UP Robert Peston
Currently so busy that he is working “17 hours a day” and has had to build a
mini-studio in his house, the BBC's Business Editor has now emerged as the
Official Face of Credit Crunch 2008. Enthusiastic, well-connected and
tireless, Peston is a man able to say “Overnight, $15 trillion has been
wiped out” in a borderline cheerful manner. Even more importantly, Peston
would also be the subject of some frantic bidding himself should he ever
float on a putative Sex Stock Exchange.
Yes, Peston is that rarest of things: Current Affairs totty. If Rageh Omaar
was the “Scud Stud”, then Peston is the “Crash Pash”. He makes the City
Pretty. He has clearly been doing his credit crunches. He's Indiana Dow
Jones. On his BBC blog, the likes of Gina from Mexico write: “Mr Peston -
you look so handsome!”
Of course, we have to bear in mind that this is all relative. Come a
recession, there isn't a lot of eye candy about. It's hard for people to
sustain their long-running crushes on sundry chancellors, presidents and
prime ministers when they're appearing on screen sweaty, panicky and saying
such things as: “Mothers will find that they can make their families a
frugal yet delicious soup by boiling a boot in some tapwater.”
When it comes down to it, Peston is quite an odd item. His hand gestures are
frankly Isadora Duncan-esque. Last week, while talking about Bradford &
Bingley, he appeared to be alternately chopping up a giant carrot, picking
bobbles off a cardigan and putting a Wall's Viennetta on to a plate, without
crushing it.
But it is Peston's hair that is the subject of the most fevered speculation.
As the world's markets have dipped, it has become glossier, and somehow ...
darker. As if both its keratin and pigment feed off global fiscal
uncertainty. “He hasn't dyed it - it's just a new haircut!” says the BBC
press office cheerfully. But that's what you would say if you knew that
someone had found that the Secret to Eternal Youth was wiring your hair up
to a plunging Dow.
DOWN Playboy Bunnies
Nowhere is immune from the credit crunch, it seems - not even that earthly
paradise of tits, the Playboy Mansion. Hugh Hefner - the man whose $331
million fortune makes it all right for him to sit around all day in a
dressing gown watching teenage girls in bikinis - has had to let some of his
bunnies go. Now, presumably, these girls are walking the streets of LA,
knocking on doors and begging for the bare essentials of their lives. “Do
you have a rhinestone thong to spare, ma'am? A pair of Perspex-heeled
stilettos? A pink trampoline that I can jump up and down on, squealing
‘Wheee!', even though I'm a 22-year-old maths graduate with two very
disappointed parents?”
UP Pop and fashion
The received wisdom is that as markets go bust, pop and fashion boom. Impose
a three-day week on a country and it will come right back atcha with Noddy
Holder in a mirror-covered hat. According to these infallible calculations,
then, by next March - when we're all eating dead rats and living in bins -
Britain should be in the throes of a cultural Big Bang: luxuriating in pop
that makes Abba sound like the Cheeky Girls, and wearing tricorn hats,
lederhosen and spats. And ignoring the fact that the Beatles emerged when
the economy was merely “meh”. And that rock'n'roll began during America's
postwar boom.
UP Exotic-sounding Stock Exchanges
In times of screaming international kitten-having, people become irrational.
They play games in their minds. They look for signs in the smallest of
things. For instance: are the fates of sundry international stock exchanges
dictated by their names? The FTSE is, after all, known as “The Footsie”,
and, indeed, we have a dirty slag of an exchange. It has rubbed its
stockinged feet against the inner thigh of the world's traders. It has led
investors on. And where has it left us? With our reputation in tatters.
Everyone gossiping about us. Practically living in a home for financially
unwed mothers.
America fares equally badly. The Nasdaq sounds like the rogue cousin of
Boswelox, a face-cream ingredient. And while the “Big Board” sounds
grandiose, the effect is rather ruined when you realise that's exactly how
someone from Sunderland would refer to Big Bird from Sesame Street. This
week FMW's favourite exchange is the Japanese Jasdaq, a name that invokes
happy images of people trading not in shares, but in “hot licks”; and the
day not ending with the pound “down” 30 cents on the dollar, but everyone
being “down” on bad vibes, man.
FYI: the founder and chairman of the Mongolian Stock Exchange - the
smallest stock exchange in the world - claims to be directly descended from
Genghis Khan. While probably only nine people in Mongolia are not related to
Genghis Khan, it does mean that if you short-sell on his pitch, he might
well cut your head off and use it as an executive toy.
DOWN The Royal Family
there ever a good time to ask a country to buy you a private jet? FMW has
always meant to find out (for its own personal reasons) but always suspected
that doing so during a gigantic credit freak-out wouldn't be ... optimal.
Likewise, the Prince of Wales's TWO gigantic sixtieth birthday parties seem
almost wilfully badly timed. As if the royals believe that, while the
proletariat might spend the next five years subsisting on mud and their own
hot tears of despair, they will still “be happy” for the royals. How odd
that, despite ruling us for 200 years, they haven't noticed that the British
are never happy for other people; indeed, they want everyone who has even
one more pair of socks than them to die.
UP Vince Cable
As the only prominent political figure who consistently says such stuff as,
“Er, all this short-selling seems a bit off”, and “Blimey, perhaps we need
some regulations in here”,* the Lib Dems' economic spokesman has recently
undergone an almost Al Gore-like shift - from “whining killjoy” to “the kind
of visionary who might save the world”. In just two weeks. Amazing. Indeed,
the magic is so great that we've almost forgotten that if you Google-image
“Vince Cable”, one of the first results that comes up is for a lovely “Vince
Cable-knit” jumper pattern, in either “cream” or “stone”.
*FMW is paraphrasing here.
UP People with iPhones
Let's face it - people with iPhones are always on the up. The iPhone is the
phone of the winner. The phone of the maverick. The phone of FMW. But in
recent weeks, the owners of iPhones have been extra smug - thanks to the
“Stocks” button on their ravishing, crystal-clear menu-page. In times of
economic stability it was, admittedly, less of a draw than the “GoogleEarth”
button, which would allow you to fly over San Francisco. Now, however,
“Stocks” can be accessed to show you plunging international stock prices,
live, in exciting and alarming shades of red. Wheeee! There goes the economy
of Japan! Right next to an appropriate “Sad Songs” playlist on iTunes!
DOWN Dog-walkers
Depending on which newspapers you read, you could be forgiven for believing
that the biggest damage from the collapse of Lehman was felt not across the
banking world, but among the small, yappy-type-dog walkers of Notting Hill.
As newly impoverished bankers sell their froufy dogs for glue or make
sausages out of them, literally dozens of people qualified only to walk
around a park picking up hound excrement are searching for new jobs. FMW
hates to be the bearer of bad news, but fears that these people should put
any big investments - such as buying a cup of coffee, or throwing 2p into a
wishing well - on hold for a couple of years.
UP Tony Blair
This time last year, everyone hated Tony. He was loathed as the man who took
a once-proud, honest country and turned it into a superficial, consumerist
La-La land. Now, of course, a superficial, consumerist La-La land sounds
brilliant - compared with being in a rainy, bankless island going down the
dumper. Already destitute dog-walkers are looking back at the Blair years as
a sunny Utopia - one where we drank cava for breakfast, took a £30 flight to
Barcelona for lunch and spent every evening wearing new shoes, watching Sex
and The City and listening to that great album by Stereophonics.
