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Barbarians Clamber for Barbarous RelicSteven Lachance 1 April 2006, Oslo (Roy Door's News Service): A long line of bearded men in animal skins formed outside a coin dealer in Trondheim today, but inventories were soon depleted, forcing the uncouth hoard into a frenzied attempt to find alternate sources online. In the executive summary of a grubby dissertation presented to a reporter on the scene, one hunter-gatherer bemoaned, "this fiduciary unit debasement is intolerable, and besides, Oleg won't exchange his axe for government debt." Developments in Trondheim come close on the heels of a sudden influx of men on horseback into Ulan Bator in search of wafers of four-nine purity, reputed to be for sale by street vendors after the Mongolian central bank building collapsed under the weight of IMF reports stored in the attic. The government's attempt to placate the mounted mob by changing the 70s retro-design of its bills and notes was met with howls of "short squeeze!" With due consideration for the impracticality of undertaking temporal pricing arbitrage with yak cheese, the consensus was clearly in favor of something divisible, storable, transportable, and, above all, shiny enough for the Chinese to willingly trade for iron pots. Harvard economist Earl Ersatz, author of the groundbreaking Federal Reserve report Gold Sucks, points out that, "while a metallic monetary order prevents destructive swings in interest rates and currency values, facilitating long-term growth and social stability, using debt for money has the decisive advantage of transferring wealth from the uninformed to myself and my friends." "In short, we don't need gold anymore because the government's central bankers have created a virtual gold standard that is equally disciplined and responsible," summed up Mr. Ersatz, winner of the prestigious Charles P. Onzi Prize for advanced American economic research. Analysts reviewing the incursions along the pale emphasized the importance of better educating the public on the wisdom of saving in a monetary unit with unlimited supply, entrusting new-age bankers with pension funds, and taking out a second reverse amortization mortgage. According to Lee Mann at a US investment bank in London, shiny relics distract these barbarians out of pure ignorance of the monetarist school, adding that, "these brutish people just haven't got much Elvis." Some economists, however, are increasingly concerned over the pigheaded tenacity of the uncultured fringe. "Next thing you know, they'll be holding seminars on why economic growth requires savings and investment, when Alan Greenspan demonstrated that we can all become fabulously rich through asset inflation fuelled by credit expansion," wrote the Wall Street Urinal in a recent editorial. It concluded, "returning to gold would be a step backward given that redeemable money was used for the three thousand years up to 1971, which obviously comes before 2006 in chronological order. It would also terminate the credit boom and force us to stop building sports arenas and home theaters with money from the Chinese, and who wants that?" Perfectly rational financial markets reacted to the news from Trondheim by bidding up the price of Treasuries and the dollar. Speaking at the Bank for International Settlements in Banal, Switzerland, Treasury Secretary John Snow cited this as proof that deficits really don't matter; "we're doing them a favor putting their cash to such productive uses, granite countertops to name but one." Mr. Snow, whose department pays the People's Bank of China $35 billion in interest each year, then promptly boarded a flight for Detroit, where he is scheduled to chair a conference on selling the city to Chinese scrap metal dealers. Steven Lachance
Steven Lachance is a financial translator based in Tokyo. Over the last decade, he has worked for major European and Japanese investment banks, including Deutsche Bank Group, Commerzbank, Nikko Solomon Smith Barney, and Mizuho Securities.
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