Crac financiero global calienta las cosas en la "flemática Inglaterra"

February 25, 2008 (LPAC)--Great Britain has gotten a lot of mileage out of its "Cool Brittania" marketing campaign over the years, but that image is about to take a big hit as a result of the financial blowout. Financial Times columnist Wolfgang Münchau warned today that the British economy is destined to suffer even more than the U.S., because of its reliance on the financial sector.

"In the next few years, I expect the U.K. economic miracle to be exposed for what it was: an overlong joyride on the back of an overlong asset price bubble. The U.K. economy is about to undergo a downturn at least as large as that of the U.S.--maybe even worse, because of an even more inflated housing market and because the financial sector constitutes a larger share of gross domestic product," wrote Münchau.

He argued that housing prices in Britain might fall 40% peak-to-trough, as many of the foreign buyers "that cool Brittania has attracted" might leave just as quickly as they came, and that "the U.K. financial sector is in no less trouble," in particular because London is the center of the European credit derivatives market. "Perhaps the worst thing will be that working in finance will no longer be regarded as cool, as it has been for the last 15 years. Finance will be once again what economic theory always told us what finance should be: a necessary activity, requiring some technical skills, but rather dull in the absence of bubbles."

Perhaps in the financial centers like the City of London and Wall Street people still believe that these financial parasites are cool, the almost-hero status given in some circles to Jerome Kerviel of Societe Generale suggests that the days of banker coolness have come to an end, replaced with a growing anger at the damage they have wrought.

As for Münchau's warnings of trouble ahead for Britain, they pale in comparison to what is actually in store for the Brutish Empire, as Lyndon LaRouche elaborates in a soon to be published paper, in which he warns that Britain's imperial design is doomed to a very early and ugly end as the fruit of its own imperial guile. No longer being cool, is the least of Britannia's problems.