Snowmail: Timely but late words in crisis

Last Modified: 11 Oct 2008
By: Alex Thomson

Coming up on tonight's programme...

Greetings All - Alex Thomson here with your weekend Tomomail...

And so the grim cycle continues...perhaps we should begin tonight's programme with the verbatim speech by Mr McCawber. Income...expenditure... happiness and misery etc. Timely perhaps, but a little late. Which is pretty much what they are saying of the efforts coming from Washington thus far, to impose some kind of sanity on the globally crumbling banking industry. So far lots of fine old words. More empty rhetoric from George Bush this afternoon.

The only thing which moves the markets though are concrete moves and numbers. None of that on Capitol Hill so far.

As David Trimble used to say during the long hours forging the Good Friday Agreement in Belfast : "fine words butter no parsnips". And big parsnips desperately seeking butter is right where we all are at the moment. Forget the dips and plummets of the stock markets - the urgent thing is to create a banking loan system that works. That is now the only game in town and finance ministers from G7 and the IMF are in Washington to try and make it happen.

Thus far, no dice. And Just now the IMF Chief Economist has forecast that markets will fall another 20 per cent. Well, talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy.

BITTER WORDS BETWEEN ICELAND AND THE UK

We are in Washington and in Iceland too for that latest on the increasingly bitter war of wards between the UK and the Icelanders over the economy that went over the edge. The word is, that the hard talking in Reykjavik will go on for most of the weekend if not all of it.

And what of those people who invested in the parallel banking universes of Guernsey and the Isle of Man. We shall here tonight of a woman whose mother has no idea whether or not she has lost her entire life-savings . Several hundred thousand pounds at stake from her house sale...told the bank was a no-risk move...desperately tried to get the money out ...now at a loss.. And there's no Nice Mr Darling offering a lifeline to save these people. I understand that only £50,000 is no guaranteed safe.

MUGABE BAGS KEY CABINET POSITIONS

To Zimbabwe where things might be unravelling. It appears Robert Mugabe has made a sudden land-grab, bagging key cabinet positions for his Zanu-PF Party. So far the opposition have done little more than call the move contemptuous. It will no doubt soon become clear just what the options are for the MDC.

All that plus all the main sporting action. As I write the Tartan Army are roaring on Scotland against Norway at Hampden. Rather different from the booing which has, apparently, cowed the spirits of the English in recent years at Wembley.

Do join me with this and anything else which moves, at 7.30 on 4.