We Interrupt This Programme....

For An Important Announcement.

The IMF has given us the astonishing news that during this Great Financial Crisis we have lost 6 trillion dollars.

Do any of us know what six trillion dollars means?

I confess, without the slightest hint of self-deprecation or irony, that I am an ignorant man. I can do easy sums and can count the change in my pocket, but I am not one who can talk for hours about fiscal this and hedging that. As far as I’m aware “High Finance” was a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie and that is the sum of my balance sheet.

But, even given that, I can still contemplate the meaning of ‘6 trillion dollars’. It is an amazingly big number. Imagine giving every man woman and child on earth a dollar coin and then imagine doing that on 882 duplicate worlds.

On the other hand, you could get 6 trillion microbes in a bucket with lots of room to spare. However if each microbe had a dollar coin in its pocket then, try as you might, you would not be able to lift the bucket.

On the third hand (the significance of which will become apparent), if the six trillion were years then they would stretch back to 430 TIMES the age of the universe and Genesis and therefore pre-date God himself. Should you wish instead to stretch that number of years into the future then it is extremely likely that the age of the three-armed human being would have come and gone long ago.

All this is mind boggling but nowhere near as mind boggling as the really significant part of the IMF news.

We have lost it!

We have lost 6 trillion dollars!

WHERE?

If I lose a dollar through a hole in my pocket then it either goes down a drain or under a rock. Sometimes it’s picked up by a finder and keepersed but what the dollar doesn’t do is disappear from the face of the earth. So what happened to the 6 trillion?

I have made the point many times before that ‘wealth’ is a deceptive and perhaps deceitful concept. Who can seriously believe a house that doubles its value in a year makes the owner twice as wealthy? Who can believe there is a real increase in the value of a company based on nothing more than the expectation of a future increase in value because the value of the company is expected to increase? And so on.

Who can believe these things? Well, quite a few apparently. They have allowed themselves to be mesmerised by the illusion of being better off and have borrowed wealth on the strength of their expectations of wealth. This would be bad enough and deserving of a good kick up the arse as punishment for naivety but unfortunately, in the main, the blame cannot be laid at the door of the mug punters.

Somewhat like The Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889 the moguls of finance and their toe-rags, the politicians, were whipping us and screaming for more speed as we were driven headlong into the land of plenty. We cast wild-eyed glances right and left to make sure we were not falling behind as we pounded over anything and everything to keep pace with the manic charge of wagons. Whooping bank drovers lashed at us to get through Shit Creek’s Treacherous Banks only to be faced by the Impossible Mountains of Debt but still they drove us on. And on, and up, and up, and up until…..ooops.

But it’s not just this. On television we can watch contestants in some inane reality show allow them selves to be smothered with cockroaches or they eat revolting looking insects all because money is more important than their dignity. I can’t but help imagine the producers of these reality programmes longing for the day (surely not far away) when Celebrity Dump becomes a ratings grabber.
I say we can watch them but I confess I don’t. Any more than I watch beauty contests or ‘food programmes’ like Iron Chef or Ready, Steady, Cook. I am aware of these things but I try my best to ignore them because they make me despair of society’s good sense.

We have been a greedy, silly mob. We have borrowed prestige and pride. We have pretended to be sophisticated and yet we have fallen for the oldest con in the book.

“You can be whatever you want to be.”

Bollocks! Is my reply to that. You didn’t seriously think you would actually gain something out of this protracted smash and grab raid and be allowed to keep it did you?

Did you?

You did?

BAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!