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Vice Blog

LONDON - THANKS FOR THE RECESSION, BOWIE

You know whose fault it is that you've had to move three Latvian haulage companies into your trendy East London warehouse space? Ziggy fucking Stardust that's who. Yep, in the kind of wildly unpredictable move that has made finance such a giggle over the last six months, an expert has come out to blame David Bowie for starting the credit crunch.

A decade ago Aladdin Sane decided that it was time to cash in on his back catalogue. Much like Lou Reed, the banks started shamelessly and unadvisedly copying him. The result? He condemned us to a 2009 spent milking our children from the fluid in our knee-caps while he swans about with his enormous wife and a warehouse full of tiny white triangular hats. It's like the time Mick Jagger's late payments on a Cyprian time-share set Bearings Bank tumbling, or when Springsteen's card was swallowed in a Chalk Farm cash-point, setting into motion a wave of panic which eventually blew the Enron conspiracies out of the financial waters.

Weirdly, a couple of people (here and here) seemed to have predicted the Thin White Duke's culpability for this crunching credit and dedicated themselves to coming up with credit crunch puns on Bowie songs. Coincidence?