The times they are a-changin'

A change, it is said, is as good as a rest. The 5,000 tearful employees of Lehman Brothers who were turfed out onto the glossy streets of Canary Wharf yesterday probably didn't welcome the sudden change in their circumstances, but it's OK because they'll now have plenty of time to rest, whilst looking for new jobs in a chaotic market. London has always been a fast-moving city but at the moment it's helter-skelter.

I returned after a few days away to discover Cannon Street station swathed in scaffolding, the preparatory stage of a huge redevelopment project. As fast as companies are shedding staff from the Docklands, new office buildings are appearing in the City itself, most of them apparently destined to remain empty for the foreseeable future.

It's also a time of change for me personally. In late July, I and around 70 colleagues were hit by the bombshell that the project we were working on, was to be relocated to Houston, leaving us to guess what might come next. The contractors have been leaving and as of yesterday I'm officially in limbo, pending a decision on whose team I should join. I have been putting to good use the inverted commas in “working” from home. My team of nine, closely knit over a number of months, is being scattered to the winds.

Even managementspeak is changing. In a meeting yesterday I heard the phrase “in the hopper” (i.e. up for consideration) and “set the hares running” (get people excited without full knowledge of the facts) – and the latter was also used by a loud-phoning man on the train. No doubt there will soon be more job-loss euphemisms like “rolling off”.

I think a lot more change is around the corner. You could probably count on your fingers the people who understand the macroeconomic structure of modern Britain, but a growing number believe the whole financial system is rotten to the core and we are headed for a very nasty fall. There will be more high-profile casualties of the current meltdown, which is proving to be far more than a credit crunch. It's long been argued that socialism breaks down because people are greedy. Now we are being reminded that capitalism also breaks down because people are greedy. And that is one thing that definitely will not change.