It's curious in so many ways, watching the consumer bubble as it shrivels. People don't stop wanting to buy stuff just because they are frightened. There are so many ways that fear can motivate you to buy yet more. Over the past year, I've watched with interest as more and more items in our weekly Sainsbury's shop have been reassuringly repackaged as Basics, with ugly orange labels and cosy little sayings: Basics potatoes come in 'all shapes, all sizes'; Basics flour is 'a little less refined'; Basics houmous has 'less tahini, just as tasty', and at 75p for 200g, is actually a little more expensive than the mainstream version, which gives you 300g for £1.05. People imagined that a crash, when it came, would act like Occam's razor, cutting out the hedge funds and leaving the world a little saner, but that's not what we seem to be seeing. The economy whines and wrinkles, like a washing-up liquid bottle ('cleans, no added promises') on a fire. Words rear up and loom enormous - David Cameron, for example, may find this with his plan for 'thrifty government' - and fizz and collapse and make a nasty smell.

LRB 14 May 2009 | PDF Download