But at least I am consistently wrong! No chance of any nasty surprises here, at D&N, like getting things right. I still cannot quite believe that the American people ignored me and voted in that Marxist-socialist, a man who gives politics an even worse reputation than it already possesses. Ah well, like the glutton who orders every course on the menu and then explodes when presented with the bill, so they, too, will eventually learn the hard way the truth of Dickens' saying: “Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 19 and six, result happiness. Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 20 pounds, nought and six, result misery.” In the case of Obama's America you may change the "20 pounds" to 20 trillion dollars because that is roughly what they will owe in four years' time and the socialist trap will have sprung shut! Then they will learn the truth of that wise old American saying, "Never give a sucker and even break!"
I was also spectacularly wrong about Europe. I made the classic mistake of under-estimating the fanatical determination of the Euro apparatchiks. I had forgotten their propensity for dying in bunkers as the world outside goes up in flames. For the next nine months or so they will be desperately firefighting one emergency after another - 'Bunga-Bunga' Berlosconi and his dead broke country might make a come-back - as they hang on grimly for the German election results which Frau Merkel seems, for now, likely to win. Once she's back in, the final moves towards a total political and fiscal union will go ahead. Even so, "there's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip", and there is one player, or rather, a set of players, who have yet to make a decisive move - I mean, of course, that rather smelly, unreliable, emotional multitude known as The People! So far they have been fairly quiescent, the odd riot or two here and there but nothing that any semi-efficient state machinery could not put down easily. I gather that youth unemployment is at enormously new highs in southern Europe and surely anything that the Tunisians and Egyptians can do with their misnamed 'Arab Spring', our European lads and lasses should be able to do even better. Unfortunately, any eruptions are likely to be national and what is needed in order to really shake the Brussels-Berlin apparat is a continental uprising. Alas, European-wide co-operation is not easy, unless, dread thought, the unions decide to get their act together. Now that could be a game-changer!
Anyway, tomorrow, New Year's Eve, this site will once again regale you with some spectatcularly wrong predictions!
