It’s the economy, stoopid

I was going to just cancel the blog this week, but now in keeping with the general trend of the news, and largely because I couldn’t think of anything else to write I have decided to write about the state of the economy.

I know, I know, everybody’s fed up with this and everybody has heard and read enough about it all, but still…

Okay, I have to admit right now that I’m not really qualified to write about the economy and I am not all that well versed when it comes to understanding the ins and outs of all this economic jargon, but, let’s boil it down to this - it all seems pretty scary.

All this stuff about bonds and rates and percentages and balance of trade surpluses and deficits, hard currency, soft currency, liquid assets and equity, the list goes on and on and it’s all very confusing.

I don’t know a lot of this stuff, like for instance what a tracker mortgage is and maybe I’m just being a tad simplistic here, but until recently my understanding of how things worked was something like this.

If I spend a euro, then somebody somewhere makes a euro, or at least part of a euro. I get what I wanted for my money, whoever made and sold that item got something for it and we’re all happy.

And if I didn’t want to spend my euro I could go along to my bank, put the euro into my bank and the bank - a great guardian of money - would keep it safe for me until I wanted it back.

Umm, unless the bank goes bust that is.

Yep folks, here we all were putting money into banks and then, POP, banks go bust all over the place quicker than a bag of balloons in a hawthorn bush.

But now what I want to know is how did this all happen?

I mean if the banks don’t have our money and the governments don’t have any, who the hell has it?

Surely all of our efforts should be put combined to try and find whoever it is that is taking all of the money and wrecking all of the economies.

Unless of course nobody has really taken it and it has all just been sucked into a big black hole in outer space where it will swirl around for all eternity with all the odd socks.

That does remain a possibility, except for the bit about it swirling around in outer space (I think).

I mean isn’t it all just numbers on some computer screen somewhere? I’m pretty sure the actual cash doesn’t disappear in an instant (I really do think that only happens in cartoons), so the money has to go somewhere.

But, where? That is the question!

Well according to my e.mail spam folder there seems to be quite a lot of retired generals or retired generals wives out there with big wads of cash, maybe they have it all. How they got it is anybody’s guess, perhaps they were able to retrieve some of the Anglo passwords when nobody else could.

Wherever it is, the money seems to be gone, yet the funny thing is, from what I can make out, one of the ways we are supposed to help is to, umm, spend more money.

A while back we were all supposed to tighten our belts but now I think the message is - if we haven’t got a belt, we’re supposed to go out to the local shop and spend money buying a belt.

But what happens if you haven’t got a belt and you haven’t got the money to buy a belt? Personally I wouldn’t worry too much about it.

Everybody knows you can’t take britches off a bare ass!