Murder capitals of the world: how runaway urban growth fuels violence

San Pedro Sula, Honduras, is the most dangerous city on the planet – and experts say it is a sign of a global epidemic

• John Vidal, environment editor
• The Observer, Saturday 1 November 2014 23.33 GMT

People on their way home in the Chamelacon suburb, considered one of the most dangerous ares San Pedro Sula. Photograph: Juan Carlos/Juan Carlos/Corbis

It was relatively quiet in San Pedro Sula last month. A gunfight between police and a drug gang left a 15-year-old boy dead; the body of a man riddled with bullets was found in a banana plantation; two lawyers were gunned down; a salesman was murdered inside his 4x4; and a father and son were murdered at home after pleading not to be killed.

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Humanity's 'inexorable' population growth is so rapid that even a global catastrophe wouldn't stop it

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One politician survived an assassination attempt and around a dozen people were found dead in the street. The number of killings is said to have fallen in the last few months, but the Honduran city is officially the most violent in the world outside the Middle East and warzones, with more than 1,200 killings in a year, according to statistics for 2011 and 2012. Its murder rate of 169 per 100,000 people far surpasses anything in North America or much larger cities such as Johannesburg, Lagos or São Paulo. London, by contrast, has just 1.3 murders per 100,000 people.

Now research by security and development groups suggests that the violence plaguing San Pedro Sula – a city of just over a million, and Honduras’s second largest – and many other Latin American and African cities may be linked not just to the drug trade, extortion and illegal migration, but to the breakneck speed at which urban areas have grown in the last 20 years.

The faster cities grow, the more likely it is that the civic authorities will lose control and armed gangs will take over urban organisation, says Robert Muggah, research director at the Igarapé Institute in Brazil.

“Like the fragile state, the fragile city has arrived. The speed and acceleration of unregulated urbanisation is now the major factor in urban violence. A rapid influx of people overwhelms the public response,” he adds. “Urbanisation has a disorganising effect and creates spaces for violence to flourish,” he writes in a new essay in the journal Environment and Urbanization.

Muggah predicts that similar violence will inevitably spread to hundreds of other “fragile” cities now burgeoning in the developing world. Some, he argues, are already experiencing epidemic rates of violence. “Runaway growth makes them suffer levels of civic violence on a par with war-torn [cities such as] Juba, Mogadishu and Damascus,” he writes. “Places like Ciudad Juárez, Medellín and Port au Prince … are becoming synonymous with a new kind of fragility with severe humanitarian implications.”

Simon Reid-Henry, of the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, said: “Today’s wars are more likely to be civil wars and conflict is increasingly likely to be urban. Criminal violence and armed conflict are increasingly hard to distinguish from one another in different parts of the world.”

The world’s most dangerous cities Photograph: Giulio Frigieri/Guardian

The latest UN data shows that many cities may be as dangerous as war zones. While nearly 60,000 people die in wars every year, an estimated 480,000 are killed, mostly by guns, in cities. This suggests that humanitarian groups, which have traditionally focused on working in war zones, may need to change their priorities, argues Kevin Savage, a former researcher with the Overseas Development Institute in London.

“Some urban zones are fast becoming new territories of conflict and violence. Chronically violent cities like Abidjan, Baghdad, Kingston, Nablus, Grozny and Mogadishu are all synonyms for a new kind of armed conflict,” he said. “These urban centres are experiencing a variation of warfare, often in densely populated slums and shantytowns. All of them feature pitched battles between state and non-state armed groups and among armed groups themselves.”

European and North American cities, which mostly grew over 150 or more years, are thought unlikely to physically expand much in the next few decades and are likely to remain relatively safe; but urban violence is certain to worsen as African, Asian and Latin American cities swell with population growth and an unprecedented number of people move in from rural areas.

More than half the world now lives in cities compared with about 5% a century ago, and UN experts expect more than 70% of the world’s population to be living in urban areas within 30 years.

The fastest transition to cities is now occurring in Asia, where the number of city dwellers is expected to double by 2030, according to the UN Population Fund. Africa is expected to add 440 million people to its cities by then and Latin America and the Caribbean nearly 200 million. Rural populations are expected to decrease worldwide by 28 million people. Most urban growth is expected to be not in the world’s mega-cities of more than 10 million people, but in smaller cities like San Pedro Sula.

“We can expect no slowing down of urbanisation over the next 30 years. The youth bulge will go on and 90% of the growth will happen in the south,” said Muggah.

But he and other researchers have found that urban violence is not linked to poverty so much as inequality and impunity from the law – both of which may encourage lawlessness. “Many places are poor, but not violent. Some favelas in Brazil are among the safest places,” he said. “Slums are often far less dangerous than believed. There is often a disproportionate fear of crime relative to its real occurrence. Yet even when there is evidence to the contrary, most elites still opt to build higher walls to guard themselves.”

Many of these shantytowns and townships were now no-go areas far beyond the reach of public security forces, he said.

“These areas are stigmatised by the public authorities and residents become quite literally trapped. Cities like Caracas, Nairobi, Port Harcourt and San Pedro Sula are giving rise to landscapes of … gated communities. Violence … is literally reshaping the built environment in the world’s fragile cities.”

Uefa and Michel Platini are missing the real targets with their £50 million fine for Manchester City

Paul Hayward in The Telegraph

When Abu Dhabi’s rulers first decided to build a bonfire of hundreds of millions of pounds at Manchester City they would have laughed at the idea that blowing money was a crime punishable by Uefa sanctions. Imagine that: a sport where they throw a £50 million penalty at you for excessive generosity.

Strictly, Financial Fair Play (FFP) is an anti-subsidy initiative by a game that prostrates itself to foreign billionaires and then ticks them off for investing too much. It defiles the World Cup by awarding it to Qatar, then disapproves of Qatari spending at Paris St-Germain.

It says little about rampant ticket price inflation, the huge sums extracted by agents or grotesque individual player salaries. Whichever way you turn it, Uefa’s clumsy lunge at “fairness” has ended up being about two gulf states who jumped into football as an act of future-proofing because their oil was running out.

No torch is being held here for sovereign wealth. But the distortion of the London house market by foreign speculators, for example, is a far more serious issue than City paying Sergio Agüero’s wages via a so-called sweetheart deal with Etihad Airways.

Uefa-ologists might have spotted that president Michel Platini enjoys a cosy relationship with Qatar, who chose Paris as their investment outlet, and that it might have been somewhat awkward for Europe’s governing body to punish PSG without also directing their disapproval at City. 

The clubs hit hardest by these arbitrary actions are those who had to spend heavily to raise underperforming clubs into the elite. City and PSG both fit this profile.

It was no surprise, then, to find Roman Abramovich broadly supportive of the FFP principle. Chelsea’s owner had already torched the kind of cash City and PSG have burned in the last three years. By endorsing the move to have such extravagance cast as a crime, Abramovich was simply blocking the way to new tycoons and therefore protecting his competitive advantage.

From Sheikh Mansour of Abu Dhabi’s viewpoint, a £50 million fine doubtless leaves a kind of moral stain. It implies financial doping, or even cheating, with its suggestion that the £35 million-a-year Etihad deal was really a polite way to cook the books.

As with PSG and the Qatari tourist board (£167 million), Uefa clearly believe that the deal was inflated to allow one part of an oil-rich state to subsidise another. And they might be right.

Yet the people who struck those deals are unlikely to appreciate being singled out in an industry that is synonymous with creative accounting. If in doubt, consider the mess Barcelona got themselves into over Neymar.

Nobody wants an unregulated free for all, or illegality, or the crushing of the poor by the rich. But Uefa’s punishment of City takes no account of the direction in which the club is heading or the socially constructive investment in the Etihad Campus in a deprived part of Manchester. Shiekh Mansour and his entourage are not philanthropists, but nor does their spending fit the template of outright decadence.

So far all that expenditure has bought them one Premier League title and not much headway in Europe. There is no wholesale buying of trophies because the Premier League is too competitive to allow it. This season City have had to fight Liverpool and Chelsea for the championship. The seductive allure of FFP is that helps the poorer against the richer. All it might do in this case is to make Abu Dhabi resent being stigmatised and cause them to question Uefa’s motives. You can see the speech bubble now: “They take our money and then fine us for giving it to them?”

A much greater problem, certainly in England, is clubs being ram-raided by speculators who seek to suck money out, not put it in. Portsmouthand Birmingham City are just two examples of clubs that have been treated like lumps of meat on an “investment” menu.

Many of us would like to see regulation attack that issue before the Uefa bureaucracy drives through arbitrary penalties against a club (City) who are putting money in, rather than taking it out, however vulgar it might sometimes seem.

Where is the £50 million fine for the Glazers for servicing their debts from Manchester United’s revenues? On this evidence, FFP is mere grandstanding.

40 Days of Dating: would you go out with an old friend?

The experiment carried out by two single New Yorkers suggests one course of action for those struggling with relationships

• 
• • Hannah Slapper
  • theguardian.com, Tuesday 3 September 2013 13.50 BST

‘40 Days speaks to the many of us who have that friend in our lives who could have become a lover but things never quite worked out.' Photograph: Gen Nishino/Getty

Trying to find a significant other while living in a fast-paced city is a notoriously difficult process, especially as you try to balance all the other things you're expected to do as a young adult (find enough money to survive, carve out a career, etc). It's a struggle to get into the habit of dating, and even tougher to turn those dates into meaningful relationships.

We've read about many ways to deal with this problem, and have friends and family who fit into every category: singles in their mid- to late-30s, people in Skype-sustained long-distance relationships, serial internet dating players.

But on 20 March this year two New York-based designers, Jessica Walsh and Timothy Goodman, tried something new.

The pair had been friends for years and, on discovering they were single at the same time, decided to date each other for 40 days purely as an experiment.

There was a set of strict rules: they would see each other every day, visit a relationship counsellor once a week, and they would be totally exclusive. Every evening they would separately complete a questionnaire to document their feelings.

The 40 days came to an end on 28 April, but it was only in July that they started publishing the answers on their blog, 40 Days of Dating – capturing the attention of readers worldwide. Walsh and Goodman now have a combined Twitter fan base of more than 40,000, a Vimeo page with hundreds of thousands of views, and have signed up toHollywood talent agency to handle the onslaught of film offers they've received for their story.

So what is the magic that has made 40 Days become a viral hit? The main aspect that people appear to be attracted to is the "what if" scenario. It speaks to the many of us who have that friend in our lives who could have become a lover but things never quite worked out. Often that is for a very good reason, but for many people it's just a matter of bad timing. I overheard a group of women discussing the blog on the London underground, and they took great pleasure in exploring which of their platonic pals would qualify for "upgrading", as they called it. David Nicholls's novel, One Day, revolved around a similar concept: that person you've known for years who, if you just took the time to think about it, could potentially be your soul mate.

Walsh says some of her favourite feedback has come from readers inspired to make a move on a special someone who had been stuck in the "friend zone". Prior familiarity definitely caused issues for Walsh and Goodman during the first couple of weeks, as both parties struggled to adjust to a new attitude of togetherness.

At first, it looked unlikely they would fall for each other and both seemed to adopt a rather academic stance. They found it difficult to see each other in a romantic way, and the topic of sex was a real issue from the very start. With friends urging them to consummate their relationship in order to prove it as real, plus their combined tendency to overthink everything, it blew up into such a big deal that it basically became a barrier.

However, as they spent more time together and work through each other's issues, we could watch them get closer, they opened up, and suddenly it seemed all too possible that their foundation of friendship would provide a solid structure on which to build a relationship. Readers were thrilled when they revealed on day 24-25 that they had finally done the deed. It certainly was a turning point for the pair, although the emphasis has definitely been on the emotional rather than the physical. The blog paused at day 36 and resumes today. The same question haunts every fan's mind: are they still together? Did they fall in love?

All too often I've been given the advice that finding the one is effortless, and "you just know". After five years in my own, sometimes turbulent, relationship, I couldn't disagree more. I like the fact that 40 Days promotes taking the reins and being decisive: if you embrace compromise, and dedicate enough time and energy to getting to know your other half, learning what's important to them and sharing your own dreams and opinions honestly, then you have a real chance of creating something wonderful.

40 Days seems to propose a solution to the chronic loneliness of the young city dweller. It's never too late to redefine your connection with somebody. And given the blog's impact, it seems certain that many people will now be plucking up the courage to reach out to that one person they've always been curious about.

I am beginning to dread Mumbai

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Shantanu Bhagwat in The Times of India

My favourite city when I was growing up has today become a place that I try hard to avoid. The reasons are not hard to find. Lack of an efficient system of public transport tops the list. Add to this, the traffic snarls. To this, add a humid climate and uncontrolled, chaotic crowds that jostle for space with shops, scooters, buses & cars.

Don’t get me wrong. There are still many things that keep me hooked on Mumbai. The spirit of enterprise, the numerous eating joints, the real feel of a cosmopolis and the walk along Marine Drive – to name just a few. But all these are increasingly overshadowed by my dread of being stuck in an endless traffic snarl or missing my meeting (worse, a flight) or having nowhere to go for a walk if I feel like unwinding after a long day.

Mumbai’s problems are not unique. At their core is the utter failure of government and administration to deal with rapid urbanisation that is happening across the length and breadth of India.  This urbanisation is the reason for Guwahati losing its charm. This urbanisation is the reason Delhi is fast becoming a cold, ruthless city seething with rage. It is what long-term residents of Pune dread. And it is the reason Bengaluru’s distances are now calculated in “hours” rather than kilometres.

To get a sense of the magnitude of the challenge we face, sample this:

• Over 32% of Indians living in major cities still live in single room homes. In most Tier-I cities, “Affordable Housing” remains a pipe dream.
• Almost no Indian city has water coming through the pipes that is safe to drink. Waste disposal remains a common problem across towns and cities in India
• Sometime between now and the next 10 years, 3 Indian cities will be among the fastest growing cities world-wide. These are Ghaziabad, Surat and Fardiabad. “Twenty-two other Indian cities (will) also find a place in the top 100”. 
• In Delhi, over 350 kms of nullahs (storm water drains) built hundreds of years ago now carry untreated sewage posing a grave risk to public health & environment 
• On an average, 10-12 people die every day on the tracks of Mumbai’s suburban rail system. That is almost 4000 people each year. This has been going on for several years 

And finally this statistic which I doubt would surprise any of you: almost 50% of the population in most cities live in slum-like conditions.

About 3 years ago, I visited one such area in Mumbai. Situated within minutes from the famous RK Studios in Chembur, this area is called Cheetah Camp. Cheeta Camp is unusual because it is a “planned slum”. But the planning does not extend to sewers or basic provisions.

A recent study discovered that the 117,000 residents of Cheeta Camp have just 38 usable toilets among themselves. That means roughly one toilet per 170 people. To understand what this means, take about 30-40 families in your neighbourhood. Now imagine all of them coming to your home to use our one toilet.   I think you get the picture.

Believe it or not, we actually have a “Ministry of Urban Development” with a cabinet rank minister in charge. The minister in charge is the redoubtable Kamal Nath – a man tagged with the “15% label” by Tarun Das, former Chief Mentor, CII and alleged to  have offered “jet airplanes as enticements” to  get support from MPs for the India-US civilian nuclear deal in 2008. 

Sadly the Ministry appears to have achieved little.  The Minister himself has publicly said, “We are not building for the future, unlike Hong Kong and Singapore. We are still catching up with the past” 

And his own Ministry’s survey on the state of affairs in our cities has highlighted glaring failures, including the fact that, “more than half of India's cities have no piped water or sewerage systems, four in five had water for less than five hours per day and seventy per cent households across the states had no lavatory.”  Not only has the Ministry failed to achieve much, it has been dragged into the murky CommonWealth Games Scandal too.

Unfortunately urbanisation is a dull topic for prime time TV. It does not arouse the kind of passion that can get people out on the streets. For most well-read, educated Indians whose stomachs are full, urbanisation is an inevitable “evil” that is ruining their towns and cities. It is the “evil” that is making water scarce; making groceries expensive, commuting a nightmare and jeopardising the safety of their children.

There is little realisation of the long-term implications of this “problem”. It seems most of us assume the challenges of “urbanisation” will be resolved on their own.

But we ignore urbanisation at our own peril. I believe, more than anything, dealing with the effects & impact of rapid urbanisation will be India's biggest challenge in coming decades.

If bankers leave the country, it would be no loss

Ignore their howls of protest. 

They took home unheard of sums. Only in Britain do ministers dance to their tune. But public fury cannot be defied for ever

• 
• • Simon Jenkins
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 6 March 2013

Illustration by Belle Mellor

The peasants are revolting across Europe. They want bankers' blood and mean to get it. Until now, public response to the credit crunch has been one of general bafflement and wrist-slapping. The banks persuaded the world it was all an act of fate. As it was, they were too big to fail and their leaders too saintly to atone for it. For four years, British banks were showered with nearly half a trillion pounds of public and printed money. They duly recovered and stayed rich, while everyone else went poor.

The worm has turned. The banks and government alike have failed to deliver recovery. The people want revenge, and have found it – of all places – in the European parliament. It has declared that EU bankers cannot get bonuses bigger than their salaries, or twice as big if shareholders approve. This applies wherever EU bankers work, and to any overseas banker working in the EU.

Meanwhile, a Swiss referendum now requires top executives to seek explicit shareholder approval for their pay, with a ban on golden hellos and goodbyes. The Netherlands is talking of a tighter 20% cap on bonuses. Even laissez-faire Britain has seen the National Association of Pension Funds demand that boards keep executive pay rises down to inflation.

Europe's once omnipotent banking lobby has been all but neutered by the scale of scandal. The German government caved in to the EU parliament under pressure from the opposition Social Democrats. This was after the Libor scandal revealed Deutsche Bank cutting one trader's bonus by £34m, thus implying a staggering original sum. The Swiss campaign was kicked into life by the drugs firm Novartis giving its departing chairman a $76m gift. Some 68% of Swiss voted for the new curb.

Only in Britain do ministers still dance to the bankers' tune. Last month RBS executives brushed aside their state shareholder and paid themselves £600m in bonuses after posting a £5bn loss. Loss-making Lloyds dipped into its till and gave senior staff an extra £365m. Money-laundering HSBC announced 78 of its London executives would take home more than £1m each. They all say bonuses were unrelated to fines or losses, but they always say that. George Osborne was humiliated in Brussels on Tuesday by having to plead their fruitless cause.

Last year the City of London's much-heralded "shareholder spring" got nowhere. Revolts against executive pay at WPP, Barclays, Trinity Mirror and elsewhere had little noticeable impact. While overall pay stagnated, that of top executives rose 12%. Opinion polls showed the public overwhelmingly hostile to top pay. Only the government and the London mayor stand between the very rich and a furious public. The peasants' revolt means that even British ministers cannot defy opinion for ever.

The reality is that the banking community has allowed this thirst for revenge to build up for over four years, and it just did not care. Ever since the 1980s and financial deregulation, the profession took home sums of money unheard of in any other line of work.

This had nothing to do with free markets, except within a tight group of high-rolling traders. Modern bankers derive "economic rent" from exploiting oligopolistic cartels in financial services, with shareholders kept at one remove. The astronomical traders' bonuses are asymmetric returns on cash that properly belongs to depositors and shareholders whose money bears the risk. In any other business such bonuses would be regarded as theft from the firm.

For four years the British government – Labour and the coalition – huffed and puffed but was too terrified of the banks to act. Regulators were suborned by lobbyists and ministers, their offices packed with seconded bankers, and did as they were told. They gave huge sums to the banks in the belief that this was benefiting the demand economy. In Britain, some £400bn of cash was "pumped into the economy" via the banks. They merely traded or hoarded it, to their ever greater enrichment. The money vanished. A thousand pounds handed to every British citizen would have had more impact on the economy.

Last year, as if learning nothing, the Treasury gave the banks another £80bn to boost business and mortgage lending. This week it was predictably revealed that lending to small businesses actually fell as result. It was like giving money to a drunk and telling him to support his children. Never in the history of money can policy have been so glaringly inept. The banks laughed.

No trade unions are fiercer in defending their interests than the rich professions. As we saw this week with lawyers, cut their largesse and they threaten to take it out on the poor, the economy, the government, everyone. The banks howl that the bonus cap means their greed will go "offshore". This seems exaggerated. But the EU curbs could possibly see the start of the high-rollers moving out of over-regulated Europe towards the Americas and Asia.

This would not be wholly good news for Britain: finance has been the boom industry of the past quarter-century. But more likely is that the more toxic activities will go, and that is no loss. Either way, the banks have themselves to blame. They flew their golden wings too near the sun, and rage has melted them. They have only one plea on their side. The culture of greed in the City was nothing to the culture of ineptitude at the Bank of England and the Treasury. They pumped out the money. Never in British economic history can so much have been so wasted on so fruitless a cause. And still no hint of remorse.

Europe will thrive. But we could be doomed to a life on the fringes

There is a Little England-ism that would have us leave the EU fold. It would be a disaster

• 
• • Will Hutton
  • The Observer, Sunday 10 June 2012
  •  

Santander: familiar on our high streets and part of the Spanish banking system that needs bailing out Photograph: Kumar Sriskandan / Alamy/Alamy

Taxi drivers and eminent commentators are agreed. The euro is an unmitigated disaster. It should never have been launched. Europe's elites over-reached themselves, locking the proud peoples of Europe in a disastrous straitjacket without any democratic mandate or ongoing accountability. This is payback time. Its collapse won't be pleasant, but the sooner the whole experiment is ended and Europe becomes no more than a loose association of free-trading nations with freely floating exchange rates the better. Eurosceptics have been vindicated.

This has become a settled British media and political consensus and now hardly seems the moment to challenge it. After all, Spain needs a massive bailout of its tottering banking system, including Santander, so familiar on every British high street, before the Greek election next Sunday. This appears to have been agreed yesterday. If Greece were to leave the euro before the bailout is complete, the bank run would overwhelm Spain and spread elsewhere. The EU and the IMF have only days to avoid a calamity. Southern Europe would confront run-away inflation and slump.
Nobody knows what will happen. Now Spain has got its bailout, Germany will agree to a fully fledged European banking union before the end of June, in which all eurozone countries guarantee each other's bank deposits and bank debt, agree common banking supervision and joint means to ensure every eurozone bank has sufficient capital. This should cut the poisonous link between the banking crisis and the public debt crisis. I also bet that the next Greek government will cut a deal to allow it to stay in the euro with less austerity.

In addition, a combination of ultra-cheap money and big infrastructure spending, again agreed reluctantly by Germany, across the continent will start to lift the European economy. The EU will have muddled through and the system held, because in the end the costs of break-up or for any one country exiting were just too prohibitive.

But the situation is dangerously volatile and the Germans may be too slow to act. It may be that we face months of bank runs and pandemonium and that the euro is reduced in essence to a north European euro bloc, including France and Germany but not most of southern Europe. But the big point is that one way or another the euro will have survived in some form because the member countries will have pulled together. And what will remain will be immeasurably stronger and more integrated – a euro area with a banking union, common governance of fiscal policy and political structures to match. Not a federal superstate but a new amalgam of nation states within a new international architecture – and with a newly forged European identity.

One of the byproducts of the crisis is that every European has become aware of the continent's interdependence. What happens in Greece, Spain, Ireland, France or Germany affects everyone else. Like it or not, we have to co-exist. In which case, this becomes a moment of existential choice for Britain. Eurozone members are not only fighting for the euro because the costs of collapse are so awesome. Europe must have a monetary order to underpin its ambitions to be a single market.

Devaluation, touted as a panacea across the British economic and political spectrum, certainly works for an individual country if it can devalue against others that hold their currencies stable. But as Keynes argued so effectively, if devaluation becomes the default policy for the entire system – the temptation in a world of floating exchange rates – then the consequence is disaster. It is an invitation for everyone to engage in beggar-my-neighbour economic policies by trying to rig their currency to boost their exports and minimise their imports, just as China has been doing for 30 years. A single market needs an accompanying monetary order – a heartland Keynesian proposition. This is not a doctrine of euro elites. It is how a single market can be made to work for all its peoples.

Which is why post-crisis Europe will be so tough for Britain. The EU that survives with its euro will be the centre of the European order. It will set interest rates and fiscal policy that will become the benchmark for every other European country. It will be the biggest and most desirable market in Europe and it will set the rules for how trade is conducted within its jurisdiction. Already it is happening. Senior ministers and officials have recognised that Britain had to agree to the banking union – with incalculable consequences for the City – but could do little or nothing to shape it. Financial regulation will be organised in Brussels for the benefit of euro member states. If we don't like, we can lump it. It will be across the board, from economics to climate change.

There is general delight that we are not part of this emerging superstate – a language that misrepresents what Europe is becoming. A referendum will cement our detachment or even lead to exit. Sceptics say the model for us to follow is Switzerland. The truth is that we would be a sort of Greater Guernsey, suffering an accelerated economic rundown. We will proudly float the pound, despite evidence that what floating means in practice – for a country with a huge international financial sector such as ours that sucks in capital from abroad – is systemic overvaluation and the evisceration of our traded goods sector: an economic doomsday machine.

Our foreign-owned car industry, dependent upon exports to the EU single market, will gradually migrate back to Europe or low-cost Asia. On a range of key strategic interests – finance, agriculture, fishing, transport, energy, IT and data security – benchmark policy will be made in Brussels, Paris and Berlin. They will have brought the EU through the crisis; their debts will be to each other, not us.

For the British Eurosceptic none of this counts. The vision is of endless austerity, prioritising deficit reduction above all else and evisceration of the social contract at home, and a refusal to recognise interdependence abroad or that there is any need constructively to create rules and an international order, especially in Europe. We should all resolutely tighten our belts and export our unemployment to others in a world of floating exchange rates and nonexistent international rules. It is a doctrine of arid meanness and nationalistic jingoism, an appropriate editorial line for populist centre-right newspapers, but nonsensical for a state with real interests to protect and advance. Britain stood aside from the euro crisis. It will stand even more aside from what follows, leaving us not just economically diminished but culturally shrunken.

The trader who lifted the lid on what the City really thinks

One man reveals how economic disaster would let him and his colleagues profit 

By Tom Peck
Tuesday, 27 September 2011

The world may be teetering again on the precipice of economic disaster but those with any investment in the popularity of Alessio Rastani, a hitherto unknown "independent trader", had a worse day than most after his memorable appearance on television yesterday morning.

"I have a confession, I go to bed every night and I dream of another recession, I dream of another moment like this," he told dumbstruck BBC News presenter Martine Croxall, when asked if the proposed eurozone bailout would work.

The interviewer thanked the trader for his candour but told him that "jaws had dropped" around the BBC newsroom while they listened to his answers shortly after 11am.

"I'm a trader," he said. "We don't really care whether they're going to fix the economy, our job is to make money from it.

"The 1930s depression wasn't just about a market crash," he added. "There were some people who were prepared to make money from that crash. I think anyone can do that. It's an opportunity."

The three-minute clip quickly spread online, provoking outrage. In the interview, Mr Rastani went on to advise "everyone watching this" that, "This economic crisis is like a cancer, if you just wait and wait hoping it is going to go away, just like a cancer it is going to grow and it will be too late."

He said it was "wishful thinking" to believe that governments could prevent another recession.

On his Twitter profile Mr Rastani describes himself as an "experienced Stock Market and Forex trader" who is "dedicated to helping others succeed".

Some were as quick to praise him as others were to damn him. Comments on his Facebook page included: "Great interview" and "talk about the truth," while others described Mr Rastani as a hero.

The current crisis bears considerable similarity to that which engulfed the world in 2008, though thus far it lacks the talismanic hate figure generously provided in the form of the former RBS chief Sir Fred Goodwin. The slick-haired, pink-tied and American-accented Mr Rastani may yet fill the void.

Quite how much he personally stands to gain should the financial world collapse again is unclear. The profile on his website, Leadingtrader. com, would suggest he is more reliant on "professional speaking" than his wizardry in the money markets to keep in him in hair gel. But after his performance yesterday it may just be that, like the eurozone, that particular sideline is beyond salvation.

"My belief is that anyone who wants to improve their income and achieve success in life, cannot afford to ignore learning how to trade," he says.

"Based on Alessio's sound advice, I pulled my money out of the markets just before the 2008 stock market crash. He saved me a fortune, not to mention my pension!" claims a client named as Maurice E.

Though Twitter users were quick to pick up on Mr Rastani's outburst, his dire forecast went mysteriously unnoticed by the wider financial markets. Shares in French and German banks rose by as much as 10 per cent, as traders analysed a proposed three trillion euro (£2.6 trillion) rescue package for the single currency.