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But suddenly, it seems, I am not alone. Some of our greatest financial institutions are having trouble holding on to the slippery stuff. Whatever it may be. Nothing more, apparently, than a poxy bit of paper which, someone convinces somebody else, has some mutable value. It's a mind game: I persuade you that my bit of paper is valuable or desirable and yours is of less value and you need to produce more of yours to have one of mine. However, if, once you have one of mine, someone loses confidence in my ability to judge these things, they can arbitrarily decide that my bits of paper are worthless, thus forcing you to offload your bit of my paper before its spurious value is wiped out by someone else's rival bit of paper and its spurious value. Money is a giant con.
The stock market wobbles. The banks falter and merge. Financial gurus pontificate and foam. Governments step-in and bail-out. Venerable institutions tremble and buckle. And I find my interest dropping steadily. In the whole subject, I mean.
If I were ever invited to dinner parties, I'd be sick of talking about house prices. Technically, I'm a first time buyer, as I have never owned a property of my own, content to sleep on the floor of my surgery, when I'm not in the revolting apartment bequeathed to me by my late mother. (She just couldn't hold her arsenic.)
So that makes me one of the mysteriously cherished community of vainglorious fools who feel ever so entitled to own their own house, as if they can't be seen in public without the deeds to a 3-bed semi chained to their necks. And that's exactly what it would be were they to buy now. Go on, you deluded borrowers, keep on buying houses and see how great you feel in 25 years time when your Repayment-Only Mortgage finally "matures" and you still have to find the £400,000 you shelled out for your crappy new-build on an estate no one has wanted to live near for the last 20 years, but you had to, because the negative equity was so severe you were stuck there until the house's value bounced back, which it never did, and you've been working 80 hour weeks just to scrape together the repayments on the vast interest; working so hard, in fact, that you barely step foot in the precious house at all.
Meanwhile, the shenanigans of estate agents persuaded people that it was financially canny to Buy To Let - "It's our pension! Pass the pinot."- and, as the number of available properties diminished, up crept the rents of the poor swine who weren't pursuing your ridiculous dream, but suffered anyway.
If that's what "being good with money" gets us into I'm glad I'm fiscally dyslexic. Which brings me to....
*****************
Conversation In A Bank
“I’d like to take out a mortgage.
A mortgage?”
“A mortgage.
I’d also like an overdraft, a bridging loan, a bung."
“But sir, there is a credit crunch."
“A credit crunch?”
“A credit crunch.
No-one’s coming back from lunch,
For money there is none!”
“Have I walled into a grocer’s?”
”A grocer’s?”
“A grocer’s.
I thought this was a bank, sir, so please can you explain?”
“Indeed it is a bank, sir,
A fine old clearing bank, sir
But like a leaking tank, sir
The money in this bank, sir, has dribbled down the drain."
“I’m sorry I don’t follow,
I came in here to borrow, but
You’re saying, to my sorrow, There’s no money in the banks…”
“Have you heard of sub-prime?”
“Sub-prime?”
“Sub prime.”
“Is that a sort of sandwich eaten by the Yanks?”
“No, it’s a kind of mortgage”
“A mortgage?’
“A mortgage. The kind they give to people who can’t afford to pay.”
“I think I’m going deaf, sir.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Deaf, sir! Are you sure that what you said to me
Is what you meant to say?”
“Indeed, that’s how they do it, sir, in the USA.”
“But what’s that to do with me, sir?”
“You, sir?”
“Me, sir.
Because I fail to see, sir, why I have to pay?”
“Well, someone in the States, sir,
At most attractive rates, sir,
Handed on a plate, sir, loans to homeless types.”
“Large amounts of cash, sir?
Wasn’t that quite rash, sir?”
“Indeed, and hence the crash, sir,
Their shares have all been wiped.”
“And I’m supposed to care, sir?
I’m sure that it’s unfair, sir,
But that was over there, sir. And I am over here."
“The markets are all linked, sir
If one so much as blinks, sir
Another starts to sink, sir. That’s how it works, I fear.”
"Then we must say good-day, sir
For I refuse to pay, sir
To underwrite the gross mistakes of such a monied club.
I'll go and take my chances with a loan-shark up the pub."
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