Onwards to the Future!!

 Well, with Barak Obama’s Presidency of the United States in sight, I’m pleased to see that he is getting down to business. He is already putting into practice his first scheme to raise funds with which to fill the hole in the public finances. He has gone into business as a flag salesman albeit with a fairly limited range – you can see some of them in the picture to the right.

The race is already on for a share of the spoils. I shared a train carriage yesterday with a Democratic Party official with whom I am acquainted and I took the opportunity to ask which names I should be looking out for. It seems that another old acquaintance of mine, Laurence Summers, is in line for the job of Treasury Secretary. I remember sharing several enjoyable evenings with Laurence, and Lady Collar of course, back when I was advising the government of the day on waste disposal policy, engaging in some blue skies thinking over dinner as to how to deal with the growing rubbish mountain. On one occasion I’m afraid I had rather too much Port and opined that we should send all our garbage to the Third World! It’s funny the things you say, isn’t it. A little later, when Lady Collar had gone to bed, I shared with him my grandfather’s theory, from the days when he lead the brave fight against those dangerous extremists in the Suffragettes, that the real reason why woman did not appear in positions of power and influence was because they didn’t work as hard as men and because they weren’t very good at arithmetic and so forth. How we laughed! I often wonder why he lost his position as President of Harvard but it seems that the University’s loss will be America’s gain!

Laurence has served his country before, of course, as one of Clinton’s Treasury Secretaries. I’m pleased to see that, like Her Majesty’s government, Barak Obama can see that the way to get out of the financial crisis is to employ as many as possible of the people who got us into it. In this spirit, he is also considering employing Timothy Geithner, who is the current head of the New York Federal Reserve bank and who helped to dream up the idea of giving the banks $700 billion to pay to themselves as bonuses. Some have argued that appointing Geithner would be failing to deliver change. This is nonsense. Geithner will have changed from a very rich banker into a very rich government minister. What more can you ask?