[Politics] The way we were.

Eighteen months ago, shortly after he took over the reins, Gordon Brown looked at calling a general election to give him a mandate but backed off, instead saying that he wanted time to develop his 'vision for Britain'.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather he'd just told us that his vision for Britain involved the effective collapse of the banking system, a run on the pound and penury and destitution all round, and then put it to the vote to see if that was what we wanted.
Too much to ask for, I suppose.

It's odd to look back now and realise that I was predicting a crash four years ago. It rather gives the lie to people saying that a crash couldn't be foreseen; if an enthusiastic amateur like myself could see it coming almost half a decade ago, then it beggars belief that the person in charge of the economy couldn't, unless he was a complete imbecile who believed his own mindless propaganda.
Oh.
It's not like he wasn't warned by those in the know: the 2006 Bank of England Financial stabilty report was effectively subtitled "Oh my God, we're all screwed!", but that didn't appear to make much difference in governmental attitudes whilst the debt-fuelled boom continued.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, I decided to go back in to the stock market. This shouldn't be taken as meaning that I think we're back on the way to recovery; I actually think that any recent uptick in the markets is what's known as a Bull trap and that we've got a lot further to go yet. On that basis, I bought gold. Traditionally the 'safe haven' in times of trouble, this proves to have been a fairly wise move on my part as gold has gone up 15% since then.
Or rather, it hasn't.
Gold rose by about 3.5% against the pound last Friday (it's since slipped a bit due to profit taking), but it only rose about 2% against the dollar. Now, gold is interesting stuff. It's handy in some electrical components, but it really has very little intrinsic value beyond what value people place in it and the volumes of the gold in the world change by next to nothing on any given day. What this means that as an indicator of relative value on any given day, gold is an excellent yardstick by which to judge a currency and, as the day wore on on Friday and I watched the value of gold tick up, my thoughts slowly turned from pleasure at the value of my investment increasing and turned more to dismay as I started asking What the Hell has Brown done the economy today?. I didn't get 3.5% richer last Friday, you see. Instead, we all got 3.5% poorer as the value of the pound declined yet more. It's just that the little of my money which was in a fixed asset ratined it's value relative to the pound. You know that money you've got? It's worth less than it was last Thursday. This decline is incremental but ongoing. You probably haven't noticed yet, but you will.
I should have seen this coming as well, really. A Labour Government in this country has been a buying signal for gold for the last 50 years and it should have been obvious this was going to happen ages ago. I'll know next time.

It's odd, looking back on posts I made 3-4 years ago now, just how many people argued against me in support of Brown as Chancellor, saying that he was doing a super job of running the economy.
I wish, looking back, that I'd been proven wrong in my assessments of where we were going. I wish that the person who told me that Brown was doing a good job of running the economy had been proven right. Because, for all that I've made a bit of a short-term score on the gold markets, that's not really much consolation for the losses that I, and others, have made in the inevitable and entirely predictable slump that has happened.
Like I say, I wish I'd been proven wrong.