IT’S OUR 21st CENTURY MEDIA THAT HAVE HELPED MURDER THE MARKETS

As press pundits the world over speculate why the western world and everything it holds dear continues to crumble around our ears, the answer, I suggest, lies with the very people asking the question.
RBS down 39%. HBOS down 42%. “200,000 Hit By Bank Crash” cries the Evening Standard – available on your mobile, on the web and in your good-old traditional quaint li’l newspaper format.
Just when you think it couldn’t get any bleaker, a leak to BBC News business guru Robert Peston about an emergency meeting between Gordon Bennet, Alistair Dawdling and Mervyn “my crown’s now worth less than my socks” King, and the world’s financial markets go into freefall again.
Financial peaks and troughs are cyclical. The boom of the late 60s followed a bleak 70s bust. Thatcher’s hot-bed of 80s money-stoking was followed by a financial chill in the early 90s. Equally, Blair’s 21st century buy-now-pay-later Britain has finally just woken up and realised that “later” is now hovering outside the door with a knuckle-duster and a scary man called Big Johnny.
But what has made this fall more dramatic and damaging than any that have gone before? Simple: our system of 24-hour global – I gotta fill airtime, webspace, inbox - media. It’s everywhere. I wake up in the morning, it’s on the radio. City AM and Metro scream headlines of “When Will It End?”, “Financial Flatline” and “We’re ALL Going To Die … yes ALL of us”. At work, an innocent search on the internet throws up more woe, and my mobile is constantly bleating like a newly-castrated sheep with the sound of incoming text alerts updating me about the death of global capitalism. On the way home The London Lite and London Paper tell me to sell my house, car and wife by the end of the month or no bugger’s gonna buy them ever again. And finally, as I sit down for dinner, Huw “Bloody” Edwards is giving me the lowdown on which banks have given up the ghost since I last took a crap. And that’s going on 24 hours a day, in every connected country in the world. It’s a non-stop international orgy of wholesale financial slaughter.
One market closes, another opens. The media maelstrom goes on and the markets continue to fall, having had no time to breathe - traders, investors, consumers desperately coming up for air to escape the non-stop bombardment of spiky graphs heading down, down, down. It’s like a panic on the titanic, but there are no life rafts as we’ve sold them all to pay off our overdrafts.
That, Mr Peston, is why I can categorically tell you that this will be the worst financial crisis we have witnessed since this whole financial fakery began. Stick that up your bulletin. Then please shut the * up.