Actually the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England isn't supposed to have one view, like, say, the Cabinet, so the "news" that the Bank was split over the latest interest rate cut is not much of a surprise. They're just a collection of brainy individuals who get thrown into a room at the bank of England every month to chew over the economy. Naturally with nine economists there are going to be more than nine views. So a three way split is a pretty unified stance, if you see what I mean.
They warned it could happen. It has. The credit crunch is here. The British Bankers Association said today that the flow of cash going into the housing market has halved, compared with last year. The implications for house prices - and for your personal prosperity, very likely - are starkly clear.
The one bizarre thing Alistair Darling said during his post G7 meeting press conference was that the assembled ministers and central bankers didn't mention the state of the US dollar in their communique because it wasn't discussed. We can only assume they ran out of time before the coffee arrived or that the Americans declared the dollar "off topic". An odd affair either way
The key to the G7 Communique, just released, lies in what it doesn't say as much as what it does, at some length. Thus, there's nothing in it about a concerted effort to boost the world economy; nothing about the declining dollar; and more or less a repeat of the old calls for transparency in financial markets, a succesful end to the Doha round of trade talks and IMF reform. The idea of a green development fund for emerging economies isn't new, but at least it seems that it may be getting somewhere. They've asked Opec to pump more oil which may be good for growth but isn't the greenest initiative they could have taken...
"Transparency" is the word on every financial minister's lips just now, but so far as the press is concerned, there isn't a lot of evidence of it here at the G7 in Tokyo. Take the finance ministers of the world's two largest economies, the US and Japan. This is the "transparency" they're offering the world: "The two ministers had a frank exchange of views on such topics as the global economy, US and Japanese economy (sic), financial markets and climate change. They agreed to continue to cooperate closely and to maintain a good working relationship." From which we may infer that they didn't agree on much, but they're not going to tell you what or why. Like I say, not very transparent.
Bad generals, so they say, always end up fighting the last war. Maybe the commanders of the world's richest economies are doing the same thing. Everything the G7 finance ministers are likely to agree upon would have stopped the credit crunch from happening, or at least made it milder. But I don't detect much sign that they're going to make the next financial crisis any easier. Then again, how can they when its causes are unknowable? There's a sense that the G7 ministers, or some of them, think that they can prevent market crashes by demanding more 'transparency'. Dream on...
Who's going to help us now? Decades ago President Ford refused New York City's pleas to help the metropolis out of its massive debt problems; it prompted one NYC paper to run one of the most brilliant headlines of all time: 'Ford to City: Drop Dead'.
Sometimes even I feel sorry for the PM. yesterday he flew in with what sounded like a great idea to reform the IMF: turn it into an "early warning system" for the world economy, alerting us to impending bubbles bursting and market crashes. Today though some senior public figures in the field of international finance and regulation made clear his idea was a non-runner: predicting market crashes is simply not feasible they say. They may be right. Poor Gordon.
Pretty much the end of Davos, though there are some interesting sessions tomorrow and a formal closing cermeny tomorrow. However most people take the Google party tonight as signalling a wind down; the slopes may be fuller.
The mood is more bullish now too; a certain calmness that they lived, talked and partied through the worst this week. I'm still marvelling at the eclectic mix of folk here; last night's dinner suprise was he premier of Quebec, where they've made it illegal to put public signs up in any langauge but French. And he's a federalist not a separatist! You learn a lot at Davos.
Friday; two days to intellectual and physical stress to go (the thin air and steep hillsround here don't do me any favours). I'm still getting over last night's live jazz funk experience and now looking forward to the Brown/Gates/Queen of Jordan show; they like Bono want the world to rededicate itself to the Millennium Development Goals, almost lost i the chatter aour recession and Soc Gen...
Tory leader David Cameron has been putting himself around a fair bit at Davos this year. He was at a dinner with Rupert Murdoch and other famous business names last night; obviously wooing the Digger in textbook Blair style. It's also possible that David will bump into his trenchant traditional/right critic Simon Heffer, and a rapprochement there may be in the air too.
One well known populist businessman who warmed to David C, noted his slightly right of centre pitch to business but wondered how much difference there really is between Cameron and Brown on the big issues. Don't we all? Cameron's set piece on terror is this afternoon...
To be honest before I came here for my first World Economic Forum I was a bit of a Davos sceptic. I still am, a bit, but I think I can see what the organisers were after when I think about the people I encounetred last night: three senior Government ministers, including the Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, all very impressive; the boss of a go-ahead Indian biotech firm, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, even more impresive; four Nobel prize winners, including Shimon Peres; the actress Francesca Martinez, who you might recall from Extras; Arthur Mutambara, from the MDC in Zimbabwe who explained to everyone in the back of a shuttle how the Zimbabwean economy keeps managing to function; plus the usual compliment of bankers and bosses.
Well, she wowed them... but I'm not sure Condi Rice convinced all the Davos participants that the US is still an "engine" of world economic growth. Still she put a few things right about Russia and the Middle East. What a pity her colleague, Treasury secretary Hank Paulson cannot now come to Davos; a testament to the scale of the crisis.
Your corespondent-blogger is off now to dinner with the Indian minster of commerce and thence to a "Nobel nightcap" - with no less than I think seven Nobel prizewinners. I'm not bragging, just letting you know how folk in Davos spend their time. Lucky things.
Lest we forget... In a conference centre full of the rich and powerful they're understandably fretting about recession and stock market crashes. So there's a danger that the biggest threat to the planet - climate change - is forgotten. Just as well then that the warm up for the packed session with Condi Rice starred RK Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Nobel Peace Prize winner (with Al Gore). He told the Davos participants that to reduce our consumption now would mean the prosperity we'd reach in 2030 would be postponed for a few months! Gets the stock market in perspective.
They say there are such things as Davos moments. This wasn't one, as such, but I found myself in the queue for lunch behind Stephen Roach, one of the world's most entertaining economists (OK, not much competition there) and head of Morgan Stanley in Asia.
Day one, session one at the World Economic Forum at Davos and the bears are out in force. Some of the big economic beasts of the jungle are predicting an American recession and a sharp slowdown in economic growth.
A few closing thoughts from the IMF's autumn meetings;
1. The International Monetary Fund hasn't got much hope. It doesn't do a lot of lending any more and it seems to be mutating into a think tank. It doesn't say much that, having hogged the post, the Europeans have delivered two bosses in a row who haven't completed their term. It needs some vision. Maybe the new Frenchman, Dominique Strauss-Kahn will deliver it. It needs to reform its governance and find a new purpose. Maybe they could start by turning themselves into quasi regulators of the world banking system...
Day Two of the IMF/World Bank circus, and I'm afraid that most of the UK press are obsessed with the slightly parochial question of British house prices. You too? Ah, well perhaps I should let you know that the International Monetary Fund's economic counsellor tells us (reading between his lines) that your home is probably one third overvalued. I'll just let you have a moment to work out how many thousands you'll be down on your latest deal.