Britain is going to sea in a sieve
The Sunday Telegraph
On a recent call with business people, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Michael Gove, compared Brexit to “moving house”, says Jeremy Warner. The analogy went down like a lead balloon. It’s all very well if you’re “trading up”, one attendee told me, but Britain’s current prospects look more like those of a “grotty little bungalow... on a flood plain”. It’s hard to disagree. We seem to be casting off our EU moorings and heading for the high seas amid “a perfect storm”. Brexit will make trade with our neighbours more difficult, but what opportunities does it offer? Reaching a “meaningful US trade deal” after a Biden victory may be more problematic than under Trump, who has a “soft spot for Brexit Britain”. And we appear to have declared China – the only major economy with decent levels of growth – “persona non grata”. Nobody could have foreseen today’s “terrifying confluence of negatives”. But Britain has broken the cardinal rule of never fighting on more than one front at a time. I’m reminded of Edward Lear’s poem “They went to sea in a sieve.”
The Jumblies.
“The global pandemic has had momentous economic effects,” says Oliver Kamm – not least in “the way we choose to pay for things”. As well as a big shift away from notes and coins, there has been a hastening towards “digital currencies”. The global payments provider PayPal indicated as much last week when it announced it will soon allow bitcoin payments for the first time. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies “appeal especially to people who believe the Government has too big a role in the financial system”. If they want to take the risk on a currency whose daily movements are highly volatile, “that’s up to them”. But there would be huge economic risks for the rest of us if the world’s existing currencies, backed by central banks, were supplanted. Any financial system “dominated by bitcoin transactions” would find it impossible to counter immense external shocks such as the coronavirus pandemic, which has tipped the global economy into the steepest downturn in the postwar era. Central banks and governments are fighting back with all the firepower they have available. “Cryptocurrencies are a fad best avoided.”