I once played soccer for a team with the exotically self-satirising name of Racing Club de Shepherds Bush. We used to wear pink socks, and sometimes bow ties as part of our kit. The intention was to provoke and outrage our inevitably more serious opponents.
It worked. The dandyism often attracted some ferocious physical challenges, but we still won more than we lost, and had a lot of fun with it.
My affection for Shepherds Bush ends there, with name. It has latterly become the furthest-flung outpost of brutal urban churlishness in central west London. There has been a spate of muggings, drive-by shootings, and stabbings on Shepherds Bush Green in recent months. The green is a embellished by nasty fast-food outlets and wholly unadulterated by any charm that I can see. Yet if you cross the roundabout to the east, you will find the Elysian fields of Holland Park, with its exquisite, multi-storied houses, its expatriates, and those hedge fund managers who managed to keep enough of their asset mix in cash over the past couple of years to keep their heads above water. And some liquid it is too. If you can tread water in Holland Park, you are surviving in one of the most expensive spots in west Europe, sterling's declines against major currencies this year notwithstanding.
So it was with some trepidation that I took a variety of teenage children to the movies in Shepherds Bush this week end. The film we all wanted to see was not available elsewhere, so I took four adolescents off to a place I could hardly describe as being one of safety. You can imagine the horror I felt when I saw a group of people gathered round in a tight circle in one of the shopping malls. Every now and then a triumphalist cheer would issue from them. I half-wondered whether this was some brutal urban incident – a beating, perhaps, to be recorded on mobile- phone cameras and uploaded on to the internet.
Well, humiliation of a sort was occurring, though no actual violence was taking place. The crowd was gathered round a bank of television screens, and the cheering was for the dominant performance of the Pakistan cricket team as it brutalised Sri Lanka in the final of the World Twenty20 cricket competition.
I am consistently impressed by the way sport has become a leading force in the drive towards globalisation. Here was a group of people, mainly Asian and, I guessed, mainly based in London. They were almost all cheering (the quiet ones were neutral or crestfallen Sri Lankans) at a spectacle played out between two countries they felt they belonged to. The final was being beamed out worldwide to hundreds of millions of people. They were acting locally, but the spectacle was global.
Whether it is swine flu or a Polish car part manufacturer failing to deliver to an assembly plant in Dusseldorf (which means the German workers get laid off a couple of days later), the evidence is before us of an increasing global inter-connectedness.
On a country analysis, the only engines of growth still functioning properly seem to me to be the twin Asian giants, China and India. But the contraction in demand in the West is finally beginning to bite. The latest figures from the World Bank make for pretty gloomy reading. World Bank economists predict that developing countries are expected to grow by just 1.2 per cent this year. While that is still a positive outcome, it compares dismally with a growth figure of 5.9 per cent in 2008 and 8.1 per cent the year before.
But there is a twist in the tale – and a grim one at that. China and India are still technically classified as "developing countries", which is a nonsense. These are developing countries only in the narrowest of senses. Both these Asian giants are growing and developing, but they are, like the children I was taking to the cinema, strapping adolescents and "developed" in a very meaningful sense.
If you strip out the performance of India and China, the combined economic output of the developing countries is expected to fall by 1.6 per cent this year. Ouch.
And things do not look too great for India, either. Regular readers will know I am a huge fan of the Indian work ethic and its economy (and, yes, there is massive inequity and horrendous poverty – but the progress overall is phenomenal).
Deflation has come to visit India for the first time in more than three decades, according to the country's Ministry of Commerce and Industry.
Commodity prices have been in free fall for a while after the massive inflationary ramp we saw over the past couple of years. Those falls have seen food prices drop sharply (no bad thing in itself) and wholesale prices fell by 1.6 per cent in the year to June 2009.
The Indian Government is predicting deflation to continue through the summer, until at least September. The Global Development Finance report is not an enjoyable read: For all the falling food prices, poverty (and therefore hunger) and unemployment look set to increase. My own long-term investment in India is just that – long term. But I fear I may have to hold on for quite a while yet before my fund offers the returns I want.
- Martin Baker is a journalist, author and commentator on international business affairs