All at sea..
image: bernard garon
How does it go? We stand in our own patch of diamonds but see it not…
Ever watch a dog chase its own tail? It’s great and the dog is usually oblivious to what it is doing, it gets so lost in the thrill or the passion of the chase.
Today I went for a walk with the head honcho, she who must be obeyed, the little woman, ‘er indoors. You know the person I mean, right? Well, we have a route that we take, down along the waterfront, along the jetty and out into the sea, it’s just under five miles there and back and we can crack along at some pace when we need to, it’s a real cobweb blaster, the negative ions of breaking waves, particularly when there’s a swell as there was today, and the salty breeze have a healing effect.
A huge ship was leaving the mouth of the river and heading out to sea, it looked modern as it had a very ‘of the moment’ feel to it, almost a stealth cargo ship, obviously designed to cut gracefully through the waves and weather whatever seas it might encounter. We sat on a bench on the breakwater and looked at the ship beginning its voyage. I don’t know if it was a coaster or about to cross an ocean but I fancied the thoughts of the seamen as they left the haven of the river and moved away from the land. I have ridden out storms at sea and know the joy of placing your feet back on firm ground, so I wondered about their collective experience, the combined encounters of the crew with the elements.
We were discussing the financial repercussions of the current economic situation, and how it might start to affect people’s habits and their spending patterns. We were considering how much sympathy members of the public might have for city high fliers who had for years traded the markets with other people’s money and paid themselves huge bonuses - we thought: not much. I explained that for every winner in the markets there has to be a loser, profit taking and successful trades by their nature mean someone else has taken a hit.
The markets are at once a complicated but also very simple place. The difficulty arises, as we are experiencing now, when all that hypothetical intrinsic value is suddenly exposed as worthless. Paper money, figures on computers but not ‘real’ in the tangible sense that a gold ingot is real or a treasure chest is real. This is when confidence wavers and the single most important element of the fiscal and commercial system that we currently enjoy/endure is confidence. Without confidence people will not invest, there is no speculation and the capital markets run dry. People become uneasy, they worry and they hold on to what they think they’ve got. The irrigation that cash flow provides to the economy is directly analogous to the need for water in agriculture.
So we looked at the ship and my best beloved said, “The ship of the financial markets, sailing on an ocean of misery.”
I couldn’t top that so I wont try to.