A better class of riot

Whingeing about the dire state of the economy with a good friend, who is the chairman of a major UK accountancy group, he told me of a recent dinner he and his wife had attended somewhere in the West Country. The property developer sat next to his wife told her, in all seriousness, that he had just bought an estate in the Welsh Marches, to which he was imminently retiring, because he expected social breakdown and riots on the streets of London by Christmas. . . and didn’t think the Metropolitan Police were up to stopping them.

Perhaps that explains what Devon & Cornwall Constabulary were doing in Waitrose car park in Okehampton in the middle of last week, kitted out in full riot gear, and role playing in and among the public. Nonetheless, if you are going to practice how to control food rioting, Waitrose seems an unlikely venue.

Money’s tight

It is often the everyday that illustrates the story. My cab driver the other Saturday told me that late afternoon the day before he had spent 45 minutes looking for a fare. The problem, he averred, is that aren’t spending: or not the ones who would usually call a cab. It seems that M&S have had the same problem with selling food.

Another inconvenient truth

City living is not just good for the economy, but for the planet. From Matt Power in June ’08 Wired,

A Manhattanite’s carbon footprint is 30 per cent smaller than the average American’s.

I thought of this reading Rural idyll or stuck in the back of beyond, by Rhymer Rigby in this morning’s FT.

Going up

From the June edition of Wired,

“What high-speed means of transportation emits less atmospheric carbon than trains, lanes, and automobiles?

The humble counterweight elevator put into service in 1857, which has made vertical density possible from Dubai to Taipei.”

Mind the gap

An interesting article by the FT’s Economics Editor, Chris Giles, this morning in which he suggests that ‘the gap between action and sentiment puts the economy at a tipping point’.

Take surveys of households and companies at face value and the economy appears to be in free fall. Most measures of business confidence are sharply down on a year ago and the Gfk/NOP poll of consumers’ confidence about future economic prospects has declined to its lowest level since 1982.

But what households and companies are saying and what they are doing has rarely been so different. For all the misery poured out to pollsters, hard figures so far show people behaving as if they really believe Britain’s economy problems will be short and shallow.

Companies are not yet taking really tough decisions to cut costs. Instead they are keeping their workforce intact, presumably in the belief that it is better to hang on to employees in bad times because the good times will be with us again soon.