I love enhanced. I'd buy anything if it said enhanced.
Absolutely. It might have been different if you'd have said the Unemployed Man In A Stringy Vest Fund, but--
Well, yes because then alarm bells might sound...ring. Despite these very plausible names, surely the reality is that the people that lent all this money are being incredibly stupid.
Oh, no. NO, no. The reality is, what's stupid is that at some point, someone asks how much money these houses are actually worth. If they hadn't bothered to ask that question, then things could have gone on as perfectly normal, but unfortunately they did.
I see. But now people you see are saying the crisis is likely to turn into financial meltdown--I mean can that be avoided?
It can be avoided, provided that governments and central banks give us--the financial speculators back the money that we've lost.
But isn't that rewarding greed and stupidity?
No. No. It's rewarding what Prime Minister Gordon Brown called 'the ingenuity of the market'. We don't want this money to spend on ourselves. We want this money just to go into the market so that we can carry on borrowing and lending money as if nothing had happened--without thinking too much about it.
Yes, but if the worse came to the worse and you didn't get this money, what then?
Well, then there'd be another market crash and then I'd say to you what I always say to people I meet--that it's not us that will suffer. It's your pension fund.
Thank you very much George Parr.
Pleasure.
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