The Money Con

A piece written for the Financial Times in 2011 but never published. I have added a few modern details e.g. Elon Musk the S African Illegal Immigrant wanted by ICE.

In the year of Our Lord 2011 on the 9th of February, I, a human being on the Planet Earth, of almost sound mind and semi-reasonable intelligence, sat him down and pondered the Money Question.

The economist, J K Galbraith once said, “If you get all the economists in the world and lay them down side by side all you get is a (roughly) 13.765 mile line of people who don’t know what they are talking about.”

I decided that rather than go back to university and spend three years studying something which obviously doesn’t contribute much to the sum total of human happiness I would sit and ponder the question of Money. I decided, as I said above to eschew, and even ignore, Economics.

“Economics is a valueless discipline, neither a science nor an art.” Albert Einstein.

Economists can always tell us what has happened – which is of course a complete no-brainer – the past is better left to Historians. Economists are rubbish at telling us what will happen – otherwise we would not be in the mess we are in now – QED.

So – how does a Common Man work out what’s what?

How does a Common Man, Woman or Child make sense of the fact that poor and starving black children in central Africa spend 12 hours a day hacking out cobalt for the Chinese for a dollar a shift while Chinese rare metal industry managers’ wives, who, a few years back, were wearing baggy black pyjama suits and eating cabbage soup, now fly to Paris Billionaire Class and spend thousands of dollars on a handbag?

How is it that single teenage mothers living in council accommodation brought the World Economy to its knees in spite of the best efforts of the banks and hedge fund managers to stop them?

How did our Arts Centres and Civic Theatres come to be a threat to the health of the World Bank and the IMF?

How did that old lady pensioner with her tartan shopping trolley going to get a large print Mills and Boone from the library manage to endanger the whole of the City of London, the Royal Family and Al Life As We Know It?

I needed to know the answer to these and many other questions.

I made myself a coffee and sat down and thought. Then I thought again. Then I got out of The Box and thought.

Let’s go right back to basics….

In the beginning Mankind and Womankind and Childkind wandered round gathering nuts and berries and whacking things on the head. This gave the Early People food and clothing. They were called the Hunter Gatherers – there were at that time no banks or hedge funds or PFI schemes.

Then somebody discovered that certain grasses could be made into bread and beer and this gave rise to farming and fun; ploughmen’s lunches, real ale and possibly folk singing. People instead of wandering round getting berries and hitting things on the head settled down and started keeping cows and sheep. This was called The Neolithic Revolution. Nobody was killed in that revolution though some ploughboys developed seggs on their hands. There were still no banks or hedge funds or PFI schemes.

When people settled down they started to breed (it’s hard having sex when you are continually on the move) and tribes thus grew larger.

At first the tribes were managed by women, who were on the whole better at sorting things out than men in that they tended to talk rather than fight. Women have been largely of this make in politics ever since – exceptions being Mrs. Thatcher, Mrs. Ghandi, Sarah Palin and Imelda Marcos – all of whom were or are patently mad. There were still no banks or hedge funds or PFI schemes or thoughts of building a civilisation on Mars under the decree of Emperor Musk.

The Neolithic Revolution was followed by the Bronze Age which meant you could have a medal for coming third in the Olympics (which had just been invented by the Greeks) and meant you could have your baby’s first bootees cast in the stuff and bits of the Bronze Age got muddled up with the Iron Age which meant that Sheffield had to be invented.

Things were still fairly simple and amicable in those days – here’s how it worked.

People had begun to realise that the only thing that mattered in the world was (and still is) food and water.

Since water at that time had not been privatised we can stick to thinking about food.

Without food we die.

At one time we grew all our own food. Then some people got better at it than others and we called them farmers. Other people got good at making pots – we called them potters; making clothes – we called them tailors; and making tools – we called them B and Q.

There were still no banks or hedge funds or PFI schemes and people mostly swapped stuff.

I, for example, might have nice, warm, fur-skin, one piece, romper suits which I swapped with the farmer for cheese and corn while my pal Jim made good screwdrivers which he swapped for beer and a butty. My mate Martin on the other hand could sing songs and tell jokes and he used to make us laugh in the village hut so people gave him food and clothes and tools for doing that.

Stuff got made and distributed all the time. There was no point hoarding stuff because it went off: food went rotten, iron rusted, clothes fell apart when the moths got at them and Martin’s jokes got stale and he had to make some more; so stuff got made and swapped all the time.

There was lots of gold and silver and stuff like that about and very nice some of it was too, but people in them days were fairly sensible, they knew you can’t eat gold and realised that like a Damien Hirst Pickled Sheep – gold is only worth something because people say it is. The minute somebody says “Gold? What a load of rubbish!” or “Damien Hirst? What a con!” people will not want the stuff any more, and it won’t be worth anything. Don’t laugh. This happened in Holland during the Great Tulip Mania Bubble when somebody decided that tulips were the Next Great Thing and people sold their houses to buy bulbs. Then somebody shouted “Tulips? What a load of crap!” And lots of people threw themselves in the canals of Holland - so many in fact that some just landed on islands of Dode tulpenbollenbubbel zorgt voor faillissement (dead-tulip-bulb-bubble- bankrupts) and didn’t drown. Amsterdam passed an act forbidding Canal Suicides so people got on boats to Clacton and waited for Death. Their descendants are still waiting.

“The Next Great Thing is ladders to reach the moon!” somebody shouted and immediately thousands of people who had found themselves holding useless onion-looking-things that they couldn’t eat, began investing in ladders to reach the moon.

That was called The South Sea Bubble. Then there was the Dot.Com Bubble, the AI Bubble and multifarious Ponzi schemes too numerous to list here - all of which meant that a small number of people became incredibly rich while many millions went round with their arses hanging out of their trousers not knowing if the could pay their mortgage/rent/ovredraft/medical bills/credit card debt – this was called the YOU’VE NEVER HAD IT SO GOOD BUBBLE.

So to repeat - food and the production of food is the most important and basic thing in the whole wide world – without it? Death.

As an aside – have you realised that if there was a real crisis of a kind that locked down the World’s transport system, supermarkets would run out of all food in about 5 days (apart from jars of pickled walnuts and a few bags of frozen sprouts) and approximately twenty minutes later all of Western Civilisation would collapse – looting, murder, anarchy. A sobering thought – we are only ever four or five days from Armageddon and the Four Horsemen!

So how did we get from that food and barter system to the Tesco – Tulip - Ladder To The Moon - Dot Com - AI Bubble Armageddon situation we are in today?

The answer is The Money Con.

One sunny morning a Bronze Age village idiot called Fred sat down and thought, Hmm, why don’t I invent money? And he took a small piece of bronze, scraped his own picture on the front and wrote on the back “One Fred”. All I need to do now, he thought, is con people into believing that a Fred is really valuable.

He then went to the pub and asked for a pint of beer. The landlord knew he was an Idiot and a Waster and a Glassnack, who hated work and said, “What you going to give me in exchange? You don’t work and apart from that bearskin you are wearing you haven’t a pot to piss in.” (The pub was called Mick’s Metaphors BTW)

Fred handed him the first coin. “You’re ‘avin me on!” the landlord said, “What’s this? You can’t eat it or wear it or anyfing.!”

“No but you can change it for two loaves of bread.”

“Oh is that right?”

“Dead right,” said Fred.

“So the Landlord went to the farmer and said, “Two loaves of bread please.”

“Sure,” said the farmer, “That’ll be one pint please.”

And the landlord said “I didn’t briong a pint with me but bring this to the pub and I’ll swap it for a pint.’

Fred meanwhile went home, made a load more Freds and went back to the pub and got totally wasted. The landlord then used all the Freds he had collected from Fred and bought loads of other stuff. And so the One Fred coin became the currency in that village.

Soon everybody wanted Fred’s because they were easy to carry about and they made Fred king because his picture was on the front. He was still the village idiot but he soon learned and began to kill anybody who thought it might be a bad idea to have a village idiot for a king (sadly this idea went to The Swamp Where All Good Ideas Sink And Are Lost and was almost lost forever.) Then Fred died and his son Fred 2 took over. He was more subtle. He didn’t kill people, he paid people Freds to go round saying having a king was a good idea. He also gave lots of people jobs in the big house he had built himself. They were useless jobs in the main – emptying pots to piss in, feeding the royal tortoises and budgies etc but it meant that soon Fred 2 had loads of brown-nosers around him. They were called “courtiers” and “loyal supporters” and still are to this day. (You can tell them out from ordinary people by the faint stain of excrement on their probosci )

The Ivention of Not Freds

There were still no banks or hedge funds or PFI schemes – but they weren’t far away because Fred’s cousin Bert said, one day.

“I got a good idea. As well as Freds we can have ‘Not Freds.’ Not Freds are Fred’s we don’t have yet but will or may have soon. They are bits of calfskin which say ‘This is the promise of a Fred’ So you can buy stuff with the Not Freds then when you get the Fred’s you pay it back. But you have to give us extra Freds on top for using the Not Freds.”

“Why?” somebody asked.

“Because writing the bits of calfskin out makes me very tired and because I have a big wattle and daub hut to pay for and a new very posh cart with gold wheels, and the missus want’s new woad and stuff. And I have to write loads more Not Freds to not pay for them.”

“So you just write Not Freds and we have to pay you Freds?”

“That’s the way it works.” he said. So they killed him and everybody lived happily ever after.

PS

Only of course they didn’t and Bert went on to found the first Not Fred Storage Cave for Freds and Not Freds which was called a Bank. People gave him their Fred’s to mind and Bert gave himself a massive bonus of Freds and wrote out a lot more Not Freds which he then gave to people and charged them a lot of real Freds for it. This was the start of banking. Soon the world was full of Not Freds and anybody who had real Freds kept them very quiet or exchanged them for gold.

OED Def

Gold - a rare earth metal which rich men pay very poor men to dig up from deep underground. It is then buried again in vaults deep underground in a place called Switzerland which is famous for rolled cake and cuckoo clocks..

Coming soon….

The Stork Exhange - How To Buy A House In Clacton with Not Freds and The Egyptians invent Pyramid Selling.