Cocaine Nights

A "timeless world beyond boredom with no past, no future and a diminishing present...nothing could ever happen in this affectless realm, where entropic drift calmed the surfaces of a thousand swimming pools."

Such is Ballard's charicature of Spain's Costa del Sol, a dystopia of premature retirement that forms the backdrop for this 1997 novel - and which is ultimately of far greater interest than the rather weak murder-mystery he has built around it. 

The author seems to have been aware of this too, because he keeps re-stating his core conceits about this chronologically-challenged limbo:  

"The Costa del Sol is the longest afternoon in the world, and they've decided to sleep through it."

"Zombieland. Fifty thousand Brits, one huge liver perfused by vodka and tonic. Embalming fluid piped door to door...brain death disguised as a hundred miles of white cement."

"Memory-erasing white architecture; the enforced leisure that fossilized the nervous system."

"Shaded lounges, their bunkers with a view, needing only part of the external world that was distilled from the sky by their satellite dishes."

Ballard's narrator (and I at once sensed this novel might have worked better if it had been written in the third person) is Charles Prentice, a travel writer whose brother Frank is languishing in a Spanish jail having confessed to an act of arson in which five people died. 

To investigate the circumstances of the villa fire, Charles comes to the resort of Estrella de Mar where his brother worked as the manager of the Club Nautico. Compared to the comatose state of the endless white pueblos Charles detects something of a mini-Renaissance under way in Estrella. This civic renewal turns out to be the result of a "tonic regime" instigated by a sociopathic tennis coach called Bobby Crawford. 

All this charismatic 'entertainments officer' has to do is chuck a few turds into swimming pools and pinch a few DVD players and the mentally embalmed begin to experience a surprising cultural awakening. (Along with the painting classes and amateur drama come a host of new vices, such as kiddie porn, which Crawford explains as a form of misplaced nostalgia in this world without children.) 

So Ballard's plot is being driven by another notion which will be familiar to any student of history that had to answer the essay question comparing the achievements of the peaceful Swiss with their cuckoo clocks and the unruly Italians with their Renaissance: 

"The first and last truth about the leisure society and perhaps all societies - crime and creativity go together, and always have done." 

And: "The ultimate crime-based society is one where everyone is a criminal and no one is aware of the fact."

Ballard has drastically simplified the reality of retirement in Nueva Andalucia, in order to prognosticate on the direction of our increasingly ageing society. He characterises this environment as "the Fourth World", the place which is "waiting to take over everything", but in the end the idea is more of a knowing gag than a serious piece of futurism, and throughout its 329 pages I constantly felt the absence of the arresting humour of Michel Houellebecq, for whom scenarios like this are the gist of some strikingly baneful visions of proximate eras. 

Going bananas...

Some FT pieces about the newest 'Banana Republics', namely the US and the UK. 

(The term 'Banana Republic' was first used by American author O. Henry in his 1904 novel Cabbages and Kings. 'Going Bananas' entered the English language in 1935. In the same year 'Banana Republic' was first used in its familiar modern way in a piece of fiction published by Esquire magazine.)

Full of the Holy...

Our local church in Panorama often seems to resemble a social club for closet Protestants and homosexuals. 

Indeed, what remains of Roman Catholicism in Guatemala - leaving aside the annual dirge of Semana Santa - tends to involve rather a lot of clapping and hugging.

16% of the population belongs to one Protestant (Pentecostal) group or another, and 6 out of 10 Guatemalan Catholics are now said to be of the Charismatic persuasion. 

It was much-loved Pope John Paul II who helped finish off the Liberation Theology movement and its vision of a mass popular church in Latin America, largely through the preferment of the more goose-stepping kind of prelate to the region's most important Sees. 

The biggest building in all Central America belongs to the Fraternidad Cristiana de Guatemala. It has seats for 12,000 worshipers plus spaces for 3500 vehicles outside, and cost $20m to build. 

The 'Frater' was founded in 1979 by the genuinely charismatic pastor Dr. Jorge H. Lopez, whose sermons are broadcast every Sunday morning on Channel 7, sandwiched - not entirely inappropriately - between comedy shows. Watching them is one of my nascent pecadillos out here in Guatemala.

Quote of the Day

"If Clinton sees you walking down the other side of the street, he immediately crosses over to shake your hand; if Obama sees you coming, he nods and waits for you to cross."

A mate of Obama!

Route 666

More on those atheist London buses...

Update: 'You wait ages for a Deity..."

Levitating with excitement

We had a fairly severe tremor around lunchtime last Thursday - reported then as 6.5 on the Richter scale / 3.0 on Mercali. We were both in the office on the top floor and so felt its long, swaying movements quite strongly. It lasted for almost a minute too.

The epicentre was apparently up near the border with Chiapas in Mexico. It's been a while since we wobbled that much and this little quake was certainly the strongest since April. 

A friend from London who was in the market at the time said she was possibly the only person around here not to feel it as she was too busy "levitating with excitement" about being in Antigua!

A bunch of second stringers...

...sound off to Al Jazeera about Obama and that whole muzzl'm thing. "A little unnerving..." (Thanks again to Scott for this one!)

Quote of the Day

"We're in the same situation of people who have lost a limb but can still feel it. I don't know how long it will take for Chávez to realize he's lost a limb." Ricardo Hausmann, a Venezuelan economist teaching at Harvard.

A peculiarly dangerous month

"October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February." Mark Twain

When bubbles burst short-sellers have tended to cop a lot of the flak, but it's really the last bunch of longs with their 'greater fool' investment strategy that are guilty of having over-egged the last charges of the Bull Market.  

It is said that the seeds of each new financial crisis are sown at the bottom of the cycle. There's a lot of emotion around in the market right now - manipulable mammonist emotion - and any capital that is speculated on a stock market recovery is effectively being diverted from other productive uses. (Many investor-speculators will have portfolios down 30-40% this year and will be seeking a swift rebound.)  

On this occasion one could argue however that stocks weren't especially over-valued and that the bubble had been bulging elsewhere - in the housing market in particular. 

After a short rally yesterday, the price of oil and gas has continued to fall today, and some analysts predict a price of $50 a barrel by Christmas. This, combined with the limited freeing up of credit markets we saw yesterday could mean a briefer, more v-shaped global downturn than we have collectively feared.

There's still probably going to be a significant rise unemployment in the US and Europe next year, thanks to the commercial deceleration that will have already taken place during the last twelve months of scarce credit and inflated energy prices. 

And then the modest rallies we have witnessed on the past couple of Mondays may turn out to have been 'suckers' rallies', or even part of that phenomenon which is evocatively called a Dead Cat Bounce. 

Now stop worrying...

The Guardian's Comment is free section is launching London's first atheist bus advertising campaign. 

Donations will be handled by The British Humanist Association and Richard Dawkins has promised to match all contributions up to a maximum of £5500. The general idea is to counteract the ads from organisations like The Alpha Course on London's transport system. 

(This reminds me of Kermode's law that any movie advertised on buses must be a stinker!) 

Quote of the Day

"There must certainly be a vast fund of Stupidity in Human Nature, else Men would not be caught as they are, a thousand times over, by the same Snare, and while they yet remember their past Misfortunes, go on to court and encourage the Causes to which they were owing, and which will again produce them."

Cato's Letters, January 1721.

Forgive me Father for I have speculated...

Having essentially liquidised my stock portfolio at the end of last year, I thought I was content to watch others on the rollercoaster, gently licking a gelato on a park bench below. But in the past couple of weeks the capitalist serpent has been hissing in my ear again...and the temptation to play the market for oil and gas short has proved to be too great. 

According to some of the worthies on BBC Radio 3's Beyond Belief programme on the ethical ramifications of the credit crunch, short-sellers and their like are set for a real roasting. "These people profit from others' pain."

My chosen instrument of pecado mortal was DUG, an ETF which seeks 'daily investment results, before fees and expenses, which correspond to twice the inverse of the daily performance of the Dow Jones US Oil and Gas Index'. 

Aside from the fact that this security has a manager who is paid to go to Hell on my behalf, there are several other factors contributing, according to my own private exegesis, to a possible remission of sin in this particular instance. 

My current place of 'work' doesn't for instance incorporate those collateral moral distractions familiar to City workers, such as Colombian blow, lap dancers and male-bonding sessions. 

A lower oil price may also help cushion the blow of recession - billions which might have been spent distending the bombast of the likes of that populist dingbat Hugo Chávez and all round turd Mahmoud Ahmadinehad, can be put to better, maybe even social, uses methinks. 

Chávez has been indulging in a bit of premature gloating of late, but he rather needed the price of oil to stay above $95 to balance his books this year. Oops. 

Now, I have nothing against the good people of Venezuela - except perhaps that comedy show Bienvenidos - but I can't be wrong in assuming that a certain amount of disarray in their public finances might help to bring the possibility of regime change a step or two closer. 

Other members of the 'Axis of Diesel' are feeling similarly discomfited. Ahmadinjihad - who faces an 'election' next June - was also hoping for $95 a barrel and Poot'n's little red line was around $75. (Vlad has more of a snowy day fund to resort to than the Venezuelan government, but he's also going to have a harder time flogging AKs to Hugo's ejercito.) Nigeria must also be feeling a bit nervous ($68), but those medieval bullies down in Saudi are a bit more sorted unfortunately: $55.

They're all getting together this week for an OPEC jolly to see what can be done against the dissipation of their petrodollars. 

Anyway, the panel on Beyond Belief reached the ecumenical conclusion that our future moral wellbeing will depend on privileging investment over speculation. 

Wall Street wit Fred Schwed once noted that "speculation is an effort, probably unsuccessful, to turn a little money into a lot" whilst "investment is an effort, which should it be successful, to prevent a lot of money becoming a little." He added that explaining the difference between the two was usually "like explaining to the troubled adolescent that Love and Passion are two different things."

The theological commentators assembled by Radio 3 could find no way of separating speculation from the sin of gambling, yet other - more secular - observers, have often pointed out that while the gambler creates new risk, the speculator is merely assuming one that is already implicit within the capitalist system. 

I did however quite take to some of the ideas being expounded by the representative of Islam on the show. In that tradition it is a precept that businesses and their customers must share risk - so the circumstances in which cynical merchant bankers advise clients to pump money into flakey enterprises would not generally arise, because deals would be structured so that the financial penalties also fall on the purveyors of poor counsel. 

Having lived through three of these GDP-shrinking moments in my professional life, I'd have to agree with the French President that it's about time we tried to change our commercial ways more durably. 

Some sort of preventative regulation will certainly help to avoid the need for repeats of the kind of state intervention we've seen this month, but revisionist mores at the level of everyday business practice could also have a role to play. The Islamic notion of shared risk might even be a good place to start - what a different place the PR industry would be if it was rewarded at least in part according to business results. (A lack of a real stake in the business outcomes of communications campaigns has probably been one of the key factors holding back the industry.) 

One last thought for today. A knowledge of history has famously been said to help contain the danger of repeating it. But a misapprehension of that knowledge can also generate new gaffes in governance. The credit crunch may well be no more an analogue of the crash of '29 than the appeasement of Saddam was one of the several accommodations made with Hitler in the 30s. 

Having said that, it might be worth adding a geographical dimension to our historical quest for antecedents for the 2008 crisis. Both Chile (1982) and Mexico (1994) had to re-nationalise their banking systems after massively over-extending themselves with debt, with immediately dire consequences for their GDP. (A contraction of 20% in the case of Mexico). These were both dodgy developing economies you might argue, but UK and US public debt levels have not been far off Third World levels in recent years...

Remittances

Whatever else might not have been achieved in terms of development and social progress in Guatemala over the past decade or so, it's clear that the lower middle-classes have taken significant steps to both globalise and consumerise themselves - thanks perhaps to proceeds from the informal economy and remittances from abroad most households in this bracket now boast TVs, fridges, DVD players and several mobile phones. 

The on-going fate of remesas - remittances from Chapines living in the US - over the next few months could be critical to the Guatemalan economy. Across Latin America they have annually totalled around $50bn, with nearly half going to Mexico alone.

Down here they represent a full 10% of GDP and have continued to rise recently in spite of what must already be hard times in critical industries up north such as construction.

It has been suggested however, that although the quantity of Dollars that arrive in the form of remittances exceeds the total of foreign investment in Guatemala, each percentage point of GDP they represent only contributes to a half point drop in the overall levels of poverty.

Cuetes

A mi me cae mal tener que despertarme casi cada madrugada cuando ni los gallos han cantado, rodeado por chuchos temblorosos a punto de infarto, solamente porque algun fulanito cerote en la vecindad esta cumpliendo años...

Quote of the Day

"Men, as it has well been said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go made in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)

A late complement to yesterday's post!

Some great Daily Mash pieces...

Global stockmarkets were last night urged to stop dicking about and make their fucking minds up. 

The Government is to invest £500bn of your money in British banks so that they can lend it back to you with interest. 

Bastard Americans ruin your life.

Police discuss wages policy in Brazil

Yikes, this hasn't happened yet in Antigua...but we live perilously close to the main police station!

Wobbly John

Ok, McCain may have lost all three debates, but we'll give him the comedy stand-off. He still looks like he's going to throw a wobbly any minute though - I'm sure those 'unstable' facial impressions of his have been worrying a few floating voters. 

Reflexivities

Chile is often cited as an example of the successful implementation of the libertarian economic ideas of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School. It's worth remembering however that a failure to properly regulate the banks and other industrial conglomerates which resulted from privatisation under Pinochet meant that Chile suffered worse than most of its neighbours from the '82 debt crisis. Its economy shrank by 14%, as real wages fell by 10% and unemployment soared to 30%. The government had little choice but to re-nationalise most of the key institutions within its collapsed financial system. 

Under a democratic and un-alternated centre-left adminstration Chile has since made a full recovery. One of the more interesting ideas that this regime has codified is that of a stabilisation fund, which requires the government to run a surplus during years of strong economic performance. My father very much holds it against Gordon Brown that our own government in the UK has failed to operate a similar counter-cyclical fiscal policy: "He had no business borrowing so much...."

To some extent Brown just got carried away along by the prevailing current. The more stable things appear to be the harder it gets to imagine that someone out there is doing something that's eventually going to look REALLY stupid. 

In the past few years the US has been running a current account deficit of 6%, which is getting close to Third World levels.  George Soros has suggested that the US has only managed - up to now at least - to avoid the full implications of its status as the world's largest debtor because of a peculiar set of historically-defined circumstances: 

"There was a symbiotic relationship between the United States, which was happy to consume more than it produced, and China and other Asian exporters, which were happy to produce more than they consumed...The United States accumulated external debt: China and the others accumulated currency reserves."

Soros reckons this situation has contributed to the formation of a 'super-bubble' which is regretably on the point of bursting now just as other mini-bubbles (like the US domestic property market, commodity prices etc.) have been going pop in close sequence. 

As a trained historian I am more attracted to Soros's ideas about the play of 'reflexivity' in market cycles than the 'rational expecation' approach favoured by some economists. Adam Smith has to shoulder a lot of the blame for the persistant and naive belief in rational human agency. One only has to take a closer look at the world around Smith during the last two decades of his life to see how feedback loops can act as both a channel and a constraint on the practice of governance. 

So, counter-cyclical fiscal policy or not, I do have some sympathy for our beleaguered PM. Sometimes our rulers need a special historical opportunity (or an institutional loophole) in order to be able to properly demonstrate prudence in times of apparent bonanza. Chile's government has come under intense pressure at times to stop saving and start spending - such as during the protest led by students in 2006, which took place at a time of record copper revenues, precisely when the rules about stashing money under the bed apply!)

It may well be the case that Brown is a better economist than he ever was a politician and that current circumstances will see an upswing in his fortunes.  Either way his electorate aren't going to be feeling especially chipper come polling day.

Bus travel explained

This is superb... and it gives me the idea of making my own film about bus travel in Guatemala...but using parts of the same soundtrack!



Remember, much kindness to the cripples, and please do share your children with those kindly African students dressed like KGB agents.