My fault, your fault, their fault, default

The United States is three weeks from defaulting on its obligations. Ordinarily, at this point what would happen is the party in opposition (though it’s hard to tell who that is in this case) does a lot of heel dragging, but grudgingly decides not to send the US and world economies into a downturn that would make the 2007-2009 crisis look like an amusing typo. And in many ways we are in luck. The President, Senate Majority Leader and House Minority Leader all want to raise the debt ceiling. As does the Republican Speaker of the House. But, as with many things in US politics, it’s not so straight forward.

The US owes $14trn, and it needs some more, hence the necessity to raise the debt ceiling. Throw in the fact that the economic recovery has been anemic at best, and you understand why unemployment, the truest misery index, has remained stubbornly above 9%. Republicans are demanding major spending cuts and not a penny of ‘job-destroying tax increases’ in order for them to agree to not crashing the global economy. America has an economy problem.  America has a political problem. It’s a marriage made in K Street.

This is not to say that Democrats are blameless. In the same way that they could have passed a budget deal before the 2010 midterms and therefore avoid a near government shutdown, they could have voted to raise the debt ceiling when they were in charge of the House. Furthermore, in the years of total Republican domination of the executive and legislative branches, Democrats repeatedly voted against raising the debt ceiling in protest against the policies of the Bush Administration. Neither side is blameless in this debate.

America has not run out of money. It has run out of the legal authority to borrow money, a legal authority that it can grant itself. They are in the enviable position of being their own bank manager. And if they do, they’re fine. People are falling over themselves to purchase US Treasury bonds. They can’t get enough of the stuff. In some cases, some yields are working out at negative interest rates. Simply put, there is a seller’s market for US debt. And it’s not surprising when you look around the world. Europe is suffocated by sovereign debt, the Chinese make it difficult for foreigners to buy bonds whilst the greenback remains a reliable friend, even after the near trillion dollars of quantitative easing.

Right now, America is the Titanic, but with satellite navigation and headlights. It can see the iceberg coming. And it is literally (at least in this dodgy metaphor) deciding whether or not it should hit it. America is not like Portugal. It has never defaulted on its loans. Also, if Portugal were to default, the world will not have lost $14trn. I’ve never had more than £50 in my wallet at any one time, but that sounds like a lot of money. And it’s mostly held by US citizens in pension plans, not by the cackling Chinese and their plans for global domination.

The debate in Washington, and indeed around the world, is thus: are the Republicans that crazy? And the answer is no, probably. Republican policy is, if not dictated by, then written for big business and the super rich. Hence their strident opposition to all tax rises on the uber wealthy, and to closing tax loopholes for oil companies. But if the US defaults, everybody loses. If you own anything other than gold and wheat, you are in big trouble. And the Republicans know this because their backers are telling them as much. If America defaults, big business loses. This is why there will be an agreement to raise the debt ceiling. Probably.

The US has a medium to long term debt problem. It doesn't need a short term one as well. John Boehner is a serious guy, and the main danger isn’t that he doesn’t vote yea, but that he can’t take his Tea Party infused caucus with him. The world economy is in the process of recovering from a nasty bout of pneumonia. Will the Republicans vote for Spanish influenza? No, because their financial backers don’t want it. So sit tight until August 2^nd. Though I’d stock up on canned goods, just in case.

First Past the Net Post

The Alternative Vote campaign was not a good advertisement for direct democracy in the United Kingdom. Truths became half-truths, and half-truths became Goebbels. The Yes campaign started with leads in the polls, but in the end was defeated by a margin of more than two to one. This has been explained as punishment directed at the Liberal Democrats for repudiating their own manifesto, a glorious endorsement of the first-past-the-post system or because Eddie Izzard isn’t very funny. But of course it’s none of these; it’s because we like tennis.

The essence of tennis scoring is to exaggerate slight differences between players, and in doing so create clear results. In 2007 Rafael Nadal defeated Roger Federer in the final of Roland Garros. This is because Rafael Nadal always defeats Roger Federer in the final of Roland Garros. In 2007, Nadal defeated Federer 6-3 4-6 6-3 6-4. Three sets to one, twenty-two games to sixteen, whatever way you look at it, a comprehensive victory. Except, only because of the electoral or rather scoring system. Break points are to tennis what marginal constituencies are to British elections. In that final, Federer earned seventeen break points to Nadal’s ten. But whilst the Spaniard converted four of his, the Swiss managed a measly one. It was as if Lord Ashcroft was funnelling winners to Nadal at those vital moments.

It may appear paradoxical to cite a match that took three days to be completed, but the same principle held when John Isner finally defeated Nicholas Mahut in the match that would not end at Wimbledon last year. The statistics bordered on the fantastical. The match lasted over eleven hours, the final set included 138 games and the IBM scoreboard broke at 47-all, which bodes well for our cyber attack defences. Isner won the match, but he did so by winning a minority of the points. Frenchman Mahut nominally ‘won’ the match 502-478. But as Federer knows all too well, not all points are worth the same. A double fault when 40-0 up matters far less than a missed drop shot at 30-40.

If you live in a marginal constituency, you are, for want of a more attractive analogy, a break point. You matter. If, however, you reside in the bluest of blue hamlets or the deep red of the northern inner cities, you are a 40-0 point. Like a low level US federal employee during a government shutdown, you are non-essential.

All of which of course means very little. This was an intellectual exercise, and not a very intellectual one at that. Tennis has a reputation in this country for being a middle class sport, played in country clubs by well to do ladies and gentlemen wearing their all-whites. Unfair or not, its scoring system means that tennis is a place where Conservative Britain meets conservative Britain.

In tennis you cannot play out the clock. You cannot take the ball to the corner flag, and you cannot kick it away. The match is over when your opponent is defeated. But the 12^th Century French aristocrats that invented the sport weren’t so stupid as to conceive of a game with no time limit in a region of the world that is forever blighted by that awful faux-meteorological motif ‘scattered showers’ without fixing the scoring system first. First-past-the-post, with notable exceptions, delivers majority governments. Tennis scoring separates winners from losers despite oftentimes tiny differences. What do Nick Clegg and Nicholas Mahut have in common? Now we know.

The Colour of Clay

The grass may need cutting at Wimbledon, but there’s only one grand slam where the court is alive, and that is Roland Garros. Only on clay are you playing on someone’s face.

Clay can lay claim to being the most aesthetically pleasing surface, and when the sun is shining, I cannot think of a better looking face than that of the Monte-Carlo Country Club, where the glistening Mediterranean caresses the Monegasque coast. But behind the Angelina Jolie looks is a dangerous, volatile personality.

To spend a day staring at a clay court is to watch her many moods. In bright sunshine, she is golden, tawny brown, a sea of tranquility to contrast with the fierce battle taking place on her surface.

But she changes when the sun goes down. She doesn’t just slow down serves, she drains energy from her pallet. A match with life and speed and relentless vigour slows down sometimes slightly, sometimes dramatically, as if under the spell of the surface. A day at the beach is transformed into a week in the trenches.

The rallies are extended, the grunting becomes more pronounced and the mood gets darker. Everything gets harder. As if life bleeds from the players and it’s that what turns the surface dark. It’s volcanic, sulphuric, powdered rust – a million miles from the bucket and spade post card. Where once there were shadows, now only muscles. In the sunshine, the players dance over the surface, but when it won’t come out to play, they are shackled ankle-deep in quick sand.

Clay is the surface made most malleable by the weather. In warm and dry conditions, it hardens and speeds up, but when cloudy and humid, it slows quite dramatically. Slow conditions paradoxically favour the bigger hitters, as they have the requisite power to overcome both their opponent and the clouds.

When the court is swept, the lines cleared and the sun blocked, the court is baptised, and the trailing player is given a second chance.

There’s something satisfying about the idea of blaming the weather and having physics on your side. The idea that when the sun goes out, it doesn’t just make you feel lethargic, it slows things down at the particle level. Shifting blame is the world’s favourite game. But tennis at Roland Garros must be a close second.

Labour's (David) Miliband Problem

Labour has a problem, and it goes by the name of Miliband. But it’s not Ed that is a cause for concern (at least not yet), rather his brother and defeated Labour Leadership contender, David. To state the obvious, David Miliband is not the leader of the Labour Party, and as such, even almost one year on he acts as a very visible sign of the path not taken.

The former Foreign Secretary is what Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight would call a ‘ghost’. Not because he is admirably thin, nor because he is particularly pale, but because candidate David has been usurped by the ghost of David, like the deceased hated husband who can now do no wrong.

Ghost David would have gained far more than 800 seats in the local elections, and would have orchestrated a miraculous Labour victory in Scotland. Ghost David would out do the Prime Minister every week at PMQs, framing him as a bully that panders to the vileness of the Tory right and the mendacious Liberal Democrats. Ghost David would have the Labour Party twenty points clear in the opinion polls.

Victorious candidates always live with a ghost or two. William Hague had Margaret Thatcher for company, Barack Obama had Hilary Clinton and Ron Greenwood had Brian Clough. Ed Miliband has it tougher than most; for 'Mr Miliband' once meant David.

There are still (probably) four years before a general election will take place in the UK. The result will be determined, as ever, by economics. If the Osborne plan works, the deficit is reduced and a pre-election budget delivers tax cuts for the middle classes, a Conservative majority is the most likely outcome. If, however, the economy is still flat-lining in 2015 and people feel poorer than they did five years earlier, a Labour victory is probable. Policy and even personality is marginalised when the saliency of the economy is high. That the economy (over which Prime Ministers and Chancellors, and to an even greater extent Leaders of the Opposition have only a modest influence) trumps issues in terms of importance in elections, leads one to ponder whether one of the vital foundations of representative democracy is discredited, but that is an academic diversion.

There are murmurings in the Labour Party and the media about the performance of Ed Miliband. Some of the criticisms are fair and should be taken on board, most are unwarranted and mean-spirited. But in the battle between a person and a ghost, I’d always opt for the former, if for no other reason than a man (or woman) is better than a myth.