CITY AND SUBURBAN
It's a game of two halves Ken leaves the field and Eddie scores the goals
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
lien and Eddie Show, late result: Chancellor, 0 Governor 4 (after extra time). This became an uneven contest on 1 May, when Ken was shown the red card, together with his team, and left the field. Eddie stayed on to put four interest rate rises into an empty net. This is the score- line he had been shooting at for the last nine months, so now he and his team will leave it alone for a while and see what happens. He was right in warning that there was more and more money about and that sooner or later it was going to spill out into inflation. So it has, this week, but the team are more worried about pres- sures still in store for two years' time. (Was Ken playing to the crowd? Not at all, say Eddie's team politely: it was merely a matter of judgment. . . . ) The decision to pause for regrouping put sterling into reverse. Half of its surge, so Eddie's team think, has been caused by the relative attractions of interest rates, home and away, and half to economic misery in conti- nental Europe and funk about the single currency. Against the dollar and the yen, the pound has been falling. At home, the money is still rolling round. More than £30 billion has now poured out of building soci- eties and into their former members' pock- ets. Even that is dwarfed by the £250 billion increase in people's wealth as measured by the stock market and house prices. One point of the pause is to see what they do with it. After that, the chances are that Eddie will be lacing up his boots again.
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