It seems that each time I turn the tele on it merely reverberates with gloomy and ominous sound bytes that none of us can do sweet FA about. As far as I can tell no one really has any idea on how to fix it other than trying to stimulate the economy by punching dollars into it. However, it appears governments are fighting a losing battle considering consumer confidence is being manipulated daily with media heralding the message that we’re on a sinking ship and to prepare the lifeboats before we drown in economic collapse. I mean what the fuck  It doesn’t make sense.

Are we supposed to spend or save? On the one hand we’re given the message that the economy depends upon consumer expenditure while on other, the message is loud and clear, your job may not exist tomorrow. The Doom Sayers tell us to save and the economists are telling us to spend. Well if they want to stimulate the economy why tell us that in a few months there’ll be mass lay off’s and we’ll be in the grip of a deep dark recession?

So we’re on the edge of precipice, wavering on the point of falling, the abyss glaring menacingly below. What do we do? Jump? Run? Hide? How about we stare straight down and call it’s bluff? It seems to me that we’re in recession only because we say we are. It’s self fulfilling prophecy. The shit hit the fan when someone called the bluff on the boom so why not engage in reverse psychology and call the bluff on doom? It’s absurd when we cast our minds back to what brought the whole economy to its knees. We were all intoxicated with how well things were going, no one batting an eyelid to the absurdity of trading on the future…

Haven’t we got the deal for you!

What is it?

Well this cheque is the future and it only costs one pound three pence a pop, guaranteed 100 percent return.

Fantastic give me a hundred thousand.

Done! Sold to the highest bidder *shit eating grin*

Future

After going around the merry go round Mr X decides to cash his cheque FUTURE Not Negotiable

I’d like to cash this cheque mister bank manager.

Ok. Lets just punch this into the keyboard here…Err there seems to be a problem.

Oh. What is it?

Well this seems to be a blank cheque.

Yes that’s right. Its the Future and it is now worth Five Trillion Dollars. You can check it. It should be filed under Past Derivatives.

Ok that makes sense, let me just confirm with the issuer, Bank Z. *goes off to call Mister Y from Bank Z*

Ok Mister W unfortunately the issuer seems to have traded that cheque to another Bank, Bank P who then sold it onto Bank K and after then the paper trail seems to have been misplaced *looks rather worried and perplexed*

Very well then, *looks annoyed* if you would just be kind enough to cash the Future I bought and chase it up with Bank K I’ll be out of your hair.

No I’m afraid you don’t understand Mister W, we can’t cash that cheque because it appears to possess no value. The value was decided by the Past Derivative but the Future suddenly embarked upon another course and it appears the cheque you now possess is worthless.

Mister W storms off in search of his missing five trillion of non existent funds.
Well unfortunately the funds never existed so once the banks realised they’d been trading on non existent wealth the resultant predicament is the global financial crisis where we are now. The folly of it is the boom we came out of was a fraud. The money was fake, but for some reason we have disconnect because we seem to believe the recession isn’t. But if the recession is based on false economy I fail to see why the recession can’t be viewed with the same logic. We are in recession because the future was sold at too high a price and now we have to wait for the future to catch up to the past. Now if we sold the recession to the future and traded it for the past we should come out even.

Make sense?

You gotta be worried when the Prime Minister is doing his damnedest to keep the economy “strong”  and I think times are going to be pretty tight if not hard, very soon. I have this sense of doom invading my psyche and it isn’t just my general neurosis speaking. It goes somewhat deeper than that. I have a premonition that when the going gets tough I’ll cave into a blubbering mess. It’s already difficult enough trying to keep my head above water and if extra struggles are piled on top I’m not sure how I’ll react. I guess I lived through one recession and I can somehow get through another. At the end of the day there isn’t much I can do about the impending doom so it serves no useful purpose in imagining the horrors to come but my mind excels in catastrophic mind games.

Two sides are on every coin and the silver lining on the face of one side of the coin is an appreciation of how good things have been for me to date. If anything, a lesson can be drawn from the economic crash 2008 and that is to always appreciate what you have because it could always be worse and the ethereal “good times” ought to be celebrated more so, if only because they can be short lived. Only time will tell if Capitalism can draw us out of the rut in time to save us from the nonchalant face of hardship.

In some sense the natural state of being is surfacing. From Dionysian excess, the fall back to the nourishing earth to decay for the next regeneration and rebirth. The cycle of decay and rebirth, chaos from order, order from chaos, excited molecules reaching the end of their life to morph into more stable associations. The economy can be no different, how can it escape the natural order anymore than we can?

It’s self evident that we exceeded the confines of Evolutionary Stable Strategy when we started writing blank cheques to the real estate market thinking inflationary theory could be unconstrained and the elasticity was infinite. I guess the people who masterminded the sub-prime scheme benefited but once the yield strength of the elastic band holding it all together started to spring back the tension was more than the rest of the market could contain. So we are just beginning the momentum to perhaps land back further than where we began.

So it is with this imaginary entity that we worship at the alter of the Multi-Plex:

Capitalism has made it this way. Old fashioned fascism will take it away.

The Beautiful People – Marilyn Manson – Antichrist Superstar

And perhaps we will see fascism take it away because if the current President of the United States of America – our esteemed G W Bush, uses his Patriot Act powers to declare a national emergency and extend his Presidency, as the conspiracy theorists claim is within his powers, then we may well see a fascist state incorporating a new capitalist agenda to suit the whims of some madman who is at the helm.

When all is said and done, it is extraordinarily profound, this system we have; when blank cheques can be written to manipulate a market (isn’t that exactly what the sub-prime scheme was about?) and when defaulted mortgages can be bought and sold like they were gold. When trillions of so called value can be wiped in the blink of an eye and yet have no physical currency disappear. When debt is the measure of prosperity and wealth. These things certainly defy logic and then to have Governments prop the economies up with real cash slaps us in the face with indignity.

Is this the society and system that we hold so dear and indeed are willing to lay our lives on the line for? All this anguish so we can wear our Calvin Klein underwear and display the label over pants that are falling off our arses? So we can have our KFC and McDonald’s on every corner block. So we can watch the latest installment of “reality” in an unreal house with Big Brother watching on our 50″ plasma and LCD HDTV’s? So we can be in a constant state of yearning – that happiness is only a sale away. “Capitalism has made it this way”….indeed, prophetic words from a zoid wearing gothic makeup – Go Figure!

Remind me again – What is the definition of insanity?