It’s been a very long time since my last blog. My life has changed so much in recent times and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the future – the horses have taken a back seat.
I’ve had a few winners lately. Present Danger won tonight which was nice – she’s very capable but is still very green and quite weak. She’ll be better next year if we keep her in training – it’s tempting to start breeding from her but my current feeling is that we should give her another year. I need to chat to Michael about that.
Whey Sauce was a nice winner the other day, and I think she may make up into a decent animal. She’s placed in a Group 3 and has won a good looking maiden – again I think I’ll give her another year. Work Shy has run and won – she is injury prone and may never run again. Bouguereau and Morana may go jumping this year.
I’ve become a little obsessed with the problems of the Eurozone, trying to work out what is likely to happen and how it is going to affect me and my future plans. The current situation is very bad, if somewhat predictable. I don’t really know how the powerful economies of Europe thought it would be a safe bet to get into bed with Silvio Berlusconi – Italy is culturally a pole apart from Germany and Berlusconi’s swashbuckling style of politics was always going to be too rich for the controlled and collaborative effort required to make the Euro work as a currency. If it all comes apart now it’s going to be an unmitigated financial disaster the like of which the world has never seen before – it would be very very bad.
…but I don’t see it happening, at least not yet. The situation can be saved, at enormous expense, by printing vast amounts of new money. Italy in return will presumably have to sign up to extremely tough terms if they are to accept the bailout. The concern is that there will be rioting on a massive scale as the horrible truth sinks in to the people of Italy and Greece and other countries that have not managed their finances as well as the Germans.
The only way to get a deal done is to get everyone looking hard into the abyss – not just the leaders of the economies around the world but also everywhere in the media. We need to get to the point where people are afraid rather than angry – only then can the right deal be struck – and I think that Europe’s leaders are playing the game accordingly. I think deals will be struck when the time is right, but all they will do is to buy time.
Sooner or later it all has to change, and in a big way, but I think we will buy the necessary time to effect change in an orderly fashion. It will come at a big cost.