Watching the English on credit

Michael Lewis's article about the collapse of Greece has been getting a lot of attention; here's my favourite bit...

"The tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2007 has just now created a new opportunity for travel: financial-disaster tourism. The credit wasn’t just money, it was temptation. It offered entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge. Entire countries were told, “The lights are out, you can do whatever you want to do and no one will ever know.” What they wanted to do with money in the dark varied. Americans wanted to own homes far larger than they could afford, and to allow the strong to exploit the weak. Icelanders wanted to stop fishing and become investment bankers, and to allow their alpha males to reveal a theretofore suppressed megalomania. The Germans wanted to be even more German; the Irish wanted to stop being Irish. All these different societies were touched by the same event, but each responded to it in its own peculiar way."

And what did we learn the English wanted? When the lights went off, we spent our unearned largesse on creating a new aristocracy, chosen almost as arbitrarily as the one we spent the last 1000 years laboriously getting rid of - a bunch of bankers who happened to be in the right place at the right time and were cheerfully handed all of the spare money, enough to last them for generations. Almost nowhere was there an odder or less publicly useful response, and yet like the Irish, the Icelanders and the Americans it seems to sit comfortably with the very nature of Englishness. 

Comments

[James MacAonghus]

Great articles like this suggest a revision to Carr's idea that the internet has made us switch off long writing. When a long piece is well written and compelling, I have no problem reading it.

I like the analysis but the aristocracy analogy is a little contrived. You could say American bankers are also an aristocracy; even the Icelandic businessmen.

And what British people chose to do with their credit wasn't to give it to the bankers (that happened without individuals willing it personally) - they chose to buy houses abroad, or gadgets or who knows what.

[Seamus McCauley]

Hi James
Yeah, I know - I liked the idea when I thought of it but you're right that you could say it about anywhere. Alas!