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QE poetry competition announced
Giles has a quite brilliant poem about Quantitative Easing and continued constraints on lending. This is quite a feat. Go read it.
Here’s is my paltry effort.
There’s this bloke who runs England’s Bank.
He saw the economy starting to tank.
So he doled out more dosh
To those already awash.
And they used it to maintain their rank.
Competition closes mindnight tonight. Prizes to be decided by me. Giles’s will be hard to beat, mind.
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Here’s a series of haikus (my favourite form of poem, basically because it’s about as short as you can get and therefore requires little effort on my part):
People who banked and
trusted bankers who eased were
too easily pleased.
People who filled socks
with soggy old banknotes were
cleverer by far
than the trusting mass
which believed the words and ads
of cruel salesbeings.
Time to return to
other moralities of
another planet.
An economy
at the service of people;
not people at the
beck and unkind call
of an economy which
knows only money.
This is exactly the sort of thing that was bound to ruin my evening. Or rather, to make my evening, for I love nerdish humour and I don’t care who knows it. here’s a limerick:
The Old Lady was most displeased
That credit was painfully squeezed
She made billions from nought
And yet I must report
My own bank balance is uneased
And I’ve had a stab at a much longer poem here. First verse:
Mervyn King was in his counting house, counting out our money;
It didn’t take him very long, a fact he deemed most funny.
“To return our stagnant nation to a land of milk and honey,
I must make things more liquid – or at least, a bit more runny.”
This isn’t very good either, and probably economically illiterate. But it is an authentic villanelle.
For he’s given our money away
If not in coins then just in ink
And he’s saved the economy
He gave someone’s money away
Whose money it was I can’t quite think
But it worked – hip hip hooray!
He didn’t give my money away
From helping the nation I wouldn’t shrink
But I was already in debt anyway
Did he give your money away?
Did he take it with a smile and a wink?
Did it come off your cheque on pay day?
What? He gave their money away?
Then why did they call him a cad and a fink
When they’re richer by far today?
So, he gave some money away
And we’re in the red and they’re in the pink
And how that worked no-one can say
And I think we’ve been f’ed in the a.
Hey, you and Giles got mentioned in the FT blo:
http://blogs.ft.com/ft-dot-comment/2010/02/11/poems-for-our-time/
Shall we agree that Tom Freeman won?
Either a copy of my QE piece, or a guided tour of Bickerstaffe, in Lancs, for the lucky winner…