As George Burns has remarked: “it’s just a pity that those who really know how to run the country are just too busy driving taxi-cabs or cutting hair.”  2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  So let me add my two-pennyworth to the great debate on the financial and economic crisis and how well we have fared.
I believe it was Talleyrand, Napoleon’s aristocratic Minister of Foreign Affairs, who on being asked what he did during the Revolution, gave a pithy reply: “I survived.” And we have survived, too, with scarcely an African country falling into recession, no banks going bust, and the African economy on the up and up.