The financial headlines can make your eyeballs bleed. William Burroughs, the great Beat writer, could have fashioned one of his cut-up poems out of a single day's fare:
Markets tumble as bank fears linger
Will invoking the Great Depression bring it on?
Manulife needs to confront its reality
There will be blood ...
The boom in doom reached a new peak Tuesday. That was the day Harvard financial historian Niall Ferguson declared, in this newspaper, that the global recession is about to produce blood in the streets, "civil wars" and toppled governments. By Friday it was the No. 1 all-time best-read story on globeandmail.com, and a global Internet tizzy as well.
Bad, bad news has been avalanching ever since. Nouriel Roubini, New York University's famous Dr. Doom, is predicting the collapse of Eastern Europe. "The financial system is actually imploding right now," the professor implacably informed his TV audience this week.
Meanwhile, Standard and Poor's has downgraded Ukraine's foreign currency rating to CCC-minus — that's seven levels below investment grade, ladies and gentlemen, the equivalent of your dope-smoking teenage son getting a mark of 13 in physics. The prospect of a default has European bankers sprinting for the Valium.
In Toronto, Paul Volcker, a former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, has admitted he has no idea how to fix the mess.
In New York, Nobel-Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman is calling for the nationalization of banks. In England, storekeepers are posting a sign in their windows; Keep Calm and Carry On, it reads, a slogan revived from the Blitz. The new bad news is so bad, even Bernie Madoff has been knocked out of the spotlight. By now he barely qualifies as a shoplifter.
This is the way we live these days, hiding under the blankets. But as frightening as the future looks, we seem to enjoy being told how much it's going to hurt. Dire news makes us feel like grown-ups, serious once more. We might consider seeing a collective psychiatrist. At the very least, we should take a close look at what we're afraid of.
Niall Ferguson wields the whip of shame the way we like it. "Niall is a self-publicist and a controversialist," one of his fellow Cassandras on the global lecture circuit says. "That's his stock in trade."
The Scottish-born, Oxford-trained, Harvard-seated professor's fourth book, The Ascent of Money, is currently No. 4 on the New York Times's business bestseller list. His website is stacked with his latest pronouncements. They range from a discussion of pre-First World War central bank incompetence, which led to the rise of fascism and Hitler (his ever-ready theme), to an imaginary economic retrospective of 2009 (predictions include an assassination attempt on Barack Obama by al-Qaeda next Thanksgiving).
He works the rhetoric of doom like a master. Is violence inevitable because of this crisis? "There will be blood, in the sense that a crisis of this magnitude is bound to increase political as well as economic [conflict]"— but we already knew that, where's the evidence? "It will cause civil wars to break out that were dormant" — again, where, and were they about to break out anyway?
Prof. Ferguson's best stroke is to nuzzle up to the Direst Prediction of All, without touching it. "I don't see it producing anything comparable with 1914 or 1939." By then, of course, the war horse is out of the barn.
Most of all, he's a good storyteller. His prose style is as brisk as his speeches are lucrative, at $50,000 per. Don't complain: You deserve it.
