Don't Panic

We are in a time of great economic uncertainty.

Banks and financial institutions are being bankrupted.

Stock exchanges are in a nose dive.

Properties are being repossessed.

The money markets and interbank lending have dried up.

Nobody knows what is going on or how to fix it.

Governments are stepping in to ‘act’ where necessary to nationalise financial institutions.

Karl Marx is surely turning in his grave!

It’s capitalism Jim, but not as we know it.

It sounds extreme, but capitalism always sniffs out the rats. Unfortunately, sometimes this is done with the precision of a smart bomb and there is collateral damage of the human variety. Let us hope the collateral damage is limited to the architects of this mess.

Few will sympathise with bankers who are out of a job. Having cleverly created complex financial instruments, in the end, they didn’t understand how the instruments worked. They were clearly smarter than they thought and outsmarted themselves.

This situation was created in the banks by assembling groups of high performing jumped up greedy magne cum laudes with little adult supervision. It only takes a small group to spoil it for everyone. Now no one wants to play in their sandbox.

Fingers are being pointed: governments; central banks, regulators; credit agencies; bankers; market rule makers; short sellers; Al Qaeda economic terrorists... Really!

This is a time of great opportunity for the contrarian. I have set up a new fund to invest in a large psychiatric rehabilitation centre in Connecticut for unemployed bankers. I have found a large old estate on gently rolling pastures with a small river running through the property. It is just the thing to soothe terminally depressed unemployed bankers.

Of course, a week’s stay will be terribly expensive and the fund is forecasting double digit returns.

The daily treatment programme is spartan and functional:

• a near excessive dosage of Prozac
• a locking codpiece / chastity belt to prevent masturbation
• no phone, blackberry, internet or media access
• a morning session with Dr. Terri Firma on coping with life after being a Master of the Universe
• an afternoon session in the anti-gravity decompression chamber
• an hour with a ‘Joe/Joanne Public’ guest speaker whose life has been completely fucked up as a consequence of this institutional moral hazard.

The centre is not confident of a high rehab success rate, but following a number of visits, it is confident that bankers will be comfortably numb. Unfortunately, they will always be wankers. There is no known treatment for this condition.

Not since Jimmy the shoe shine boy gave Grandfather Beaverboosh a stock tip before the great crash of 29 have I heard financial distress stories of such magnitude.

DON’T PANIC.

And don’t forget your towel and some peanuts.

Beaverboosh