Send in the clowns

I could not have been more off, from my prediction on Portugal's Prime Minister's latest nation address.  What I had hoped or expected to be a speech with a realistic and relatively forward looking tone from the top, demonstrating some recognition for the enormous evolution a population has gone through in terms of streetwise economics in over a bit more than two turbelent years, turned out to be a fairly predictable shopping list of plausible measures intended to inevatably take effect in the very near future.  

In a way I felt sorry for Pedro Passos Coelho, as he reminded me of the periodic act I need to go through at home, trying to establish the family's grocery desires for the immediate following weeks, while proclaiming my uneducated view on a need for healthier habits, before I rush out the door to execute a shopping list, hesitating back and forth between substitute products in an attempt to satisfy everyone.

As a consequence the ingredientes the prime minister intends to introduce into the government kitchen over the near future are being met with more of the same reactive protest, although the temparature does appear to be rising.

Then the population is fed with a supposedly confidential "conselho de estado", summonable only by the president who has been making public references to religion and myths in assocation with a search for much needed economic progress.

Much less visible is the simultaneous hard and relatively succesful work of (political) teams roadshowing amongst priveleged potential foreign private and sovereing investment funds in long term Portuguese treasury bonds. 

What strikes me as poor is that fairly publicly available data and indicators on economic and structural reform projections and scenarios a government gathers, are left out of the nation's messages towards the general public at home.  Portuguese households and the many small business GDP drivers have demonstrated a fierce climb on the learning curve and shown to be ready to take an as close as possible worst case scenario on board in their decision making.

So when leading politicians end up being referred to as clowns, before seeking any prosecution they may want to remember that in any circus the entry of clowns is an essential role in order to distract the audience of some unforeseen incident in the arena.  The only difference with current politicians is that, none of us feel entertained and the attempted distraction is thus not working.