I'm sure many of you in looking over the current state of things have asked the timely question, where did all the money go? I mean, if I don't have any and you don't have any and nobody either of us knows has any, what in hell happened to it, because we're talking about some serious cash here. Has anybody looked behind the sofa cushions?
Well, folks, I'm afraid that all the forgotten coins from a great many untidy sofas wouldn't get us back to those halcyon days of yesteryear now almost lost in the mists of history - I'm talking 2007 - when it was hard to find something that wasn't going up and everybody was buying stuff with their excess money just for the pure joy of having more stuff.
Ah, to be back in the day.
I know you're curious, so to save you the trouble I've done the math to make it easier for you to get your minds around the problem, and I think you'll see what I mean about the sofa cushions.
The estimate is that so far the global economy has lost approximately 25 trillion dollars since its high point. A dollar bill weighs one gram, which means that 25 trillion one-dollar bills weighs - are you ready? - roughly 30 million tons.
Therefore, the current financial oopsie is equivalent to filling 89 of the world's largest container ships, each with a capacity of 350,000 tons, right up to the brim with dollar bills and then sinking them in mid-ocean.
See? The magnitude of the disaster isn't nearly as mind-boggling as it seems: just 89 ships - is that so hard to imagine?
However, there's trouble ahead. When the economy bounces back, as it inevitably will, there's going to be all that new money to print, you know, to get us back in Spending Mode.
Bills are made of linen, and if we're not careful the Treasury Department could inadvertently turn flax into an endangered species, and then here comes the Sierra Club and the Protectors of Wildlife and the Friends of Flax and all the rest and then we'll all have to finally face up to the grave environmental consequences of the existence of money and then all the credit card companies will be saying, see, we told you so, never carry cash, it's not eco-friendly and then the Defenders of Currency will come out of the woodwork and say, yeah, and how eco-friendly is plastic. And then Woody Harrelson and all the renewable-resource people will start advocating making money, like everything else, out of hemp so if you have a dollar in your pocket you'll have the liberty of deciding whether it would be more satisfying to spend it or smoke it and then ... anyway, getting ourselves out of this won't be as easy as it looks.
But are we going to learn anything from our little trip through the briar patch?
People of the Bobby Jindal-Rush Limbaugh persuasion are yelling and screaming about how we're handing America over to Big Government, and we all know how corrupt and wasteful and unwise government is; boy, the last thing you want to do is take something away from Private Enterprise and let government run it.
Myself, I would say that as the alternative to government this hasn't really been Private Enterprise's finest hour. Those wonderful rules of a free-market economy that we all half-understood back in school kind of pre-suppose that if a company is run into the ground the executives suffer, which should be an incentive for them not to do that.
The rules also assume there are no Bernie Madoffs playing with billions of dollars and no adult supervision. AIG, the insurer of the universe on the assumption that nothing in the universe ever goes wrong, doesn't appear in the rules.
Banks intertwining their finances so inextricably that if somebody sneezes the whole industry gets a cold isn't covered either.
I think in a head-to-head fraud/waste/corruption contest between private enterprise and big government they're tied for dead last.
Maybe next time around we can do something about that.
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