Economic variations

Just out of bed the other morning and picking up the paper from outside the kitchen door, I did what I suppose everybody else does – I didn't read anything, I looked at the first photograph to catch my eye.

It was a photograph of a diamond brooch of six prongs, or stems or branches, or whatever the jewellers call them, of a most complex but exquisite design. It was the wrong time of day to start counting the configuration of the smaller branches and their smaller branches. It was like a star but every branch and sub-branch was absolutely uniform and next to this marvellous jewel was another one, six branches sprouting out of a complicated but equally uniform circle. I assumed they were relics of some old noble house, maybe part of the breathtaking collection of the Vatican jewels.

My first thought was they must have cost a pretty penny and I expected to read that they'd been sold at auction in London for one of those preposterous prices that works of art fetch in these times when, in spite of – is it – two in three people in the world going hungry every night, there does seem to be a vast amount of private wealth floating around waiting to seize on objects which will celebrate and proclaim the superior wealth of the purchaser.

And this led me think I'd better talk some time about the dizzy prosperity of the top five per cent of people in the West and that recalled an announcement I'd read in the paper the day before that, whereas about 250 banks in the United States had gone bust in 1986, this year it's expected the figure will be closer to 300. Not a sign of a declining economy by any means but, as the story said bluntly, because of the mania for corporate raiding, the merger mania which either rescues small companies or forces them to the wall. And also, the story declared, because of widespread fraud by way of creaming off profits not in the public interest.

That thought tied in with a surprising statistic coming out of the Harvard Business School, that about 40 per cent of the graduating class of 1986 was not going into law offices or various sorts of business, but into investment banking which is where the quick, lush money lies. And then there was a piece by the famous economist, Professor John Kenneth Galbraith – a warning piece finding striking parallels between the summer of 1929 and today. The summer of 1929, for happy innocents unborn then, was the last glorious splurge of the so-called Coolidge prosperity, before the roof fell in; Wall Street heard a crashing sound and the worst depression in a century was under way.

Dr Galbraith is, however, also a liberal and a Democrat and it's natural for him to look for, and find, the Achilles heel in a Republican administration that he dislikes intensely. It was a relief to hear him the other evening on the telly up against an investment man who did a very plausible job, anyway, of demolishing Dr Galbraith's thesis.

Strikingly unlike 1929, the man said; this was a time of unprecedentedly low inflation, now under two per cent, unemployment is always too high for an ideal society, but still holding at seven per cent. Interest rates were, are, remarkably low and he didn't believe the stock market was overpriced or at the mercy, as Dr Galbraith maintained, of speculators. The economic outlook, except among liberal Democrats doing the looking out, is without question generally taken to be good. Never mind, said the man, the first trillion budget in history which President Reagan has just blithely sent up to Congress, and so on and so forth.

All these thoughts went gallivanting through my mind as I laid out the paper and then looked again at the front page and the photographs of those two exquisite jewels. Well, you know, they weren't jewels. They were photographed images magnified 40 times of snowflakes and the caption was a shock. It said, 'A crystal tip or dendrite photographed in multiple exposure becomes unstable as it grows downward and sub-branches, identical in form, bud from the sides. Snowflakes generated by computer reflect all the variations of the real world.'

Reflect all the variations of the real world. That's quite a sentence. The accompanying story, much too long and dense and complicated to go into here, began with the triumphant lead sentence: 'Science has conquered the snowflake problem'. And the lead paragraph says: 'The Schlumberger-Doll Research Center in Connecticut has resolved two of nature's most poetic and maddening riddles. Why are snowflakes symmetrical and why are they all different? Theoretical physicists have now created a new body of mathematics for the laws that control the delicate branching growth of an unstable, solidifying crystal.'

I recite that sentence with no ulterior chuckle. I'm told, by a scientist I greatly respect, that there's no end to what this solution may open up to inquisitive minds, whether they are physicists or mathematicians or housewives or doctors or artists or athletes. Anybody interested in learning how the real world affects their specialty. Imagine – at long last we may be able to solve the unsolved riddle of the golf swing!

Well, my rather late discovery that a beautiful jewel was not a jewel but a snowflake dashed my intention of talking about wealth, poverty, investment banking, corruption in the financial markets, parallels, if any, with 1929 and Dr Galbraith. So I won't begin.

Rather, let us look at what we, in our innocence, take to be the real world. Not being members of the Schlumberger-Doll Research Center in Connecticut, the most real world that exists for responsible American citizens just now is the incoming, the 100th, Congress. I don't know why the reassembling of Congress is so much more exciting than the return of a parliament after a holiday recess. Of course, it must be because it's an odd year, 1987, and therefore this is the January after a national election. Not a presidential election, but since the entire House of Representatives is up for election every two years and one-third of the Senate, it does mean in January of every odd year, you can have an entirely new balance of power between the parties. And that's what we've got this year.

The 100th Congress has only been in existence a week but already we're having to learn new names, spot new faces on television as, for instance, the old, shambling face of Tip O'Neill is absent from the Speaker's chair in the House and replaced by the foxy face of Mr Jim Wright of Texas.

But it's in the Senate that there's an entirely new cast of characters, of leading men, so to speak, because the Democrats won back their majority in the Senate in November, so all the chairmen of all the committees are Democrats. And it's in the committees that the real manual and mental labour is done.

And since late last year the Senate finally voted to have its proceedings on the floor televised, we now see and hear them every night. Of course, we've always seen the committee hearings on television, the really important ones – and that means the ones that are investigating some scandal or some piece of legislation that's going to change things radically.

And I needn't tell you that coming up very soon, we shall be seeing the Senate Select Committee appointed to go into what we've finally decided to call the Iran-Contra Deal. People have tried scores of facetious names, 'Down the Iranian Drain', 'Contragate', 'Gippergate' (after Mr Reagan's most famous part as a dying football player in the movies) – none of them has caught on, but everybody knows what we mean by the Iran-Contra Deal.

The Senate passed a resolution the other day to order that committee now about to sit to finish its investigation by 1 August next, unless it's on to new, important, information not absolutely substantiated, in which case the committee could get an extension till October. It promises a running series just as tasty as John Le Carré or James Bond.

Which reminds me, I ran into a young movie scriptwriter the other day and we played around with the idea of a movie writer of talent going to a studio, let's say, a year ago, with a humdinger of a scenario. He'd say, 'I've thought up a story'.

It begins with the President of the United States making a thrilling speech urging the entire Western alliance to stop all trade with the detested Ayatollah Khomeini. But then, a sneaky little magazine in Beirut finds out America has been selling arms secretly to Iran for 18 months. The president, his secretary of state, all the top men say they've never heard of it. It's been done by an obscure marine officer and a retired admiral. It involves Israeli go-betweens and a multimillionaire Saudi arms dealer.

Now the money goes into a Swiss bank account and on to the Contras in Nicaragua, but the Contras say they never got the money and it comes out that $10 million maybe from the arms sales has gone astray. The Pentagon can't trace it. Now, wait! The one man who probably knows everything is the head of the CIA but he comes down with a malignant brain tumour and now he can't speak. Maybe ever. Meanwhile the president has to have a prostate operation and Congress has appointed two select committees, one of which is going to run for seven months.

Now this could be a mini or maxi series on TV running for 29, maybe 36, weeks but please, listen – here's the clincher. The President recovers from his operation, gets most of his budget through Congress, offers to meet Gorbachev and, at 76, is so brave and cheerful that by the late spring, summer certainly, everybody's bored stiff with the Senate hearings and the president is good old Ron again.

Of course, the young man with his ridiculous imagination would have been tossed out of the producer's office long before he got to the happy ending.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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