Growth industries

Depressed over the current economic situation and how Mr Barack Hussein Obama is managing the world's largest economic power upon which everyone else depends?  Fear not, because there are two booming industrial sectors:  Guns and sex toys.

Coincidence?  I don't think so.

Ghost cities

All built up and nobody home

Is this, as some pundits claim, Red China's century?  Are we living in the time when we see the Celestials inherit the Earth and the West fades to become one with Nineveh and Tyre?  Amazingly, every generation going back to Marco Polo manages to convince itself of exactly that and every time it turns out to be dead wrong. 

The Chinese economy is booming, but people forget that the other side of boom is bust and that China is ruled by those lovable Communists who never saw a nation that they couldn't run into the ground.  One symptom of what's to come are China's ghost cities; 64 million brand new homes scattered across the Empire without a soul living in them thanks to a insane property bubble.  And that's just the tip of the fortune cookie that's about to crumble

My advice:  Stand well clear.  Implosions tend to suck in bystanders.

The EU Cracks

The EU's response to the current financial crisis smacks less of unity than reality–especially in Germany:

Germany's Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck made clear his government's opposition to the idea that the euro zone's single largest economy should put up money to prop up institutions outside his country. He said Monday that he and Chancellor Angela Merkel were considering creating a "shield" that would protect the country's entire financial sector, and that a Europe-wide shield or bailout was out of the question. "The chancellor and I reject a European shield because we as Germans do not want to pay into a big pot where we do not have control and do not know where German money might be used," he said in a separate interview with WDR 2 radio.

It looks like cracks in the euro-empire are appearing ten years sooner than I'd predicted. Excellent. The sooner this happens the more peaceful the break up of that Napoleonic monstrosity will be.

Greatest Thing Since...

The price of a loaf of bread in Britain has broken the £1 barrier.

This is one of those pieces of bad news that is actually good news in disguise. The notion that Tesco's think a loaf of Warburton's is worth a quid a loaf is ludicrous unless each slice is individually gold plated and comes with a coupon of a free loaf of decent bread at another shop, but it is heartening that this story ended up as a minor item on the business pages.

It wasn't that long ago when news of a rise in the price of a loaf would have made headlines and threatened to bring down the government as a sign of an unacceptable jump in the cost of living. Today, the price of bread is no longer the touchstone of the British living standard when there is so much wealth sloshing about that people worry more about ipods and 4x4s than bread. Indeed, the economy is so robust that it has even survived ten years of Labour rule without failing the bread test.

And that's like the Titanic ploughing through a phalanx of icebergs without a scratch.