Current financial reporting is the worst since . . . 1929

Newspaper articles in these tumultuous, dark times are so tightly packed with cliche it is hard to do anything other than join in, writes Lucy Kellaway

THIS IS the worst column I've written since 1929. In scenes not seen in living memory, last Thursday, in a late-night session, I hammered out the fiendishly complicated details of this article in a last-ditch effort to inject some sense into the system.

At 8.05pm, the lights were on in my first-floor study and, anticipating a long and tense night ahead, I put in an order to the local curry house for a balti. When the foil wrappers had been cleared and with the clock ticking, I started feverishly drafting sentences about the changed landscape that we are in, the most toxic since the Great Depression.

Ashen-faced and reeling, at 1.40am I rose.

How would the package go down with shell-shocked readers? Would they roar their approval? Or would their confidence plummet in the worst collapse since the 1930s?

Only time would tell.

Actually, I'm writing this column in a perfectly normal way during office hours. I will not order a curry, although I might pop out for a sandwich later on.

And it is not my worst column since 1929, as my own living memory doesn't go back that far. The only true bit is that the clock is ticking while I write, but even that isn't strictly true as my timepiece is quartz and so doesn't tick at all.

The reason that I'm writing in this way is that it is infectious. Newspaper articles in these tumultuous, fatal, not-seen-since-the-Great-Depression times are so tightly packed with cliche it is hard to do anything other than join in.

To get the tone right, one needs to use cliches of four different sorts.

First is the geological seam of seismic shifts, landscapes, earthquakes and meltdowns.

Second is the newer, more vicious, medical imagery of injected, sharp, toxic, pumped, fatal and reeling.

Third is the cliche of banal detail: what time it is, what people are eating, what their complexions look like (but only if pale), followed by another look at the clock.

The only mundane cliche not to have been seen once in the last six weeks is "smoke-filled rooms" as that is now illegal.

The fourth sort of cliche is to declare everything the worst since 1929 or the worst in living memory. This is the most popular of the lot, but is it even true?

I have just been listening to someone who worked on Wall Street in 1929, and it seems it isn't. Irving Kahn, now 102, was last week interviewed on the BBC World Service and crisply said that today "things are a great deal better. People are spoiled". The main villains, he said, were the journalists - "the reporters who want to get attention writing up headlines saying how bad it is".

So is he right? Certainly the current reporting has been bad. So bad, in fact, it has been the worst since . . . 1929.

I have had a look at newspaper stories of the time, and there is little to choose between then and now. The Timesfrom 1929 talked of a "Niagara of liquidation", a "deluge" and the "panicky state of traders' minds".

The only two stylistic advantages of the earlier era was that in 1929 they didn't have 1929 to make endless comparisons with, and there was no appetite for banal detail. Back then they didn't distract readers by telling them whether the lights were on or what time it was, or what President Hoover was eating or what floor of the building he was on as he held meetings to shore up confidence.

Otherwise there were so many cliches that on November 4th, 1929, a Timescolumnist called Callisthenes wrote an article moaning about them. "'Bulls' and 'bears', 'margins' and 'covers' have been thrown about with as much freedom as if they were the jargon of the football field," he complained, going on to disparage words such as "avalanches", "hectic" and "crashed" and "thousands ruined".

The answer, he said, was for everyone to get a grip and do some proper work.

"There is more profit and more pleasure in hard work than in any lucky deal ever made on the stock exchange," he wrote.

This was just the sort of column I would have written then; indeed, it is just the sort of column I am writing now. The only difference between Callisthenes and me was that his column was bizarrely sponsored by Selfridges, the Oxford Street shop.

The demonising of bankers and speculators was just as popular then as now, if not more so. In Timemagazine in 1930 a new derogatory word, "banksters", was coined, while the New Yorker's " Talk of the Town" column gleefully called the crash "amusing".

All those dull people who have bored one over breakfast going on about their shares would now have to do some work like everyone else. "It is amusing to see a fat land quivering in paunchy fright," it said.

Even the jokes were much the same. The New Yorkerin December 1929 published a cartoon with a woman in a fur coat giving a coin to a tramp. The caption read: "You poor fellow! The stock market, I suppose."

"No, lady, I always was a bum."

The modern variant, also making fun of the impoverishment of bankers, goes like this:

"What's the difference between a City banker and a pigeon?

"A pigeon can still put a deposit on a Maserati." - ( Financial Times service)