FTdotcomment

There’s been a sudden spate of rather good poems about the financial crisis, started by Giles Wilkes at Freethinking Economist. Some extracts:

Wilkes on QE:

Both the Chancellor’s mighty eyebrows took a leap towards the ceiling
The money flooding out gave him that ‘Denis Healey’ feeling
“Infla…” he checked himself. “Guv’nor, I’m rather disappointed”
“To inflate away our troubles wasn’t why you were annointed”
But the Guv’nor mollified with words like “money multiply”
till the Chancellor signed the letter with a wary, weary sigh.

Though Cowards Flinch (which ran a competition on the topic):

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.

(Which actually addresses a serious issue ignored by most: the distributional effects of the bank rescues and QE. More on this at some point, but probably not in verse.)

Telegraph readers have been at it, too, with a whole series, including this gem:

When leaders don’t lead,
And executive greed,
Blows whole market structures away.
The ordinary bloke
Is the one they will soak
“Get back ill-gotten
gains” we all say!

Tom Freeman, I think, has the best, with his (long) Sing a song of £200bn

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.”

Here’s some quick and dirty doggerel.

Oh, the grand old Gordon Brown,
He had 10 billion pounds,
He spent them all at the top of the boom
And he asked for them back again

And when he was booming he was booming
And when he was broke he called Merv
And when he was ten full points behind
He was neither electable nor in charge

More suggestions welcome, particularly if they make the one above scan properly…