Slightly Less Bold New World

Slightly Less Bold New World

I struggle to identify when the tipping point occurred. There were so many factors that could be construed as when the definitive change happened. But really they were a sequence of interrelated events, that simply created a vortex, at the bottom of which I find myself now, on this boat, in this ocean, running from this slightly less than bold new world.
I’m grasping to find a starting point for this chronicle.
Was it the financial crisis of 2008 which began as a rumble of house hold debt and culminated in the collapse of the world financial system late in 2009 and the subsequent wars that followed?
Or was it the break-up of the European Union and the demise of the Euro.
I remember they coined this expression at the beginning of the debacle, Sub-Prime Debt.
Sub-Prime Debt; listen to that term, SUB PRIME DEBT. Who the fuck thought that there was a viable form of debt that could exist called Sub-Prime debt.
What the fuck were they smoking?
Later they renamed it Toxic debt! If they had have called it toxic debt in the first instance, no one would have fallen for it and the fuse wouldn’t have been lit. Bugger!
These cretins, these captains of commerce, these Harvard educated geniuses succeeded in creating the most explosive time bomb of all time. Then they lit the fuse and I kid you not, they stuck the freaking thing directly under their children’s beds.
Every night, when they tucked their cherished little ones into dream world, they ignored the hissing of the fuse beneath the bed and the ticking of their own instinctual clock and went back to their vapid, delusional lives. God love em!
Well, sure enough, the bloody thing blew and all hell broke loose. But it wasn’t like a typical bomb, which achieves its maxim destruction force by expending all its energy in the shortest possible time.
No, this one went off like slow motion nuclear fusion. Atom crashing into atom like dominoes, spiraling out from the centre of the capitalist universe, America, to eventually reach every corner of the planet.
The worst thing about this particular bomb was that it started to blow and destruct but it just kept on going.
None of that old BANG, followed by silence, then the plaintive wailing of the injured and the crackling of the flames. Na, none of that.
Nope, this one went BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANG infinitum. I’m still hearing it. Just one loud, ongoing, single, monstrous bang.
This is the ‘cage rattler’ that I always suspected was coming but prayed that I was wrong.
So, anyway, first we all leant of the Sub Prime Debt and we looked over the fence at those stupid Americans and thought, ‘serves you freaking right, you idiots’. Little did we know that they had just lit the fuse that would end the existence that we all had grown up with!
The banks and their minions approached poor people who had successfully proven over decades that they could not save a dime (for whatever reason) and offered to sell them a brand new house. Now you can’t blame them for saying…….. OK, sweet and my daughter will have one too please!
Then the shylocks sweetened the deal and said that they only had to pay minimal interest on the loan (in the small print it said this would rise to market after 2yrs).
The time bomb was that the cost of repayments would triple overnight when the honeymoon period was over and that the value of the homes was overstated by 30% or 40%. These former trailer park residents were never going to be able to afford the new costs and the banks mail began to jingle with the sound of keys being returned
The next thing was the expansion of our vocabularies.
We leant new words like Ponzi and Trillions. Now strictly speaking we already knew there was a word Trillion, but instinctively we knew you could not use it in conjunction with the word dollars or pounds or euro. But they just started pretending that there were trillions of dollars around. Or trillions of euros or funnier still trillions of British pounds!
How did they get anyone to fall for that?
From that moment on we should have known that we were all freaking doomed. Intelligent people from all over the globe were discussing whether or not the ‘Bailout ’involving trillions of this or that would be successful.
No one actually said “duh, we don’t have trillions or for that matter Billions. In fact, just in case you hadn’t noticed we’re all freaking broke”.
Nope, those Harvard geniuses continued to shuffle the deck chairs and the band played manfully on.
Then we learned all these new acronyms; CD’s, CDO’s CDA’s MGL’s, ERM’s---- DO REH freaking ME’s. They created these financial instruments (otherwise known as weapons of mass destruction) upon which all the existing money was incinerated. Christ they were smart.
So, first the homeowners went bung. Then they lost their jobs and the factories and businesses went bung.
Then the governments decided that the solution was to take what remaining pittance of money was left and do a loaves and fishes routine with it and feed the thousands of ……………………………………………………………………bankers with it.
The very same people who had caused the debacle flew in, in their Armani suits and private planes, cap in hand and literally got away with what was left. It was truly brilliant.
If anyone could have suggested such a scenario had a whisker of a chance of success they would have been ridiculed, but pull it off they did.
It was like a race to shoot the last Rhino or catch the last whale. The fox dining on the last chicken in the hen house.
Then the Americans began bailing the large car companies, who said we only make stupid monstrosities that no one wants or can afford to run and those pesky Krauts and slippery Japs have stolen all our business by cunningly building what people want, so if you don’t give us all the money left in the piggy bank we’ll sack everyone and it will be all your fault.
Now all this sounded like a kiddy fight until the trade wars broke out. As you can imagine the efficient German and Japanese car makers and their non- subsidized, fully engaged workers didn’t take kindly to the handouts that there corporate competitors were receiving. The word protectionism kept popping up and slowly like a smoldering flame so did the heat and vitriol.
Around the same time the national banking systems of the world began to completely unravel.
Iceland was the first to fall, smothered under a mountain of debt racked up by their out of control banking sector. Then it was the turn of the Celtic tiger, Ireland. After living off handouts from the E.C for decades and promoting a massive housing bubble, the Celtic tiger’s teeth fell out and it quickly began to starve.
The Polish plumbers, that had been keeping the drains clear and the water flowing quickly went home.
Next it was the turn of the Greeks and the Portuguese banks to fail and as each one dropped the cry went out to Germany for help.
The Germans found themselves in an unenviable position. By this stage they were sick and tired of propping up every man and his dog. The previous 20yrs were dominated by the cost of German re-unification. The financial burden that this had entailed was only just beginning to abate when the crisis hit.
Now, its one thing to prop up fellow Germans and to be good European citizens but the German populace and the extreme right in particular were vehemently opposed to bailing out their lazy and spendthrift neighbours.
To a large extent the German banks had not got involved in the trading of the toxic assets that had brought the U.S and the U.K to their knees and they resented the damage those cavalier actions had done to their own economy and industries. Eventually their patience simply ran out and Europe began to unravel.
I think it’s fair to say the Germans were loath to let this happen but they were simply overwhelmed by the financial burden their taxpayers were expected to bear and old animosities re-appeared.
Thus the beginning of the end of the European Union experiment unfolded. Rather than suffer the consequences of maintaining membership by reducing deficits and raising interest rates the weaker member states withdrew from the union and devalued their currencies in an attempt to restore competitiveness.
The classic Argentine approach to defaulting on your debt. This made the former allies competitors and the gloves came off.
It began with relatively minor skirmishes. The first one was in South Osetia, where Russia and Georgia had hand bags at forty paces but like any physical confrontation, it quickly spiraled out of control. Simmering tensions between Russia and Ukraine blew up with the Ukrainians not paying for their gas and when their supply was shut off they replied by closing the transit pipeline between Germany and Russia.
Christ, can you imagine what the Germans thought? Our account is current and where is our gas? Being nicked by the Ukrainians actually!
The Ukrainians completely overplayed their hand and the government was overthrown by the opposition party aligned with Moscow and the beginning of the end of the democratic experiment in Eastern Europe was upon us
It was a classic contagion. Banks were failing all over the world. The former champions of the financial world were one by one exposed as the charlatans they so obviously were.
One of them put up 2 cubic meters of US$100 notes ($20m) for a cricket match! CAN’T ANYONE HEAR THE ALARM BELLS RINGING?
Nope, there goes another $8 billion.
And Madoff, $50billion. $50 billion……. Say it slowly.
Try saving $500 bucks and see how long it takes, now multiply that time by 10, now do it again, now do it again, now do it again, now do it again, now do it again, now do it again, now do it again. Get the freakin’ picture?
Millions of days of hard work incinerated by shylocks and hardly a one of them behind bars.
A shadowy Robin Hood esk group emerged in the U.S. calling itself ‘The Final Court of Justice’, they started kidnapping former heads of financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers and CEO’s of large Banks and corporations and throwing them off the roofs of tall buildings because they didn’t have the honour to do it themselves. When it was too difficult to kidnap them they simply shot them in the car parks of country clubs and restaurants.
There was a groundswell of sympathy when a number of them were killed by bodyguards of Henry Paulson during an attack on him after he had been sacked from his job at the Federal Reserve.
Copy cat gangs emerged across Europe and Latin America killing numerous bankers and Industrialists in a fit of rage that generated little sympathy for the victims from the general public but howls of indignation from their contemporaries.
MORE TO COME…………………………………