Bloomberg Joins Brown-Baiting
Seems like the popular pastime of piss-taking isn’t restricted to blogs and forums any longer as far as Gordon Brown is concerned. Mark Gilbert of Bloomberg has an amusing parody of what the possible letter from Mervyn King to Gordon concerning spiralling inflation might look like. Here are a few edited highlights:
Frankly, it’s your own fault. If you’d let ME pick all of the economists for the Monetary Policy Committee, the external members wouldn’t have been able to gang up on us in 2005 and get their way with that ridiculous interest-rate cut. Heaven knows how they persuaded Charlie Bean to agree; we’re still making him sit alone in the canteen as punishment.
“Merv” later moves onto more fighting talk:
I have to warn you though, Gordon, there’s more to come from me. I’m looking at a 5 percent interest rate by the end of the year. The banks won’t like it. Barclays Bank Plc raised its bad- debt provisions by 50 percent in the first half of the year, and the others all saw problems in their loan books. Hopefully they’ll learn to be a bit more prudent in future.
But alas the order of seniority is affirmed at the end, in what is probably likely to prove the most authentic paragraph:
Finally, might I take this opportunity to broach the subject of my salary? As you know, the tradition for several years now has been for the governor’s pay to increase by 2.5 percent per year. Now that inflation has exceeded 3 percent, I wonder if we might review this arrangement.
Can Merv win the war? Next week we have the delights of the MPC meeting minutes to look forward to, an administrative anomaly which still only serves to confuse people, and spread the “shock” out over an even longer period.
