Monday, March 28, 2011

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.

27 comments:

  1. hhaa love that life is kinda like monopoly, u play u get mad and u throw things then u quit. kinda like being born, middlife cirses, then u die xD

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  2. As you say the system is broken but, unfortunately, its better than anything else we've come up with.

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  3. I agree with Danny Murphy, there isn't really another option, so we have to live with it.

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  4. Please tell me the Pic is photoshopped ...

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  5. The problem with the system is that it's been around for a verrrry long time. So it's the standard and although it's broken, it still works and it's the only thing we have that works at the moment. It worries me greatly too, though.

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  6. Spot on analysis there - and the point was well illustrated by using Monopoly. The system needs an overhaul, but I seriously, deeply doubt that will happen any time soon.

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  7. Interesting stuff! Followed.

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  8. I want to play me some Monopoly world financial crisis hell yea

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  9. Well the whole world is broken, we have the government giving the elites vasts amounts of money, covering it up, with "taxes" if that mattered to them.

    Doing that they decreace the overall $$ needed to run a country, if the USA's elite donated 5% of their entire fortune to the country, we wouldnt be in an economic crisis anymore...

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  10. I guess one of the problems is this: why would smart people come up with a new system, if they could just use the old one to get unbelievably rich?
    It's kinda sad, but I guess it's human nature.

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  11. This is exactly how I feel. Couldn't have said it better myself

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  12. it's all the same, it's like the banks are playing monopoly and every field you can step on is a "state field" on which the state pays off what you owe. so its totally riskless

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  13. i agree, i think we definitely need to rethink how we do things

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  14. Did you know the size of your hat used to determine your financial status?

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  15. great read, keep it up

    followed

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  16. I think it'd be interesting to see what would happen if the universal chaos theory stopped working. I mean, think about it, the game of monopolistic (is that a word?) life only works because of chaos theory, so remove that, and you remove the monopoly.
    Downside? We'd probably see anarchy and mutiny everywhere. HURRR. I'd say just stick to what you believe in and screw the corporate game players... You can't stop a monopoly, but you CAN stop believing in it.

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  17. It's not as hard as you think to come up with something better. You've been conditioned your entire life to love capitalism, in fact, most people equate it with freedom. The capitalism we have is not pure capitalism, either. Pure capitalism doesn't allow for bailouts.

    Interest is the problem. The people that own banks collect money from nowhere. My first blog entry was about it with some suggested movies to watch (free).

    The system does not allow anyone to stop playing, in fact. If people stopped buying each others stuff, world economic collapse would be imminent.

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  18. I agree with Xuian

    Personaly I do not think the system it is broken. It is we that are broken, capitalism is all about balancing itself out.

    Our goverments under pressure from us try to regulate that balancing process. Only problem with that is that the economy is too big for anyone to know what the #%$@ they are doing. Heck if you ask where all the bilions they pumped in the economy went they do not even know!

    With all respect I am not saying the goverments that are trying to regulate the system are stupid. Heck, even a accurate estimate of what is going to happen sort of makes them a genius. It's just the people that want the system to be regulated that are stupid.

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