Pound For Pound

I cannot do better than the latest of the very frequent emails from one of this blog's most devoted readers:

"The continuing weakness of sterling is the silver lining of the recession cloud. It encourages saving, exporting, domestic tourism and the consumption of domestically produced components for manufacturing. In other words, it'll get us out of this mess.

How many of us actually need to travel? Foreign holidays are not a need. Business meetings can be accommodated by our highly sophisticated telecommunications industry, which is just the sort of industry that HMG wish to support for the future.

People who intend to cash in their houses and sterling to emigrate ought not to be the concern of the government on whom their about to walk out. Importers of goods that cannot be produced here are usually operating at the luxury end of the market and will probably be unaffected by this or any other downturn.

People who are concerned about the prestige of a currency rather than its value, which is based on credibility not how much it buys, are children who have no business engaging in economic debate. You'll find them on the Conservative benches.

All this without having to make the devaluation speech: Gordon must be loving it.

I was going to add a list of firms that I thought HMG would have on their list for saving if they ran into trouble, but I found myself writing the word British and the letter B a lot, so here's the abridged version.

They'll save all of the old state-owned utilities, BAE Systems, pharmaceuticals (who they'll make cut prices for the NHS), cars (who they'll make go green), Royal Dutch Shell, the whole renewables industry, P&O, Stena and the railways. They'll underwrite merchant shipping insurance.

They won't save any high street retailers, but they might give low interest loans to producer-owned wholesalers, who would probably be farmers."

Here's hoping.