This morning’s Financial Times features a Dutch CEO (Gerrit Zalm of state-owned bailed-out ABN-Amro Bank) in a front-page photo cross-dressed as Dame Edna Everage, showing how humor has international sway. Dame Edna (AKA Barry Humphries) is a frumpy fake-posh Australian woman with a shaky upper class accent. The FT is firmly British and really grand. And the Dutch bank chief is also quite posh. He discussed “brothel values in banking” which you can read more about here.
However the same newspaper informs us that 38% of UK voters over 60 support the UK Independence Party, far more than any other party. That means trouble in the planned vote on continued British membership in an unreformed European Union. Old people turn out. They are upset about foreigners moving into their quaint villages and littering the lanes while laughing at jokes the old Brits don’t understand.
What seems to bug the Little Englanders most is foreigners who cannot be spotted at 20 paces: Poles, Bulgarians, or Romanians. Having just employed a Bulgarian to repair my NYC kitchen cabinets, I am astonished at this reaction.
Moreover, UK old folks seem less troubled by exotics from the Subcontinent or Africa who stick out. I’m not sure about how the English view Irish or Canadian or American foreigners because they are too polite to say anything to my face and I am not privy to what they say behind my back. As for Dame Edna, I’m sure they cringe at her gall and wouldn’t let her into their cottages or hedgerows.
With their loony now at barely over 90 UC cents, I am not sure many Canadians (except for the head of the Bank of England) can make their way to the Mother Country at all. Which brings me to the big news this week – the plummeting Canadian dollar or loony. We have a protection device, the Canadian listed DLR of Toronto, which rose to C$10.97 reflecting the c90 cents loony. The selloff in other brands of dollars also including the A$ is a reflex reaction to slower growth data from China. Commodity currencies are hurt when Chinese GNP data disappoint. However, as I wrote in my blog, it is still unclear how bad the Chinese numbers were and whether they indicate a serious slowdown. I remain agnostic.
