Praying for guidance as gilts fail to glitter in casino gamble

But it hasn't paid off, so far. The club took the equal worst mauling of its investment life with the unit price falling 11p last month to 2.55.

Does this point to a bleak 2010 for the club?

On the negative side, the club's paper and pencil analysis (papa) was looking for a bear market-rally high in the FTSE100 of 5,121, with any index reading 5 per cent or more above this level making it a bull market and rendering the club's investment policy wrong.

At the close of December, the FTSE was 5,412.88 – 35 points above the 5 per cent level. Unfortunately, the FTSE index currently looks as though it is tracing a rerun of the money-printing bull-run of 12 March 2003 to 15 June 2007.

On the positive side, the Dow Jones index at the end of 2009 was at 10,428.05. Calculated from papa's projected bear market rally high of 10,398.73, this is still 490.61 points below its 5 per cent ceiling of 10,918.66, above which papa has to concede defeat.

However, the Dow is still the catalyst for any up or downswing and is currently well within the parameters for conforming to our predicted outcome. So what has to happen to push the markets up? Governments have to find the equivalent of a new job. What is meant by this?

Say that in my present job I earn 100 a week, of which 80 is spent on staying-alive essentials. Another 10 is spent on luxuries and the balance saved. I then decide to borrow 10,000 or so to purchase a new car with a loan costing 20 a week that will take five years to pay off.

What has effectively happened is that I have brought forward to the present consumption of a product that would have been manufactured and consumed five years in the future.

This borrowing flatters current GDP but promises a disaster five years hence. What is the solution? For an individual, you just need to secure a new job that pays more. Then you can pay off the car, continue consuming your weekly luxuries and still buy a new car in five year's time. That trick is less easily achieved by governments.

What Gordon Brown and Alan Greenspan essentially did to keep markets of all asset classes buoyant and GDP trending up was to bring forward 30 or more years of our future consumption to flatter GDP now. They did this by borrowing huge sums of money. What governments have to do, to keep markets going up, is get a new job or borrow even more.

I am 99 per cent sure that governments cannot do either. However, there is always that irritating 1 per cent uncertainty. Therefore, the club's game plan for this month is a swift conversion to Christianity and prayers.