Editors Blog

Oh no, for the man pronouncing (in increasingly mysterious tones and accents) on events in the City of Wad, a man seemingly more significant (at least for the moment) than the old Big One himself... is none other than the BBC's wafflemeister extraordinaire, the one and (let's hope) only Robert 'pestilence' Peston.

A man without equal - in the sense that not much of he says adds up; a messenger of panic; a harbinger of doom; the devil's own spawn. A man with a very square head.

If ever a man was a "hollow suit of armour from which bugs emerge" it is Mr Pestilence. And it seems his pronouncements on the market are wreaking havoc.

Inevitably, among the barrel-loads of nonsense raining down on the airwaves from La Peste - acres of dross that would put ginger whinger, non-stop 'DJ' Chris Evans to shame - he does manage to hit the target very occasionally, despite the emptiness of his quiver. And this has seemingly elevated him to cult status, where the luxuriance of his hair garners more comment than his financial assessments.

Yet surely 'clot status' would be more appropriate, for where Pestilence leads, War, Famine and Death cannot be far behind, and Hey Pesto! will suffer just as much as the rest of us.

Of course, one tried and trusted way to get out of a tight financial predicament is to indulge in a bit of a war - perhaps with a soupcon of Famine and a little nibble of Death on the side - and ironically the current meltdown scenario can largely be laid at the feet of the Woman Who Would Be King, that old bag lady Margaret Thatcher. 

But as the horsemen ride roughshod through our seemingly untouchably smug society, we should have seen it coming, as the apocalyptic metaphors have been flooding in, in true Biblical style, for the past couple of years. 

In Personnel Today the unions have been threatening War, in a way only they can; and there's the never-ending war for talent; the skills famine; the jobs famine; the pensions timebomb, the age timebomb, and so on and so on. And way back in early 2007, the Times was drawn to mention the impending jobs famine - in a financial analysis interestingly short on useful insight into the disasterous year ahead. 

Then, of course, there's Death.

It all ends in death, and Mr Pestilence is no stranger to the scythe-wielding shadowy figure - 'predicting' the death of Bradford & Bingley when it had been in the coffin several weeks already, 'predicting' the Lloyds TSB bailout of HBOS after it had happened and cheerfully 'predicting' a slow and painful death for Gordon Brown's economic forecasts, your mortgage, our electricity bills, etc, etc.

Jobs will certainly go, heads will roll and we'll all be tightening our belts as the credit squeeze forces even the fattest cats to consider their options.

But let's hope the Cult of Pestilence comes to end soon. For all our sakes.