One should never let the facts get in the way of a good theory.
Say it confidently and much of the world will believe you.
So David Beckham has declared that it is time for him to quit at the top. Yeah right, as they say. And Sir Mervyn King has started the first verse of his swansong by telling us that we should ignore all that he has said for the past five years because every little thing is going to come good. Honest.
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At least one of the two of them believes the story.
I have spent so much of the past few years taking issue with the Bank of England Governor that I shall restrict myself to just a few pertinent comments.
Even if Syria were not quite so far out of bounds at the moment, last week’s Inflation Report would hardly qualify as Sir Mervyn’s moment on the road to Damascus.
It has been apparent to us for a long time that the 海角视频 economy is in reasonable shape; not brilliant, but neither clinging to a precipice by its fingernails while some dastardly European lifts one finger at a time to send us into cavernous oblivion.
The latter of course is the argument that the Governor has used to justify his insistence that our banks stay on a path of continual capital improvement, thus starving the corporate sector in particular of the capital it needed (and needs) to be able to grow again.
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My fail-safe proprietary methodology of counting Estonian HGV’s on the M4 has been saying all year that the economy is on the up; it is one that I am very happy to share with the incoming Governor in exchange for a small royalty. This is all old territory, however.
What Sir Mervyn is doing is twofold. First, he is trying to leave a legacy whereby everyone believes that everything was getting better by the time he retired. And second, he is queering Mark Carney’s pitch.
Now if anything goes wrong from here – either higher inflation or lower growth, then it will be Carney’s fault as it was all OK when Mervyn hung up his boots.
Far more important, I had a gross 73 in the scratch medal at the weekend. Let’s hope Carney is feeling equally lucky.
* Jim Wood-Smith is head of investment strategy at Investec Wealth & Investment
* jim.wood-smith@investecwin.co.uk