The world wears top hats

Well it's another day, another morning, and as I sit here with my cup of tea and watch the stock markets fluctuate after huge falls the past weeks because of the Japanese disaster - I begin to wonder if our financial system works at all.

It's well known that recessions and booms follow each other but some way we always manage to not see them coming. How is this possible? How are we always not prepared for the next crisis and every single time the middle class gets taxed and stressed, the lower class gains a few new members, but the upper class is still up there sipping their cocktails in the country club not giving a fuck?

Lately I've been thinking the whole world is like a big game of Monopoly where countries keep playing and playing. Sometimes, inevitably, one of them runs out of money, and the others have to lend it some cash to keep playing - cos, you know, when you lose in Monopoly you just walk away from the table, but you can't ask a country to just go away and stop playing.

If we assume that the riches of the world are more or less constant then we will always have countries which are producing a little more and others that are spending a little more. There has to be a balance, somehow. So how is it that countries all over the globe take turns every couple of decades and fall into economic disrepair? No, wait, how is it that at any given time there's a region of the world dipping into the gutter?

 I honestly feel like the whole system is broken. It defies a number of logics and I think even economists have a hard time understanding it sometimes. But every time I bring this up to someone, they tell me "well it's all we've got, can you come up with something better?" and I honestly can't. But I have hope that there are a lot of much smarter people than me out there figuring shit out and they'll come up with something.

Keeping my fingers so crossed they'll have to pry them open with a crowbar.