A former adviser to Gordon Brown has urged people to stock up on canned goods and bottled water as stock markets around the world slide.
Damian McBride appeared to suggest that the stock market dip could lead to civil disorder or other situations where it would be unreasonable for someone to leave the house.
“Advice on the looming crash, No.1: get hard cash in a safe place now; don't assume banks & cashpoints will be open, or bank cards will work,” he tweeted.
“Crash advice No.2: do you have enough bottled water, tinned goods & other essentials at home to live a month indoors? If not, get shopping.
“Crash advice No.3: agree a rally point with your loved ones in case transport and communication gets cut off; somewhere you can all head to.”
Mr McBride credited his former boss Gordon Brown with preventing a cataclysm by nationalising the banking system during the 2008 crash.
“We were close enough in 2008 (if the bank bailout hadn't worked),” he said. “and what's coming is on 20 times that scale”.
Financial markets are unstable and periodically suffer crises which can have devastating consequences for the wider economy.
China's "Black Monday" has plunged the global financial markets into chaos. The Shanghai Composite Index, China’s most important stock market index, was down 8.45 per cent, erasing a year’s gains in a day’s trading.
The FTSE100 fell 4.5 per cent, hoping £60bn off the price of UK shares, and the Dow Jones in the US fell by over a thousand points in its first minute of trading.
Some analysts have suggested that the stock market slide could be the start of a new global financial crisis.
Mr McBride’s suggestions about stocking up on canned goods, setting rally points and stocking up on bottled water were ridiculed by some users on Twitter as over the top, however.
Mr McBride was special adviser to Gordon Brown and head of communications at the Treasury for a period during the last Labour government.
I don't really know what to say to that.
There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.
-- (Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
Replace "ginger" with "n*gger," and suddenly it become a lot less funny, doesn't it?
-- fgalkin
I'd say this is a bit of an overreaction. What I read indicates that this is a "correction" and not a crash. The market has had almost constant growth and a slide back down to a more sustainable level is inevitable.
Hope market crashes hard. But since what we hope and what really happens are two different things... Think the guy is overreacting. Although would be nice to have the whole thing blow into the face of the smug market advocates.
Lì ci sono chiese, macerie, moschee e questure, lì frontiere, prezzi inaccessibile e freddure
Lì paludi, minacce, cecchini coi fucili, documenti, file notturne e clandestini
Qui incontri, lotte, passi sincronizzati, colori, capannelli non autorizzati,
Uccelli migratori, reti, informazioni, piazze di Tutti i like pazze di passioni...
...La tranquillità è importante ma la libertà è tutto!
What would be less nice but more likely is that in case of a crash the rich get bailed out and the rest of society lose their pensions, social security, homes and jobs.
It has become clear to me in the previous days that any attempts at reconciliation and explanation with the community here has failed. I have tried my best. I really have. I pored my heart out trying. But it was all for nothing.
You win. There, I have said it.
Now there is only one thing left to do. Let us see if I can sum up the strength needed to end things once and for all.
Having that happen all over again so soon after the last crash might well cause a lot of voters to get very tired of pro-rich policies toward "economic recovery," rather quickly.
Simon_Jester wrote:Having that happen all over again so soon after the last crash might well cause a lot of voters to get very tired of pro-rich policies toward "economic recovery," rather quickly.
I dunno...people can be incredibly stupid and have short memories. All it takes us one GOP candidate to make a barely credible claim that this is due to overregulation or some liberal policy and people would support whatever they were told to.
Well, the same dumb voters will do the same things, but there's already been a considerable move toward grousing about capitalism and its excesses in a way that would have been far less thinkable ten years ago. It's not that I'm predicting a sudden mass revolt. It's that the general public doesn't like being left with nothing because the stock market crashed again.
Unfortunately, in much of the developed world, we have no idea how to pay for the retirement of our immense masses of old people without a huge financial sector, which is a big part of how things got this way, so far as I can tell.
Sure we have ideas how to do it - increase taxes, lower benefits, raise the retirement age... it's just none of them are popular.
One of my strategies is to stay healthy so I can work for a living as long as possible rather than retiring at an arbitrary age.
And while I'm all in favor of stocking up for a week or two of supplies on general principle I think that's an over-the-top reaction to today's stock market events. Civilization is not falling.
A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.Leonard Nimoy.
Now I did a job. I got nothing but trouble since I did it, not to mention more than a few unkind words as regard to my character so let me make this abundantly clear. I do the job. And then I get paid.- Malcolm Reynolds, Captain of Serenity, which sums up my feelings regarding the lawsuit discussed here.
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. - John F. Kennedy
Simon_Jester wrote:Having that happen all over again so soon after the last crash might well cause a lot of voters to get very tired of pro-rich policies toward "economic recovery," rather quickly.
The modern economic system is so large and abstract it's effectively impervious to understanding without significant education. This means that for the average person all explanations are equally believable, including "rich people paying too much tax crashed it" or "muslims did it". Who gets the blame is up to who can who can spin it best and who their target is, and I'm betting rich people can buy more and better marketing teams.
Simon_Jester wrote:Having that happen all over again so soon after the last crash might well cause a lot of voters to get very tired of pro-rich policies toward "economic recovery," rather quickly.
The modern economic system is so large and abstract it's effectively impervious to understanding without significant education. This means that for the average person all explanations are equally believable, including "rich people paying too much tax crashed it" or "muslims did it". Who gets the blame is up to who can who can spin it best and who their target is, and I'm betting rich people can buy more and better marketing teams.
This isn't entirely wrong, but on the other hand it's basically always been true, and this didn't stop populist anti-rich movements from existing in the past.
There is a gut level on which most people do get frustrated at the idea that people with a lot more money get the system's kindness while they get its cruelty. That sentiment can easily be redirected or neutralized, but it exists and gets stronger in proportion to how obvious it is that that's what's going on.
Purple wrote:What would be less nice but more likely is that in case of a crash the rich get bailed out and the rest of society lose their pensions, social security, homes and jobs.
It seems like the rich know that socialism is fucking awesome, they want in on that sweet, sweet socialism while foisting capitalism on the rest of the world. So nobody really wants capitalism for themselves, least of all the capitalists.
Those who beat their swords into plowshares will plow for those who did not.
