Bubblehammerblog

(Placard held up last week on Wall Street)

Not much to read in the newspapers at the moment. So far as I'm concerned the swathes of print devoted the the supposed 'financial meltdown' might as well be written in Armenian. Three days into the 'crisis' I gave up buying papers. It's not that I'm ignorant or dismissive of economics, far from it, as a fierce young marxist I devoured whole shelves of books on political economy. No, I sensed as soon as the story began to unfold that nothing would come of all this blather. The superlatives that were being tossed from one news bulletin to the next failed to impress - worst figures for six years, British economy technically in recession, ten percent knocked off value of shares. All of which may be tough bananas for the banksters & their like, but what's happening here is just a periodic market adjustment, & is about as interesting as the office computer breaking down. A real crisis looms when the prices of necessities begin to rise quickly, & when the price of oil rockets. Oil has recently dropped from a high of $150 a barrel to just $80, & continues to fall.

Of course I don't have any shares, & I don't own any of the kind of property that might decrease in value. I don't use banks either. All the money I have, & there's a fair amount of it, is in cash, &
it's stuffed into the tubes of a big brass bed, where it's safe. If anyone attempts to take any of it
I'll kill or severely injure them, for which purpose a heavy wooden knout hangs from the bedframe, finely inscribed in kufic script with the 99 names of God.

The only sound reason to put money in a bank is if you want to borrow larger sums from them. I did this once to finance the purchase of a number of technically advanced television sets, & found them far too insistent, not to say pushy, when it came to getting their money back. In the end their impertinence became so intrusive I decided to permanently suspend repayment. A couple of times they even had the cheek to send people to knock on my door & ask for money. I had one of my employees provide them with an address in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia where I could be contacted, & I've heard nothing further from them. 'It is only by not paying our bills', said my friend Oscar Wilde, 'that we can hope to be remembered among the commercial classes.'

Taking refuge from the boring financial news in the serious papers, I turned to the gutter press for entertainment. I have to confess to what's probably some sort of intellectual perversion. I often enjoy, if that's the right word for it, experiencing the sensation of being appalled. Picking up a copy of the Daily Mail, The Mirror, or The Sun, I head straight for the full-page columnists - the shreiking Melanie Phillips, the odious Littlejohn, the gallows enchanted Peter Hitchens, or the pipsqueak-next-door Tony Parsons.

My deviant fix on Saturday came from Parsons. 'So many suffer for the grimy greed of a few', his piece was headed. He lays into the gluttonous, bonus-hungry spivs, who got the beleaguered British taxpayer into this mess. They are worse than criminals, he bleats. When do decent men & women, like himself, who actually work for a living, get to the point where they have given all they have to give? It was that Thatcher, who proclaimed that getting your hands dirty at work was a thing of the past, & the future was in financial speculation & writing columns for newspapers, who started it all. Casino capitalism & the culture of unfettered greed has brought us to this wretched point.

And just as you're thinking, 'hang on a bit, this fucker sounds like one of them outmoded socialists', he hits the button. An Asian immigrant, who lives in a £1 million seven bedroom Edwardian mansion, is claiming £4,000 a week in benefits from the British taxpayer. Outrageous, yes, but Tony honestly can't tell the difference between this leech & the city spivs who abuse decent, hardworking capitalism. Oh, Tony, appal me some more.

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