Two subjects this week: a spot of economic crystal-ball gazing and then a political coincidence I'm keen to share with you. This being a finance column, we'll begin with how to make more money.

Interest rates are near historic lows. This is because politicians everywhere have dug a giant hole from which they will need to escape when their national elections next arise. Their solution has been to rob people with money, any people with money (other than themselves), to pay for the profligacy and incompetence of a section of the population and those who encouraged them. We all know that; it's old news.

Now that we're past the worst of the recession (and indeed may be out of it, back on the growth path, although we won't know for a while), what will be the likely consequences for savers?

Interest rates will begin to ease upwards before year's end, is my forecast. Once they start rising, we should expect them to continue to rise as a wave of inflation, set in motion by the epic borrowing of President Obama, Gordon Brown and other politicians, washes across the world.

I doubt that inflation will kick in with any seriousness in Bermuda for a while. We're behind the curve economically, enjoying (or not) whatever our larger trading partners have gone though some months after they went through it. But within a year, I would expect to see higher interest rates for savers in Bermuda and, correspondingly, higher mortgage and borrowing rates for the other half of the human equation.

A return to the golden norm of five percent for savers and a 10 percent cost for borrowers may not be out of the question one day. After that, how far out of control interest rates go is a matter of conjecture. Today's crowd of decision-makers have been taught to fear inflation because of what it did to Germany, and then what Germany did to the world, starting in the 1930s. Politicians and economists would rather destroy the global economy than let inflation take a little bite out of people's wallets.

With the Tories likely to be elected in Britain next year (or sooner) and Obama, at this rate, a one-term President, saner minds may prevail when the economies of the world get back on track. That will probably not be so in the stock markets, where irrational exuberance is always the name of the game in an upswing.

If I had any money saved, but not invested, I wouldn't lock in the interest rate right now. I'd be putting the money out on short-term deposits and renewing, hopefully at a better rate, whenever one comes along.

* * *

And now I'm going to tell you something I'd bet you don't know, and then point out a few of the extraordinary consequences that follow from it. There's a soundtrack to the rest of this column. It's: Doctor Brown by Fleetwood Mac, Mr. Brown by Bob Marley, Old Doc Brown by Merle Haggard, and Doctor My Eyes by Jackson Browne.

In the British expenses swindle perpetrated by about a third of the Members of Parliament, it came out that among the swindlers was Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister. (I referred to him here several weeks ago as the worst British PM ever, which is now the consensus view.) Mr. Brown had to pay back some money he'd double-charged in the past four years. Had the newspapers got hold of records going back further than four years, he might have had to pay back even more.

One of the dodges used by the PM was to have the bills on one of his homes sent to him under a different name. In that he had earned a Ph. D. earlier in life, the Prime Minister had his bills addressed to Dr. Brown.

We have a Dr. Brown too. He's an actual doctor, as you know. But thinking about the fact that both Britain and Bermuda are led by men called Dr. Brown set me to thinking about other similarities between the two men.

Both are Labour politicians, in name if not exactly in substance. Both took office unelected, although our Dr. Brown has since remedied that, a feat Dr. Gordon Brown looks unlikely to emulate.

Both men have lost the faith of a section of their support and had to face difficult meetings with the PLP in recent weeks. Our Dr. Brown faced the Progressive Labour Party; Britain's Dr. Brown met the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Both leaders were saved from retirement by their followers refusing to allow the rebels to gain the upper hand. Both Dr. Browns insisted that their key parliamentary supporters sign loyalty oaths, or whatever the exact terminology might be. Both caught heavy flak for the idea.

Both have had to appoint unelected "can-do" men to take charge of parts of the political landscape. Our Dr. Brown has Col. David Burch, the other Dr. Brown has Lord Mandelson.

Col. Burch has never been drummed out of government for fiscal impropriety; Mandelson has tasted the boot twice. (Being a swindler is apparently no bar to being in government these days, as Timothy Geithner, the tax-cheating US Treasury Secretary and five other tax-cheating Obama appointees would attest.)

Our Dr. Brown wins hands down in any sort of comparison with his Scottish counterpart, but that's not much of a compliment. If our Dr. Brown performed his job as poorly as their Dr. Brown, Bermuda would have sunk beneath the waves a long time ago.

The saying has it that there's always someone worse off than you. In Bermuda's case, it is the 60-million plus Britons, whose lives are adrift while an unpopular and incoherent leader hangs on to power for grim death, which is what his country suffers while he does so.