Let’s hope our mad gambling session is over

[FarCenter]

Janice Turner

Are you feeling, as I am this week, like some crackpot Jeremiah who for years has paraded the high street clutching his “End Is Nigh” placard, to the derision of guffawing shoppers? Now cometh the day when the skies darken, the very Earth trembles, you point wearily to your battered sign and utter the most unwelcome four words in any language: “I told you so.”

It is an apt phrase, “credit bubble”, because, for the decade that we've been sealed within it, no other reality seemed feasible. Inside this fiscal Center Parcs, natural laws of financial gravity were suspended. House prices pointed only upwards, interest rates only down. We could manufacture nothing, but somehow be rich. We could live on perpetual credit, take out mortgages four times our salaries because, hey, the bank wasn't fussed that we'd get fired and default, so why should we fret? And the oldest, dreariest of these rules, that there is a correlation between effort and success, thrift and prosperity, was dispatched with a clink of crystal flutes.

That reward is random, that our livelihoods are tied mainly to fickle fate, that risk is the only route to gain - and the more you risk the more you gain - is a gambler's creed. It is no coincidence that the Government that encouraged the financial markets to run riot also liberalised gambling legislation, rebranding a vice into a cheery leisure activity.

Money, we were told, should be allowed to flow where it will and we should be free to catch it where we could. No one was dragging us into betting shops or 3am online Texas Hold-em tournaments any more than they were forcing us into Icelandic ISAs or inflated off-plan property schemes. We wanted instant windfalls: to hell with persistence, incremental improvements and lifelong slog. “Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich,” said George Bernard Shaw. “Something for nothing.”

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/janice_turner/article4922538.ece