Things remain pretty quiet in the markets and apart from the RBA deciding not to cut rates but instead fuel the fires of dutch disease, Team Macro Man have been left to trawl through the smaller stories in the press.
The background theme of potential Euro break-up has provoked turbid debate as to how the introduction of local currencies could be managed without cataclysmic step change wrecking the domestic economies so TMM were amazed to find that the UK city of Bristol has decided to leap-frog Greece and Portugal and plow ahead with the introduction of its own currency. TMM assume that Alex Salmond and his Scottish colleagues are watching the project with keen interest.
Of course introducing local town currency is nothing new in this but when one reads the resume of its creator, and knowing the qualifications needed now to even mention a new product in the City, we wonder why the FSA haven't already locked him up. Yet somehow the project is ready for launch. Now TMM have had a bit of experience in the currency markets and so would like to make their own predictions about the probable life cycle of the Bristol Pound.
We give you Team Macro Man's "19 stages of the Bristol Pound".
1) Bristol shopkeepers decide that their high street demise has nothing to do with a lack of shops that people actually want to buy things in, the internet, no parking, or cheaper prices from out of town super-centers but is due to having to use "bankers' fancy money" and so decide to make and use their own.
2) Bristol look for their John Bull rubber printing set, last seen in Toby's toy box in 1976, give up, and instead run a competition between 5 year-olds to come up with the simplest, most forgeable design possible and run it off using the printing service at Boots the Chemist.
3) The new Proud Bristol Pound is launched to gullible shop owners and the odd major supermarket who feel they have to go along for PR reasons but won't accept more that 5 or them per £100 of groceries and even then charge a 20% "handling fee".
4) All runs well for a month or so with local pride swelling.