Pass me my crystal ball…

In reality, it is only the future that really matters when it comes to getting a mortgage.

Today’s Irish Times carries an article on the availability of mortgages in Ireland.  Apparently they do exist – but only if you can peer into the future, prove you will retain your own job and more to the point can demonstrate that your employer will continue to be solvent also.  This kind of rhetoric deeply frustrates me.  How successful have governments and banks been at predicting the future?  And now the ‘average person in the street’ is charged with coming up with guarantees about his own job and the environment in which he works.  Predicting and controlling the future does not have a good track record.  Strategic planning is one way of trying to identify scenarios and possibilities that might happen but we delude ourselves if we believe that there is some kind of magical thinking that will make the future a safe and stable place.   Dealing with the instability, insecurity and unknowingness of what we face is the task.  Offering guarantees to banks about imagined rosy futures aren’t worth the papers they are written on.