Hard times? Sure. But only for some! On Tuesday the Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 index hit 9,000 points for the first time. Shares in the top 100 blue chip companies, i.e., those which hold the largest capital assets, reached a record high.
In fact this year the "Footsie" has outperformed the USA's Standard and Poor 500 and the Stoxx Europe 600, rising by 10.3% - a lot, apparently!
The pundits say it's because investors are moving away from the US, scared by the knock-on effects of Donald Trump's tariff tsunami and the inevitable downturn in the US economy.
And of course, the higher the share prices climb, the harder they're likely to fall... one and all! (Apologies to Jimmy Cliff)! A new crash-recession superimposed on the old crash-recession...
But the speculators' horizon sits just in front of their noses. They live for making money via short-term "bets" on a share-market roulette wheel. You can gamble on a "climb" and you can gamble on a "fall": and who cares about what lies behind all of this, until there's a general, great big crash, like in 2008!
"Tell Sid": take more risks!
Never mind financial "history" though. Reeves used her Mansion House speech to the City on Tuesday to encourage a "tell Sid" share-buying spree. Yes, modelled, apparently, on her heroine Margaret Thatcher's fire-sale of state assets in the 1980s, when she sold off public industry and utilities to wannabee entrepreneurs, who built their fortunes on the back of public need.
But Reeves hasn't got state assets to sell. So she is going to make it easier for private companies to offer shares and thus raise credit, so that they can purportedly "invest" in growing their enterprises... Of course, they might use this opportunity just to grow their own bank balances...
She's also offering to make it easier to sell debt to retail investors by cutting the disclosure requirements for bond issues under £100,000...
But lots of small deregulated and potentially toxic loans bundled together could make for a very large toxic mix - and a large explosion!
Nobody can forget what happened in 2007-8, when a US bubble based on debt "packages", which included unrepayable mortgages, suddenly burst, causing a global financial crisis from which the world economy has never fully recovered.
Reeves says the government will underwrite, i.e., make the rest of us liable, for a new loan guarantee scheme for mortgages... Banks are told they should take more risks, and not to worry, because "we" will have their backs!
Our power against their markets
Then there's Reeves' intention to deregulate City financial operations - and in particular, tear up the rule introduced after the 2008 crash(!) which forces banks to separate their retail and investment banking activities! This is meant to "soften regulations and drum up more investment in financial markets"! Or drum up financial storm clouds?
And how come she thinks that encouraging yet more speculation in shares and bonds, in an economy already top-heavy with financial capital and lacking "real" industrial capital investment, can magically encourage "growth"?
In fact Reeves is offering a version - on the scale of Little Britain - of Trumpism! Yet wasn't it an exodus from the US markets and flight from Trumpism which (we are told) pushed up the FTSE index to record levels this week?
Today we - the working class of this island - are still paying for the hand-outs to speculators and cowboy entrepreneurs - i.e., the privatisations and deregulation of the Thatcher, Major and Blair years. Their legacy is sewage in the rivers, floods from burst water mains, energy bills which would give "Sid" a heart attack, and a broken NHS.
It's obvious that Reeves cannot conjure up economic growth in the real world, but no doubt she'll continue to come up with all kinds of schemes in order to try to keep the markets happy.
And of course that's the whole point. No matter which "face" sits in the White House or appears at the Commons despatch box, it's the financial markets which rule. And the fact that they jump even when a British Chancellor sheds a few tears, shows how fragile they really are.
So, hasten the day when these markets jump out of their skins for good! That is, the day when there is a credible challenge to their "power" from the massed ranks of the working class.
At a time when living standards are falling worldwide and when Trump and NATO leaders are fuelling war in Ukraine and de facto supporting the extermination of the Palestinian people of Gaza, such a challenge could not be more urgent.