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Friday, October 10, 2008

A little bell will ring

In a few hours, in New York, a little bell will ring.

And then all your hard work, a lifetime's effort of diligence and sacrifice, will begin to vanish. All that you saved, all that you invested, all that you salted away in pensions for when you're old which is sooner than you'd like it to be, will start to erode, like salt in a rainstorm.

You think it's been bad already, with indices like the Dow and Nikkei falling 7-10% a day, and the Iseq a mere fraction of what it was only a year ago.

But once that little bell rings, complex mathematics overseen by overpaid shouting white men will take over, and all the many hours of your effort, all the careful scrimping and saving, the self-denial, the sacrifices you made, they'll all begin to fall in value.

Not in real value. You put those hours in, you did the work, you strove to ensure the future for you and your family. That value remains in your character and the admiration of those who love you and witnessed how hard you slogged.

But in monetary value, a large proportion of your efforts is about to vanish for no good reason other than the greed of bankers and traders and their deliberately opaque and complex system of self-reward.

The solution is NOT to do what is currently being done. The solution is to do the exact opposite. Rather than ensuring their losses, it is time to hold them culpable for them.

It's a solution I'm prepared to bet no government in the world will implement, not even Iceland which officially went broke as an entire nation yesterday. But it's the right solution.

It may provide you with a little comfort today, after the little bell rings and your savings, investments, pensions and stocks start to diminish before your very eyes, to know what the answer is to this economic meltdown.

That's why I offer it to you. Remember who's responsible for this mess and hold them to account. They just stole years of your working life and pissed it up the wall.

Otherwise, when that little bell rings, take cover. A global depression is coming out swinging.

Update: It's bad alright.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is incredibly sad that we find ourselves in this sorry state of affairs. Some people who were looking forward to a well earned comfortable retirement are now going to have to work for a further decade just to make ends meet. I think people are not angry enough about this yet, but I think they will be in the fullness of time. This current catastrophe can be traced back to Regan and Thatcher in the 80's who started the whole deregulations of the market process (Finished off by most western democracy’s economic policies). We have now reached the logical conclusion of that experiment. It has been a failure on a massive scale. Unfettered capitalism just does not work as our past can quite clearly show (Irish famine anyone? The free market forces were supposed to step in then and provide food for the starving).
Everyone has been strung along with promises of ever increasing wealth and prosperity when in reality all of the real wealth was being funnelled right to the top of this massive pyramid scheme we call 'The Markets'. The Irish turned out to be some of the greediest denizens of the current system. Ireland has become like some sort of 21st century nightmare vision of Thatcher’s Britain. Every year a huge percentage of the population would go and buy the latest model of luxury car, eat and drink out three or four times a week, get taxis everywhere, spend a fortune on the latest designer labels and pay ridiculous prices for property along with the astronomical mortgage payments that came with them. All of this was borne on the (empty) promises of ever increasing personal wealth (Insert Debt) and sustained by greed on an unprecedented level. Talk about a rude awakening. I don’t think a term has been invented to describe the current situation we now find ourselves in. Thank fuck I am on a final salary pension and not one of the index linked ones that numerous poor(Greedy) feckers have been persuaded to switch to with the promise of untold riches (Insert line graph of market climbing by Bullshit% year on year). Gordan gecko was wrong greed is NOT good.

Anonymous said...

the little bell on monday wasn't so bad.

must have frightened that depression off...

JC Skinner said...

Well, the sort of losses on the market we've seen in the past five months are not to be ignored.
And the Iseq is as good a bet as any to be the next to tumble like the Icelandic market, which was down 76% today, when it re-opened after the weekend.
God, I hope you're right. But I do believe we're in a replication of the 1873 crash (which was also based on a global, or at that time European, property bubble.)

Anonymous said...

Why is that bell such a tinkly little happy bell ?

Should it not be a big fearsome rumbly bell ?

And who are all those clowns that stand behind the tinkly campanologist every morning ?