BE careful what you wish for. Ever since Britain's calamitous 1990-1992 membership of the European Exchange-rate Mechanism (ERM), I have soldiered away in the good cause of insisting that control of inflation ought not to constitute the be-all and end-all of monetary policy.
And now what has happened? After precisely 20 years of inflation targeting, new Bank of England Governor Mark Carney has conjured up a second objective, the reduction of unemployment to seven per cent or less of the available workforce.
What's wrong with that?
OK, well here are three points to be made.
One, the unemployment target is officially of less importance than the two per cent inflation target. Officially, but not really. We all know the inflation target went by the board years ago. Ministerial-sanctioned dishonesty in terms of the 'real' target cannot be a good thing.
Two, how does immigration affect this new goal of central banking? After all, if the workforce gets bigger, then, providing jobs are being created, the percentage unemployed gets smaller.
Three, the current 'strategy' of getting monetary policy to 'do the heavy lifting' seems highly questionable. Is the central bank really the right agency for achieving every economic goal? There's an old saying about a jack of all trades being a master of none.
1) Tapping the barometer
THE general chorus of approval for Mr Carney's debut is part of a wider mood of cheeriness about our economic prospects. As I noted last week, this may be entirely justified, assuming we are experiencing a re-run of the early Thirties, when a slow but sure recovery was under way, but would look rather less clever were we to be in the middle of a repeat of the events of 40 years ago, when an apparent upswing went horribly wrong with the Arab-Israeli war of October 1973.
Or rather, when the autumn Middle East conflict and the subsequent squeeze on oil supplies caught the west at just the wrong time, when a massive economic stimulus left it horribly vulnerable to price shocks.
Sound familiar?
Nobody actually knows whether or not a similar storm is just below the horizon. But it would be nice to think someone was watching the glass.
2) You're having a laugh
TUESDAY'S edition of The Daily Telegraph was perhaps even more thought-provoking than usual. I'm a big fan of the paper, although I have never worked there in my chequered career (perhaps that 'although' ought to have been a 'because').
There was the item suggesting it was female viewers who persuaded the BBC that a woman ought not to become the new Doctor Who. I recall picking up a newspaper at the hovercraft terminal in Dover ahead of a Channel crossing and learning that the next Doctor Who 'could be a woman'. That was summer 1978.
Some stories remain evergreen, it seems.
Then there was the report that Jeff Bezos, founder of the Amazon retail group, had bought The Washington Post newspaper for $250 million. The story quite rightly contrasted the venerable title's purchase price with the $1 billion paid by Facebook for Instagram, 'the on-line photo-sharing service'.
Yep, well I guess it's not so much that the Washpost is undervalued as that Instagram is grotesquely overvalued (as is Facebook, probably).
On the obituaries page, it was goodbye to Admiral Sandy Woodward, commander of the South Atlantic Task Force in 1982. The piece ended by noting that he was separated from his wife 'and since 1993 his companion has been Winifred "Prim" Hoult'.
Sorry? The Admiral's girlfriend was nicknamed Prim?
On the same page was an obituary for Dominick Harrod, former economics correspondent with the BBC. I too was a CE (to use the French initials used on some accreditation) for well over a decade. It is a small and select breed and the loss of any one of them is always sad. Ask not for whom the bell tolls...
3) Nice idea, shame about the likely outcome
DAVID Cameron's insistence that it is time to reduce the 'cost of politics' in terms of the number and remuneration of legislators could have a lot of appeal. The trouble is, I don't see it is really connected to a wider view of the world, to any set of beliefs. It is rather like one of those dummy switches that cooker manufacturers used to fit in the Fifties to persuade American housewives that they were doing something rather more skilled than heating up ready-meals.
Were it only I who thought this, he would not have a problem. But I don't think I am alone.
4) Fatuous officialese: two corkers
Exhibit one: from the Treasury
'Our tax system should be efficient and fair. It should reward work and support aspiration.'
As opposed, presumably, to being inefficient, inequitable and rewarding sloth?
Exhibit two: from the Army
'The Yorkshire Regiment is a tough, forward looking and thinking Infantry Regiment that delivers excellence in all that it does.'
As opposed to an ineffectual, hidebound and brain-dead outfit that delivers nothing but abject mediocrity?
5) Bye bye Beck.
HOW sad a week ago to bid farewell to Radio 4's excellent adaptation of The Martin Beck Killings, the detective stories of husband and wife team Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo set in Sweden in the Sixties and Seventies. The top three sleuths were played by three marvellous actors, Steven Mackintosh as Beck, Neil Pearson as his sidekick Kollberg and as no-nonsense copper Larsson we had Ralph Ineson, who played the boorish but apparently-unsackable salesman Chris Finch in The Office.
The final episode, The Terrorists, was set in 1974, ten years after the first. It ended on a Friday in January 1975, with Beck and his girlfriend and Kollberg and his wife enjoying 'just the kind of evening everyone hopes for more of, the kind of evening when everyone has eaten and drunk well and knows that they are free the next day'.
Here's to it.
Thanks again for reading and enjoy the weekend.
dan.atkinson@live.co.uk
Going South: Why Britain Will Have A Third World Economy By 2014, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson is published by Palgrave Macmillan