14th March 08: today I got a 'phone call from my bank asking if I could lend them some money. They didn't quite put it that way, of course. The actual offer was 'would you like to pay less interest each month?', which it turned out would require me to agree a new, lower borrowing limit on our (partly paid off) flexible mortgage. Evidence (if any more were needed) that the banks are feeling the chill winds of a global credit crisis, and are resorting to ingenious ways to escape from their existing lending commitments in order to release precious cash for use elsewhere.Moses (circa 1500BC) affirmed that to 'lend to many and borrow from none' would be a sign of God's blessing on a nation. The opposite (becoming an indebted borrower with nothing to lend to others) was bluntly described as a curse. In modern Britain, we seemed to believe that we had managed to reverse this biblical wisdom, with unrestrained consumer spending regarded as a sign of economic health. The resultant 'have whatever you want and have it now' culture has led us to run up an incomprehensible trillion pounds of household debt. Now I am forced to watch people I care about starting to suffer the consequences of their ill-advised spending sprees. Whether you blame cynical commercial organisations or complicitly naive individuals, the result is going to be real hardship for some and financial stress for many.
I declined the bank's kind offer to halve my credit facility in return for saving me a couple of quid a month. This doesn't mean that we are 'safe' as a family; in our interconnected global economy, when one group suffers the pain gets widely distributed. Our best protection is probably to return to some of the oldest economic principles of all. No one individual can solve our economic woes on their own, but with courageous and visionary leadership it is still possible that we can all do so by acting together.
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