Why we need a new Bird and Fortune to explain a financial world teetering out of control

Business life, advertising and marketing included, has become exponentially more complicated with snake oil merchants of all descriptions profiting mightily because few of the rest of us have the faintest idea what they’re up to or even talking about. Adtech, martech anyone?

“Trussonomics,” as the economic policies of new UK PM Liz Truss are collectively known, has plunged people and businesses in the UK (already grappling with soaring energy prices and dubious benefits of Brexit) into a tailspin with borrowing costs, including mortgages, going through the roof.

Marketing budgets are being slashed and businesses will close in their thousands unless someone persuades Truss and her consiglieri chancellor Kwasi Karteng to drop their unfunded tax cut plans and get the country back on the financial straight and narrow.

Someone, somewhere though will be making money from all of this, in all likelihood Karteng’s old chums in City-based hedge funds. Why? Because they always do.

The last time we saw such mayhem was the financial crisis of 2008, when American sub-prime mortgage scams holed the world’s financial system below the waterline, leaving taxpayers to fork out billions to fish the bankers out of the water.

Here’s a sketch from 2008 with satirists John Bird (the banker) and John Fortune (his baffled interlocutor) exploring the financial crisis. It’s quite revealing and very funny.

Now as we try to grapple with fearsome consequences of Trussonomics’ disastrous impact on the bond markets (and hence the UK’s mushrooming overdraft) there’s an urgent need for a new Bird and Fortune to tell us what’s going on.

At least they would give us a laugh.