CNNアンカー　リチャード・クエスト氏　限定コラム– category –

I have often wondered why I care about a family to which I am not related; that I will never know on personal or confidential terms; that has little bearing on what happens in my everyday life. In other words – why do I care about the Royal Wedding?

The text of the ECB statement ran to more than one thousand words but only two of them were significant; “Strong Vigilance.” When we saw these two words we knew: European interest rates are going up. Sooner rather than later.

Forgive me if during these early weeks of January I muse some unusual thoughts. There will be plenty of time during the year to bore on about sovereign debt crises, global growth and currency wars. Today I want to go on a complete tangent.

The scandal surrounding Bernard Madoff and his $60 billion Ponzi scheme is back in the news with the tragic death last week of Mark Madoff, the eldest son of the fraudster. He committed suicide by hanging himself in his New York apartment after sending several tortured emails complaining that no-one believed him.

It was not supposed to be like this; once Greece had been bailed out, and European leaders put in place their “shock and awe” €740b package, further bailouts were not thought to be necessary. Long winded statements extolled the virtue of the European Financial Stability Facility, the European Financial Mechanism and the IMF’s helping hand.

I can’t remember reading a document quite as meaningless as the G20 communiqué after Seoul. I knew we were in trouble the moment I saw they had come up with a catchy phrase “Seoul Action Plan” and then used the phrase “root causes” to describe some of the problems. How very 20th Century management speak. That so many grown men and women could come up with three pages of verbiage and declare it a success has stretched credulity to breaking point.

It was the briefest of trips but one I did willingly; a quick three-day journey across the South Atlantic to Brazil. 22 hours of flying to spend 48 hours in Curitiba – a metropolitan city of 3.5 million people and the state capital of Parana, in the subtropical south of the country. Curitiba is more than three hundred years old. Colonised by European settlers from Germany, Italy, Poland and Ukraine, these nationalities still have strong roots here. In the heart of South America, this city has a distinctly European feel of which they are very proud.

I always believed it was a matter of time before the US Fed (and probably the UK’s Bank of England) dusted off its voluminous cheque books and engaged in further bout of Quantitative Easing (QE) by writing gargantuan cheques pumping more money into ailing economies. Last week’s statement from the Fed’s monetary committee saying it “is prepared to provide additional accommodation if needed to support the economic recovery” suggests that time is close by.

The seasons, they are a-changing. I can smell it in the air. September is upon us and in the northern hemisphere the evenings are getting darker earlier. The wind has a fresh bite about it. The lazy hazy days of summer are rapidly giving way to a chill. Colder times are upon us. Unfortunately I am not just talking about the weather.

I came. I saw.It is always good to go and see for yourself. Better to get a first hand impression than constantly listening to what others tell you is taking place.

For a Brit, being in the US on 4th of July is always a fun experience. You have to put up with the inevitable jests about how they ‘kicked our butts’ 234 years ago to form their “more perfect union”.

When BP's CEO Tony Hayward took a beating before Congress last week I felt sorry for him. Hour after hour he sat there, looking miserable as congressmen lined up to put the boot in. After three hours of watching the nearest thing we have to a modern day lynching, I was prepared to shout ‘Enough’.