Mark Carney sees a financial Utopia for the UK, but is it a house built on sand?

One of Blue Revolutions projects was (is) a TV ideas company called ISMOLOGY. We proposed a show similar to “Eden” some four years ago which took people from the stone age to phone age and in doing so tried to capture the “moral progress” that occurred as we gained mastery over our environment. Most fundamental to this progress are women’s rights. Channel 4’s “Eden” seems to confirm our view that when economies go wrong it is women’s rights that go to the wall first. Margaret Atwood made the same point in “The Handmaids Tale”. For an economy to have a progressive future it has to be grounded in an activity that creates real distributable value and is not simply some kind of equity release scheme operated on a global scale by a political and financial elite.

Economics needs explaining to ordinary people who even under old economic paradigms struggled to understand where wealth came from. The reason we believe that a new economic instruction manual is necessary is that the “new economics” is dependent on financial services and financial services rely on asset value to underpin their activities. As we saw with the 2007/8 crash if those assets suddenly reveal themselves to be worthless then we are going to be in very big trouble again.

But what of Mr Carney, the high priest of the “Reminers” suddenly getting all optimistic about post-Brexit Britain. To us, his optimism highlights the continuity that will be necessary post Brexit and which the EU won’t be able to dismantle. How so? Well, Britain is not a fabulously rich country we have too much debt to be wealthy in the traditional sense of the term, however, we are to the world’s investors a fabulously well-endowed country with property and land holdings worth about sixty trillion dollars.

Now assuming that the Tories don’t skewer free movement and upset the housing and land asset inflation apple cart Britain will continue to prosper financially post-Brexit. The worlds investment dosh will still flow here! The problem for the Tories is that it was the issue of migration that was the prime reason for the working classes to vote Brexit, and we hoped that post-Brexit immigration would be curtailed (by the loss of welfare entitlements) so as to take the inflationary pressure out of the housing and land asset bubble and perhaps re balance the economy by encouraging other sectors.

It seems clear to us this is not going to happen. Carney’s optimism is a symptom of that. Britain will continue to rely on the Kleptocracy to fund the levers of state and pay for the publicsectocracy and the workless army of the welfare and healthcare dependent citizens who are on the books of the state.

As economic determinists, we believe so much flows from this economic model which is assumed to be permanent. Take away the slosh of money washing around in this model and what you have left is nothing. With this nothing will disappear all the rights and freedoms we enjoy now. Even Jeremy Corbyn won’t be able to borrow himself out of that situation there will be little of real value to borrow against.

The good news is it is a while off yet, but with the Western worlds house built on sand rather than rock, the end it is coming!