What frightens me? Heights, extremely confined spaces, death, finding myself on a train without a book, the usual sort of thing. Nicci and I have explored the subject in our books: being targeted by someone crazy, not being believed, wondering if you really know the people closest to you.
But what frightened me today was reading the article by John Lanchester in the current London Review of Books. For example:
'It is possible that we [citizens of Britain] are on course for the worst-case scenario. that would involve all our big, TBTF [too big to fail] banks turning out to be insolvent, with the result that their balance sheets go onto the public debt. If that were to happen, Britain itself could become insolvent.... The trigger would be a general view in the markets that the government's tax receipts weren't sufficient to meet its debt payments. That would cause a 'buyer's strike' in the bond market": nobody would want to buy UK government bonds, so the government could no longer keep going back to the markets for cash to pay its liabilities. That would leave the government facing an immediate need for cash with no means of raising it - and it's that which would send us prostrate to the IMF. Sterling would be more or less worthless. Travel would be next impossible, imports would be unaffordable, interest rates would zoom up and stay up, there would be cut in all aspects of public sector spending, especially employment. It would be brutal.'
Outstanding, and scarier than Poe writing about being buried alive. (Lanchester has written another fine piece on the crisis in this week's New Yorker. But that's about the general banking crisis, so it's only very alarming rather than absolutely bloody terrifying.)
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