This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

Just after the last crash, in November 2008, the Queen asked a roomful of academics and economists why they hadn’t seen it coming. She won’t have to do that next time. This week the klaxons started to sound. Another crash is on the way.

And so if you wake up one morning and the cashpoint machines are empty, and there are long, angry queues outside famous high street banks, you, the Queen and the Government will have no excuse for being surprised.

The warning came very clearly from Alex Brazier, a director of the Bank of England, in a speech in Liverpool that ought to have been on every front page and at the top of every broadcast news bulletin.

For if he is right, all the controversies, from the EU to Donald Trump, that fill the bulletins will shrivel into nothing pretty soon. Of course he did not put it quite like that. He has to be cautious. He said: ‘Household debt – like most things that are good in moderation – can be dangerous in excess. Dangerous to borrowers, lenders and, most importantly from our perspective, everyone else in the economy.’

And then he noted that consumer credit has recently increased more than six times as fast as incomes. There is no real money to cover this. It’s a gamble on the future being just like the present.

It is very similar to the dangerous sub-prime mortgages that infected the Western financial system with impossible debt ten years ago. He warned of a ‘spiral of complacency’. As loans become easier to get, more money is lent on easier terms. ‘The spiral continues, and borrowers rack up more and more debt. Lending standards can go from responsible to reckless very quickly. The sorry fact is that, as lenders think the risks they face are falling, the risks they – and the wider economy – face are actually growing.’

It’s not just maxed-out credit cards, though debts of this kind are now huge.

There’s a big new danger. If some of your neighbours have recently acquired shiny, big new cars, they may be part of the problem. Great fleets of such cars are pouring out of showrooms thanks to easy-money loans called Personal Contract Purchase (PCP). Almost four new cars in every five are now bought through these PCPs. Put simply, this postpones the main final ‘balloon’ payment for as long as four years.

If, at the end, the buyer can’t pay, he can just hand the car back and walk away. Can you see how risky this is for the lender? The money comes from the finance arms of the car companies, not usually from banks themselves, but if used car prices fall, as is quite possible, the whole thing goes down the drain. And that might spread to the banks and the rest of the economy.

Mr Brazier warned: ‘The banks that are involved, as well as the shareholders of car companies, will want to think very carefully about the risks.’

Or will they? Experience suggests that lenders don’t want to think about this at all.

So if they won’t, Chancellor Philip Hammond and the rest of the Cabinet should be thinking very hard indeed about what to do if it all comes crashing down one day, and farmers’ fields are full of used SUVs that nobody knows what to do with.

They’ll say it came out of the blue, but it won’t have done. It’s about as predictable as next autumn, and may not be much further away.

We have been warned, and if the Government isn’t ready with a plan, then I’m not sure what will save it from the wrath to come.

The BBC has grim doubts about 'happy pills'

The BBC’s Panorama programme was attacked last week by the President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists for alleged ‘scaremongering’. Why?

This gripping, tragic and carefully researched piece of work explored the mass murder of 12 people in a Colorado cinema, five years ago. It found that the killer – previously a shy, peaceable and awkward student – had undergone a huge personality change after being prescribed increasing doses of ‘antidepressant’ pills.

He suddenly became a gun enthusiast, his academic work went down the drain. He dyed his hair orange. He began making crude sexual remarks to women.

Now, varying personality changes are not all that uncommon in people who are prescribed these pills, as any careful reader of the newspapers will know. Sometimes they are mild, sometimes they are large. But they do suggest a problem that needs addressing.

The programme was careful not to say the pills caused the murders. How could we know? Proving that A caused B is, oddly enough, one of the most difficult tasks in science. But this is by no means the only case of a person taking ‘antidepressants’ going very badly off the rails.

Add to that the discovery a few years ago that the pill companies had (quite legally) suppressed their own research, showing their products were not as effective as claimed, and what do you have? You have a case for a thorough inquiry into the whole thing. It is not ‘scaremongering’ to ask for one and I’m very glad Panorama has brought this important subject right into the mainstream of debate. Others please copy.

For this subject in more detail, please see :

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2017/07/how-to-be-a-scaremonger-reflections-o-bbc-panoramas-study-of-the-aurora-mass-murders-.html

The REAL mystery in BBC's new drama

There are many odd or baffling things about the BBC’s expletive-strewn new detective series, Top Of The Lake: China Girl. The first is Nicole Kidman, playing a ‘latelife lesbian’ who has apparently had an accident with the Australian national grid which has turned her hair into a vast scouring pad. The second is the ultra-modish actress Elisabeth Moss, beloved by Left-wing critics despite the fact that she is a Scientologist (would they even write about her, let alone praise her, if she were an active Christian?). But above all, it is the portrayal of all men as weak, porncorrupted, slobbish and ignorant. This is not accidental. It is not balanced elsewhere on the BBC. Why is it not condemned as bias?

Let's change the Tories name - to Doris

I suspect the whole ‘Trans’ issue has been cooked up so that nobody can ever say anything about it (including here) without being somehow in the wrong, and open to attack by the Thought Police. Now that there’s no more mileage in homosexuality, it’s the best way of making conservatives look like bigots.

But those of you who have clung to the Tory Party through thick and thin must have wondered a bit last week when it endorsed the idea that anyone can be whatever sex, sorry ‘gender’, that they want to be.

Here’s the simple explanation. The Tory Party itself has changed sex, from Right to Left. It is a ‘Trans’ party. I’m puzzled that it has yet to change its name. How about ‘Doris’? And it now feels free to come out. Yet still you vote for it.

Prisons

Those of us who worry about the terrible state of our prisons fear all the time that there will be huge blazing riots like those of 1990. But could it be that what we face is one long riot, all across the system, never quite bad enough to be a major national scandal? More and more brave officers are badly injured. More and more prisoners are violently attacked, or kill themselves in despair. Add all these horrible events together, and it is much worse than the Strangeways outbreak of 1990 and the others that followed. If anyone in government is interested, I can explain what’s wrong and how to fix it. See here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2017/02/prison-doesnt-work-but-it-could-.html

But they won’t like my prescription, so I expect they won’t ask.

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