Outfoxed over Hungary's credit crisis

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This week Hungary became the first EU country to receive financial support from the International Monetary Fund in response to the global financial crisis. As the financial storm clouds gathered, Nick Thorpe took to the hills. But even here, he did not feel safe. Hungary is the first EU country to receive financial aid from the IMF.

It was the week capitalism as we know it wandered over to the abyss, and peered in. But I had other things on my mind - foxes. The children were on half-term holiday, and we had retreated to our cottage near Lake Balaton, in western Hungary.

As darkness fell, there were loud, crunching noises in the garden. We looked out. A large, shadowy creature with a triangular face, and a white tip to his bushy tail, was prowling under the walnut tree, every now and then pausing to crack a walnut between his teeth. Soon he was joined by another.

We ventured outside. We had never had foxes in the garden before. Now they were playing with an old football.

They took a passing interest in us, and in the neighbour's ginger cat, who passed within a whisker's breath, then got back to the serious business of chewing walnuts. We offered bread and milk instead. They seemed grateful.

Expose to rabies?

After midnight the phone rang. The IMF had reached a broad agreement with Hungary on a "very substantial loan". The children were long asleep. But the foxes were still there, playing in our garden.

I kept half an eye on them, as I rigged a satellite dish up under the thatch, and started trying to make head or tail of Hungary's role in the collapse of capitalism. Hungary was under communist rule until 1989.

To be frank, the collapse of Communism, 19 years ago was easier to understand.

The next day we talked to friends about the foxes. Keep away from them, said my sister-in-law, they may have rabies.

We Googled them on the internet. Foxes and rabies. Strange behaviour. A tendency to eat inedible objects. Oh no. Had I exposed my loved ones to one of the most dangerous diseases left in the western world?

Means of transmission? Saliva. Well, none of us had actually gone over and stroked them ... but still. They had picked up and chewed everyday items the children play with all the time. Between reports detailing the Hungarian Socialist party's response to the crisis, and the Conservative party's critique, I removed fox turds from the garden.

We stacked hefty beech logs under the flimsy fence and reinforced our defences. We threw stones and branches at the foxes when they came back. We threw away the most chewed footballs and hopped wood to feed the hungry stoves, the only source of heating in the house in winter.

An open knife

A radio programme wanted interviews with people in Hungary already affected by the crisis. I drove down to Badacsony, Hungary's equivalent of Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa.

But our mountain just looks out over the placid waters of Lake Balaton - rather than the meeting place of oceans.

Huba Szeremley welcomed me in his summer residence with a glass of something cloudy - this year's new wine. Just a month since the grapes were picked. The juice continued fizzing and fermenting in the glass. Do foxes have rabies?

Huba is one of the grand old men of Hungarian wines. His family won back its estates when the Communist system collapsed. As we sipped his grape juice, he told me a story about a monster who swallows all the villagers, one by one.

But then he swallowed a shepherd who had a knife, open in his pocket. And the knife punctured the monster, who exploded, and all the people escaped. "The only question is," said Huba Sremley, through a bushy beard, referring to the current financial crisis, "who has the open knife in their pocket?"

We went to see his vines. The machinery he needs constantly to update, to maintain a state of the art winery which can compete with the Austrians, the Italians, the French, the Spanish, and the wines of the New World.

The Hungarian National Bank raised interest rates to 11.5%. "How can I borrow money at 11.5%?" he asked.

"Other countries slash interest rates to bolster their economies. But what do we do? We strangle it."

The ruby red juice of the blue frankish grapes gushed down the side of a stainless steel drum. The deseeder deseeded. A mountain of redskins and seeds and branches grew in the corner of the yard.

"The economies of the world are in running shoes," Huba concluded our interview, "while the Hungarians are still stumbling around in heavy army boots".

Giant bottles of the grape-juice-wine were brought out as a gift for the stray reporter. "Which ones can the children drink?" I asked him. Maybe keep the six-year-old off this one.

Weathered storms

Two nights later, the phone rang again at 1.30am. News just in from Washington: The IMF were putting up $15.7 billion for Hungary. The European Union $8 billion more. $25 billion, or 20 billion euros. But did Hungary really need it?

A glass of sweet red grape juice by the phone, I dragged sleepy commentators out of bed.

Was the prime minister hiding behind an IMF fig-leaf? Disguising his own policies as "stringent IMF conditions" as the opposition maintained? Or was this the only way to stop the rot, to restore confidence in the markets and the currency? And why did the world suddenly care about poor little Hungary? Does the domino effect really exist? If Hungary collapsed, would it pull down Austria too, and then Germany?

And did our foxes really have rabies?

Eva, a lady in the village whose opinion I respect above all others, reassured us that the foxes were healthy.

They became tame, she said, because another of the neighbours fed them.

We drank the bottles one by one. The red one had no effect. The others went straight to the head.

Hungary weathered the storm. The forint recovered. The stock market soared. The fires slowly died in the grate. We could finally go back to bed.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 1 November, 2008 at 1130 GMT on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.