Kennedy's Blog

After looking through the daily newspapers, Angus Kennedy is desperately looking for reasons to be cheerful!

Reasons to be cheerful? Actually, are there any? I open my morning paper and here goes - the credit crunch is only half way there; a major US bank will fall in six months; bread prices are rising due to bad weather; the money in your bank is not worth anything now as inflation is soaring higher than the cost of saving; billions have been wiped off banking shares; and property prices may not recover until 2016. And also let us not forget the cost of those irritating little things we need from time to time like oil, gas, mortgages, insurance, water, electricity, loans and taxes. It just goes on and on and on. You name it, it's going up in price rather quickly!

And, if it's not going up, there is not much of 'it' in supply anyway. This is really quite serious isn't it? Let's face it we are looking at this monster eye to eye and she ain't backing off. Where indeed are the reasons to be cheerful? It doesn't matter where you look, you are never too far away from a well constructed, and even half true, doom-gloom-credit-crunch story. It's getting very close to home. Heavens, I turn the page of the newspaper and read on... even the price of a small packet of boned cured Turkey Ham (170g) has risen by 9.64% to a rip off £0.91. Now I know it's bad, since when was a turkey a pig anyway? But it's badder than bad.We can't even buy the cheap tasteless sh*te any more that we used to survive on as students.We can't even indulge in one of our last retailing pleasures of throwing a packet of cheap crap in the shopping trolley for fun, or just to see how bad it really is.

I did report in a previous Candid (no really I did - ask some of our publisher friends) that there would be carnage. The Kennedy's Horoscope for September (its August as I write) does predict some really serious property price falls and banking crashes far greater than we have experienced so far. Look at it this way, in the UK there just aren't any property buyers out there and I still don't understand why they even ask these daft prices for their overpriced houses. If there are no buyers then why do they think the house is actually worth anything? Interesting times lie ahead. It's unusual for Candid to be so candid, but then over the years there has always been that Nostradamus effect on this page.

Luckily, there is one reason to be cheerful. Actually it's quite a good one... according to the Times Newspaper last week the only one single industry sector that has not been crucified this year (at least in the UK) has been the food and drink sector. Even though the price of chocolate is set to go up again it is still proving to be resilient. So, we can still be cheerful. We should forget about the revolting Turkey Ham and eat Jam instead. It's one of the only food products not to have gone up in the UK, well strawberry jam to be more precise. According to Asda, Tesco and Sainsbury's online the price has actually dropped over the past year.

So until next month take it easy. I have a very funny story involving rugby tackles and chickens next month!