The more I think about it, the more Tom Wolfe's 1990s novel "A Man in Full" seems to strike a cord with the real life dramas of our present times. There's the "man in full" himself in the person of fallen financier (and cricket sponsor) Sir Allen Stanford, US President Obama's invocations of the "American Dream", whose shadow side has always been a nightmare for a significant sector of American society, and - let us not forget - Prime Minister Brown's visit to the Pope (by whom I mean the real one and not Catholic convert Tony Blair). Herein lie all the main ingredients of Wolfe's brilliant novel - Mammon, Politics and Religion - albeit these are set in Atlanta, Georgia rather than on the world stage. I can't recommend a better read just now.
Returning to the setting for another of Wolfe's novels, his 1980s "The Bonfire of the Vanities", the news on Wall Street today is not good, as the following press report shows :
"'There's perceived disappointment from the lack of clarity from the Treasury (Department) for what it will do with the financial sector," said Wasif Latif, portfolio managerat USAA Investment Management Co. "That's hitting financials regularly."
Stocks have fallen steadily over the past two weeks as investors lost confidence in multiple Obama administration programs aimed at bolstering the economy. The market's inability to rally signals that investors don't have a sense of when the recession, already 14 months old, will end.
"We're going through a tug of war between optimism and pessimism," Latif said. "When there is a lack of clarity, it becomes more of an emotional or psychological environment. The mood can sway on any given day based on the flow of news coming out.'''
Now it has also to be said that the unfolding dramas of the global banking and finance sector - as well as the unfoldment of the so-called "Real Economy" - are also pretty engrossing, and will one day, I am sure, come in for some "creative treatment" themselves. However, for anyone seriously interested in what the Coming of the Real Economy might mean I would suggest they look not too much further back than the 1970s, which, unlike the 1960s, should be much easier to remember, for those of us who there anyway. The 1970s also saw a global recession, with whose bitter legacy of de-industrialisation* this country and the United States, in particular, still live. Perhaps the Second Coming of the Real Economy will enable us to overcome this.
* An excellent book on this subject is "The Geography of De-Industrialisation", Martin & Rowthorn, Macmillan 1986
No comments:
Post a Comment