By Joe Banks
Goodness, what tumultuous times we’re living through. Global financial meltdown beckons, with most media commentators doing their best impression of Frazer from Dad’s Army, running around with their hands in the air shouting, “We’re doomed! Doomed, I tell you!”
Of course, we’ve been here before, albeit on a smaller scale, with Northern Rock last year. And as Mike King pointed out at the time, the media played a significant role in stirring up a similar sense of anger and confusion – if customers weren’t panicking before, they certainly were afterwards, with the alleged ‘loss of confidence’ quickly becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Yes, it certainly feels quite scary at the moment – but perhaps the scariest part is the lack of clarity as to what’s actually going on. The Byzantine workings of the financial industry are just so complicated that even the experts are having difficulty articulating how exactly we’ve got into this mess and how we might get out of it. It’s such a big, ungraspable topic that it can literally cause a complete neural short circuit in some individuals...
However, for many people, the natural response to being bombarded 24/7 by a media yakking on about credit crunch this and bail out that is just to switch off.
You could argue that it’s exactly this unwillingness to engage with big issues that’s got us into this situation in the first place – and that goes for governments and industry bodies as much as the man in the street. And when you consider how the global money markets are so dependent on good will in order to operate, with many banks existing in a never never land of credit and loans, it's little wonder this is then reflected in their customers’ credit-driven lifestyles and expectations.
As such, it’s understandable that we often do everything in our power to isolate and insulate ourselves against things we’d rather not know about – even if it means we ultimately end up under a whole heap of trouble...
Or indeed (he unconvincingly segues) under the wheels of a car. When we want to shut out the world, it’s more often than not technology that we turn to – but while living online might diminish your ability to interact with real people, living with an iPod or mobile phone attached to your head could prove fatal.
In a cunning bit of PR fluff, Swinton Insurance has coined the term ‘podestrian’ to describe people who become a risk to themselves and others through immersion in music, conversation or text, causing them to step out in front of traffic, or dice with death by generally annoying right-thinking members of the public (such as myself) on trains, tubes, buses etc.
But anyway, back to the impending economic catastrophe... as another member of the Dad’s Army cast would say: “Don’t panic!”
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