Debts & Loans

One day no more Debts

One day we travelled by train and found ourselves seated next to him. He sat down and pulled out a debts magazine, just as any other debt manager would. Aside from one other manque who stopped by to say hello, no one paid any attention on our debts. A friend reports that he was on the same train a few months ago who was accompanied by only a single.

Watching the news about debts is a bit like watching a bad opera. You can tell from all the shrieking that something very important is supposed to be happening, but you don't quite know what it is. What you're missing is the plot. Let us begin by noticing that this is a comic opera that seems as though it might veer into tragedy at any moment. The characters on stage are familiar to UK - consumers, economists, politicians, investors, and businessmen.

They are the same hustlers, clowns, rubes, and dumbbells that we always see before us. But in today's performance they are doing something extraordinary, they are the richest people on the planet, but they have come to rely on the savings of the world’s poorest people just to pay their debt bills. They routinely spend more than they make - and think they can continue doing so indefinitely. They go deeper and deeper in debt, believing they will never have to settle up. They buy houses and then mortgage them out - room by room, until they have almost nothing left.

They invade foreign countries in the belief that they are spreading freedom and democracy, and depend on lending to pay for debts. But people come to believe whatever they must believe when they must believe no more debts. All these conceits and illusions that we find so amusing come not from thinking, but from circumstances. As they say on Wall Street, "markets make opinions," not the other way around. The circumstance that makes sense of this strange performance is that the UK is an empire - whether we like it or not.

Why you have to pay for your debts?

It must play a well-known role on the world stage, just as you and I must play our roles, not because we have thought our way to them, but simply because of who we are, where we are, and when we are. Primitive people play primitive roles. They are no less intelligent than the rest of us, but they would be out of character if they began doing calculus. They have their parts to play just as we do. Sophisticated people play sophisticated roles in debts. They are no smarter than anyone else, but you still don’t expect them to wear bones through their noses.

We, citizens of the last great empire, have our roles to play too, and the empire itself, must do what an empire must do. Institutions have a way of evolving over time—after a few years, they no longer resemble the originals. Early in the twenty-first century, the United Kingdom is no more like the Vatican under the Borgia popes was like Christianity at the time of the Last Supper, or Microsoft in 2005 is like the company Bill Gates started in his garage.

Still, while the institutions evolve, the ideas and theories about them tend to remain fixed; it is as if people hadn’t noticed. In United Kingdom, all the restraints, inhibitions, and modesty of the old have been blown away by the prevailing winds of the new empire of debt. In their place has emerged a vainglorious system of conceit, deceit, debt, and delusion.

The Constitution is almost exactly the same document with exactly the same words it had when it was written, but the words that used to bind and chaff have been turned into soft elastic. The government that couldn’t tax, couldn’t spend, and couldn’t regulate, can now do anything it wants. The executive has all the power he needs to do practically anything. The whole process works so well that a member has to be found in bed “with a live boy or a dead girl” before he risks losing public debt.

The Businesses are still capitalistic. They operate, as everyone knows, in the most dynamic, free, and open economy in the world. Recent press item reports, that will never be able to compete unless it ditches its crushing health debts costs.

Why does it not just cut the debts costs?

It seems to lack either the nerve or the right, but the journalist proposed a solution: Nationalize health care! Meanwhile, CEO pay has soared to the point where the average chief executive in 2000 earned compensation equal to 500 times the average hourly wage. Stockholders, whose money was being squandered, barely said a word. They were still under the illusion that the companies were working for them.

They had not noticed that the whole capitalist institution had been trussed up with so many chains, wires, red tape, and complications; it no longer functioned like the freewheeling, moneymaking corporations of the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, corporations had their hands and feet free to eat our lunches and kick our derrieres.

The entire homeland economy now depends on the savings of poor people on the periphery to keep it from falling apart. UK consumes more than they earn. The difference is made up by the kindness of Strangers - whose savings glut is recycled into granite countertops and flat-screen TVs all over the UK?

But these ironies, contradictions, and paradoxes hardly disturb the sleep of the imperial race. They have permitted themselves to believe so many absurd things that they will now believe anything. In the fall of 2007, people were buying duct tape to protect themselves from terrorist "sleeper cells ready to attack the Midwest."

You can get rich by spending

In the fall of 2006, they believed that they were manipulating their currency by pegging it to the pound for nearly 10 years! Like Alice, they were expected to believe six impossible things before breakfast and another half dozen before tea: Real estate debts never go down! You can get rich by spending without debts! Savings don't matter! Deficits don't matter! Let them sweat, we'll think! We can't help but wonder how it will turn out.