to keep the business sector flush with funds. This crisis may have started with banks, but it’s hitting Main Street hard right now with the worst of it to come in the UK.

This is not Brown’s “Falkland’s moment,” it’s his bed of shame.

P.S. How about this for an idea to break the fear of bankers to lend to other banks? It comes from Bob Cringely over at PBS in America and uses the methods of Jack Welch, former Tzar of General Electric:

“U.S. bank regulators should go to all the banks this afternoon and say, ‘You aren’t making loans, which is part of the definition of what it is to be a bank. If you aren’t acting like a bank by tomorrow we’ll take away your banking license and transfer your deposits to another bank that WILL make loans.’ Problem solved overnight.”

Sounds mighty feasible to me — if you could prevent them all saying “No” simultaneously.

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?

Walking around an English town in Devon this morning, I was struck by how cheerful people still are.

There may be a credit drought on, possibly leading to another Great Depression or, more realistically, a rerun of the decade-long Japanese deflation of the 1990s, but most people are not noticeably glum or defeated.

Is it that, in our heart of hearts, we prefer the challenge of austerity to the runaway greed of endless prosperity? Are we still basically puritans always ready to slap the wrists of our hedonistic tendencies?

In May 2007, three months before the words “credit crunch” floated into the world’s consciousness, I wrote a short piece here in Syntagma called, These are the good times. It was a riposte against the floodtide of moaning minnies who were convinced “the end is (sort of) nigh … anytime soon”.

They included the “climuttchange” mob, the fearful, who thought Islamic terrorism would do for us all, the squeamish prophets of a world dominated by China and India, and the usual purveyors of various non-specific causes of doom.

Well, they got it wrong. Nobody foresaw the financial meltdown to come, even though it rested visibly on our horizon, awaiting its 15 years of fame.

So, here’s that piece in full. In retrospect, it seems more than a little prescient.

These are the good times
Syntagma, May, 2007
Are you getting tired of hearing the whining, depressive voices of the new prophets of doom? Listening to technologists, scientists, politicians, pundits and economists, you would think we were passing through a Dark Age.

The threat from China and India is seen as dire and growing. Climate Change threatens our entire civilization. Terrorism stands ready to murder the lot of us in our beds.

We terrorize our own children in schools by telling them that flood, fire and famine are just around the corner — unless, of course, they recycle their sweet wrappers and stay at home in the holidays.

We warn of catastrophic job losses because of a rampant China and a burgeoning India … and maybe Brazil too.

Jihadist Islam is plotting to turn the world into a gigantic Caliphate in which men will wear turbans and women will all but disappear beneath miles of black cloth.

These are the bad times, indeed.

What rubbish. We’re being manipulated by neurotic, self-serving attention-seekers with nothing better to do.

In fact, these are The Good Times. In the north, we’re entering a balmy period of clement weather similar to the Medieval Warming Period, which lasted hundreds of years. Then, we Brits could grow wine in the northern fastnesses of Northumberland.

In the Little Ice Age that followed, the River Thames through London froze over every winter. They were the bad times.

Soon Scottish Chardonnay will be on every menu, and bourgenvillea will grow wild all along the English Riviera from Lands End to the White Cliffs of Dover.

In a few centuries another cooling period will begin and the price of fur and fuel will rise. Make no mistake, these are the good times.

China and India are interacting with rich Western lifestyles with the only comparative advantage they have : low-cost labour. They send us cheap goods which keep inflation low and increase the standards of living of the poor. This should have the effect of driving us to become innovation societies, with highly educated and high-waged populations.

The new Tiger economies will reach that stage soon enough and things will return to normal. But, for now, these are the good times.

As for terrorism, no-one ever took over the world from a cave in Pakistan. In fact, in Britain we suffered far more casualties from the Irish Troubles in the 1970s and 80s than we have from Islamic terrorism. Our grandparents went through two world wars when countless millions were slaughtered and mankind went collectively insane. Not to mention the inter-war Depression.

Then they had the Cold War to put up with, and possible instant annihilation or slow death by radiation poisoning.

So, here we are : great weather to come for a couple of centuries, comparative peace, and endless cheap goods and gadgets from the Chinese and Indians.

THESE ARE THE GOOD TIMES.

Get used to it!

* * * * *

So, even in a good period many of us thought we were in the bad times. Could it be that in the coming bad times, we’ll do the reverse?

We should. Mankind is not built for hedonism and idleness. We are provisional creatures designed for challenge and hard times. Our long, tough history proves that.

When times are good and enemies thin on the ground, we kill each other. As the above article demonstrates, we failed to appreciate how good things were historically as recently as the beginning of last year.

Let’s welcome the hardships to come, when we might just recognize our essential nature as evolving beings, and unplug our reliance on minor distractions and empty pleasure-seeking.

We could start by relearning self-reliance, and leaning less on politicians who seek to please our lower natures for their own benefit.

John Evans

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Welcome to the first issue of a new, occasional feature of short pieces in a diary format.

I watched part of the American Vice-Presidency debate last night.

Today I sat through a TV summary with the sound turned off. I find you can catch more of the psychological quirks and nuances if you cut out the noise.

A voiceless Sarah Palin seemed animated, keen and fresh, while old Joe Biden looked like a ghost. His age is much more apparent than McCain’s.

On balance, I would give it to Palin because she had a mountain to scale and she did it.

Who would I vote for? I never vote for ghosts.

* * * * *

I note Peter Mandelson is back in the British Cabinet as a reward for his worldwide experience. His Sarah Palin moment, they say.

Now remind me what he did for four years in the European Commission?

Ah, yes, he presided over the failure of the Dohar Round of world trade talks. He had a blistering feud with President Sarkozy — poignant memories of home, perhaps. He also helped Tony Blair and the German Presidency engineer the Lisbon treaty as a referendum-free zone. And there was that funny incident when European ports were piled high with Chinese shoes.

I can’t help thinking a hockey mom would have done better.

* * * * *

Amazingly, Syntagma will be three years old on the 20th of this month. In the constantly-changing kaleidoscope that is the internet I never thought it would last this long.

At the very least, I supposed I would sell it on before tackling something else. In the event, I am doing other things, but the old warhorse is still breathing fire — if less brimstone these days.

So, will there be wild celebrations and dancing in the street? ‘Fraid not, alas.

These are very different times compared with the heady economic climate back in 2005 when we started out.

Then “new media networks”, as we grandiosely called ourselves, were the lipstick on the pitbull. Everyone adored us — we were to be the new generation of Beaverbrooks and Northcliffes (ancient British newspaper proprietors). One of our brethren even sold itself to AOL for around $30 million. We were Masters of the Pixelated Universe.

In fact, the Murdochs and Gates’s, with MySpace and Spaces, used the technology to reinforce their offline dominance. New media turned out to be the saviour of old media.

As a result, advertising deserted the small-to-medium online operator, although you can still make a six-figure individual income if you know all the tricks.

At the moment new media is suffering a hiatus like everything else, while jumpy politicians sort out the credit drought and its ghastly knock-on effects. I must say, I thought we would be in a better place on our third birthday.

Never mind, there’s still 17 days to go.

* * * * *

At the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham this week, Tory bigwigs were ordered not to drink champagne in the bars in case it was interpreted as premature triumphalism.

What did the rascals do? They replaced the conspicuous champagne flutes with paper cups, from which they consumed prodigious quantities of the bubbly stuff.

With enterprise like that, they are definitely ready for a return to Government.

John Evans

What a difference a week makes.

In what was surely one of the finest party conference speeches for years, David Cameron, Leader of the Conservatives, showed Gordon Brown how it should be done.

In place of last week’s straining for effect and amateur theatricals, Cameron produced a professional performance of flair and depth of character shot through with real passion. It was also politically and philosophically coherent.

To compare him with Tony Blair — regarded by some as “the master” — is to judge serious accomplishment against fraud and artifice.

No, Cameron must now be viewed as the genuine article, a fully-fledged Prime Minister-in-waiting.

He even managed a rousing peroration, conveying hope and excitement — and more than a few tears from an ecstatic audience in Birmingham’s Symphony Hall.

In a way it was eerily Thatcherite. There was the same scalding sense of challenge and mission, this time social as well as economic. After a period of “detoxifying the brand”, Cameron has moved rapidly onto traditional Conservative territory, daring to contemplate tax cuts while artfully not budging an inch from his earlier concerns.

He promised “sound money”, an end to political correctness, the health and safety neurosis, and, eventually, lower taxes.

A fierce attack on the educational establishment clearly resonated with the audience: there would be an end to the practice of “all shall have prizes” and of deliberate dumbing down. This was heady stuff. A catharsis after eleven years of poisonous frustration.

The Tory theme of the broken society was rehearsed at length. Old-style punishment was blended with concern for the causes of criminality. The work of former leader Ian Duncan Smith was well in evidence.

The speech was compelling not just because of the competent delivery but for its refreshing outlook, and the complete absence of the counter-intuitive nostrums of the Labour government that often sound as if they are made up by half-witted fantasists.

It was noticeable that the biggest rounds of applause greeted the most straightforward expressions of disgust with the present government’s worldview.

I imagine the Prime Minister is feeling rather bruised right now, especially after the tentative improvement in the polls last week.

On this showing, David Cameron can look forward to an even bigger bounce in coming days.

All he needs now is a General Election.

In the days of sail, when ships were built of wood and were vulnerable to hostile warships and pirates, each ship had many bulkheads to isolate parts of it that were hit.

In the later days of giant ocean liners made of iron, wealthy passengers demanded large ballrooms and restaurants so the bulkheads disappeared from the upper decks. One of the first of these new vessels was the Titanic. It hit an iceberg and the rest needs no retelling.

We’re having our own Titanic moment now in the world’s financial system, where the bulkheads that protected us have mostly been removed. In the 1930s, America had the Great Depression, but Britain was comparatively unscathed. In 2008 we share the pain.

As David Brooks puts it in the New York Times, “We’re living in an age when a vast excess of capital sloshes around the world fueling cycles of bubble and bust. When the capital floods into a sector or economy, it washes away sober business practices, and habits of discipline and self-denial. Then the money managers panic and it sloshes out, punishing the just and unjust alike.”

Francis Fukuyama points out that globalization masks the flaws in economic policy. “Foreigners seemed endlessly willing to hold U.S. dollars, allowing the U.S. Government to run deficits and enjoy high growth. That’s why early on Dick Cheney reportedly told President Bush that the lesson of the 1980s was that ‘deficits don’t matter’.”

Globalization is not new. The 250-year British Empire was a globalized trading system, depending on the might of the British Royal Navy — which had 50 percent of the world’s warships and most of its merchant fleet. It had the muscle and authority to protect its own national interests. That has been lost in modern times.

Transnational private-equity capital, almost all of it borrowed, has swept in and bought up most of our major corporations — on both sides of the Atlantic. These highly-leveraged buyouts seem benign in times of rampant expansion. However, it only takes a small twitch in the markets for the dust-thin financial structures to become sickly.

That also applies to banks that have followed suit and lent much more than their capital should allow. When the assets on their books are impossible to value because of the extent of toxic debt, the game is over.

The biggest question we will have to answer once the financial system has been stabilized, and the toxins isolated like nuclear waste, is: how much should we retract from globalization? In the age of the internet, is that even possible or desirable?

Even in regional terms, there’s no doubt that Britain’s membership of the European Union has degraded the country’s ability to be itself — a quality that has always paid off in the past.

On the other hand, staying out of the euro currency has shielded us from lower interest rates than we needed during the boom times. It also leaves us free to set optimum rates instead of relying on blunt fiscal instruments as the Irish, Spanish and Italians are having to do. This is one bulkhead that has more than proved its worth.

The EU’s decision to adopt the accounting standard of “fair value” or “mark to market” is having a devastating effect on our banks, whose diminishing capital is daily undervalued by the system, especially in hard times. The standard is as toxic as American mortgage securities.

While the U.S. is planning to ditch Basel 2, the EU’s directives will take years to repeal, and would need 27 countries to agree to it. Britain, should, as a matter of urgency scrap Brussels’s hold over our financial markets.

On some estimates, 84 percent of British laws are now made in Brussels. Most of them are counter-productive in a British context, obsessively bureaucratic, prescriptively inefficient and despised by the population. This heedlessly dispensed-with bulkhead is deeply desired and its absence bitterly resented. We should restore it as a matter of urgency.

I suspect that globalization has passed its peak. Without descending into full-blown protectionism, most nations will consider rebuilding some of the bulkheads that gave them their national characteristics, while minimizing restrictions on free trade. With tariffs low across much of the world, there is no need for global institutions to gum up the works with legalistic complexity.

Much of globalization is unnecessary and faddish, urged on us by old international Marxists and student Trotskyists like Gordon Brown and New Labour. They should be rejected.

America too should beware of whom it is electing to office in November.

It’s time to return to simplicity, fleetness of foot, and self-reliance. We would be much better nations if we did. And happier too.

John Evans

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Update: The U.S. House of Representatives has rejected the Treasury’s $700 billion rescue package. The Dow is down 770 points as I write.

Around a year ago Syntagma was among the first to use the word “Depression” in relation to the trajectory of Western economies.

Today, Monday 29 September, the word is on everyone’s lips.

Despite the rescue package now going through Congress, U.S. Treasury officials are in wild panic mode as truth finally dawns: there is nothing they can do to halt the steep declines in credit issuance that will deliver the most virulent bout of debt-deflation the world has known since the 1930s’ Great Depression.

We are hearing that officials close to Henry Paulson are privately painting a much bleaker picture of the fragility of the global economy than that of President Bush last week.

A Republican is quoted as saying that the message from government officials is that “the economy is dropping into the john. We could see falls of 3,000 or 4,000 points on the Dow. That could happen in just a couple of days.

“What’s being put around behind the scenes is that we’re looking at 1930s stuff. We’re looking at catastrophe, huge, amazing catastrophe. Everybody is extraordinarily scared. It’s going to be really, really nasty.”

A spokesman for BNP Paribas said, “Money markets are imploding. If no action is taken very soon, there is a significant risk that the global economy will collapse.”

But what action can be taken now? Imagine a palatial building across many acres eaten through by hordes of termites. Builders rush in to replace a pillar or two hoping to stabilize the structure. But architects shake their heads knowing that nothing can save the rotten edifice from collapse.

The U.S. Federal Reserve fears an “adverse feedback loop” with terrifying consequences. The “liquidation” of failed banks policy that led to the Great Depression is alive and well and raising its head in the Republican party. That may give them a short-term bounce among very angry voters, but the result could be catastrophic.

John McCain, who seemed to be coasting to victory just a few weeks ago appears to be undermined by his own side. His chances of the White House get slimmer by the day.

Central banks in Britain and Europe are maintaining their high-interest rate policy, despite the need to loosen up credit. Libor — the rate at which banks lend to each other — rose again this morning, regardless of the $700 billion U.S. package. They need to cut and cut again despite their genteel anxiety over “moral hazard”.

We are witnessing a slow-motion shipwreck, caused partly by panic, by different officials working to rigid, uncoordinated targets, and by the lack of anyone competent enough to take overall charge and impose a coherent escape route on the entire system.

The politicians have imploded, the bankers have failed, and the markets are reflecting that turmoil in the only way they know how.

How very fragile are the pillars of our civilization.

John Evans

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