IS MONEY REAL? THIS IS NOT A PIPE!

Back in the days before paper money became popular, people were outraged that slips of paper would replace gold, silver and hard, tangible bartered goods. We moderns figured this was a pretty quaint and antiquated notion, but every so often when the economy goes haywire you begin to understand those early fears. Today in Zimbabwe, just as it was in Germany following World War One, the paper currency is practically worthless, with a wheelbarrow full of it not even buying enough food to feed a family for one day. Even stable currencies fluctuate in value and are subject to inflation. Has there ever been a generation of grandparents who bragged at how much more things cost back in their day?

And now you hear economists tell us that in America, 11 trillion dollars worth of wealth has disappeared in the past year and a half. Where did it go? Who's got it? If it was a real commodity, like say, shoes, then you could figure out where all the shoes went, no problem. Just check everybody's closet and see who's joined the Imelda Marcos club. But the money just seems to have vanished into thin air. So, was it ever really there in the first place? Or is money the one item that defies the immutable laws of physics, the ones that tell us that matter can neither be created or destroyed?

But physics also tells us that matter can be transformed, such as wood into ash and smoke, various metals into steel and food into shit. So, was that 11 trillion turned into a pile of shit? No one burned it and there hasn't been a glut of steel on the market, but there seems to be no shortage of bullshit lately when it comes to explaining where the money went. But that can't be, either, since nobody ate the 11 tril. Or maybe it's just that the money never existed in the first place except in our minds. When you have an economy based on what people think something is worth as opposed to what it is actually worth, well, there can never be a hard definition of how much wealth exists.

That 11 trillion had to be air money, wish wealth or whatever else you'd like to call something that can be created and destroyed without any actual physical occurrence. You sure couldn't make 11 trillion pairs of shoes evaporate without one hell of a fire. Shoes are real, we put them on every day and acquire new ones all the time. While they wear out and and lose substance from the friction of walking, no one ever had a pair of shoes they used until they completely vanished, and even if they did, that would take many decades. So how does that happen with 20% of a nation's wealth unless it was never there in the first place? Who built this house of cards?

There is a famous painting by Rene Magritte called "The Treachery of Images." On the canvas is a painting of a tobacco pipe. Beneath the image is the caption saying: "This is not a pipe." This exercise in pointing out the obvious was as usual lost on many people. To them, that painting of a pipe was a pipe, even though you couldn't hold it, put in your pocket, stuff it with tobacco or light it up and puff away. It was an image. Is our money that pipe? It can't be all that illusory, otherwise you wouldn't have rich and poor. If being wealthy merely a matter of having a deeper belief in the illusion of money, then we'd all be ultra-orthodox priests of finance. So, scratch that.

Somewhere between the belief in wealth and the reality of worth we run our world's economies. Exactly where the line is drawn between faith and actuality will never be truly defined, but you have to figure that at least some of the missing 11 trillion dollars never existed. When you buy a house for $200,000, unlike a pair of $50 shoes, you don't have $200,000 dollars handy. And so you borrow a ton of money that you never see or handle from a bank, which they never see or handle either, and pay the house off over a period of 30 years with money you do see and handle, money you have worked hard to earn. It's mysterious but it works. That is, it works when the economy is booming.

When 5 years down the line somebody tells you that your house is now worth $350,000 dollars even though you've done nothing but paint the garage and mow the lawn, you wonder what magic has been wrought. That $50 pair of shoes you bought the same week you got the house are long gone, worn out and worth nothing. But your house, which may also be worn out and looking pretty shoddy, is now worth a small fortune more than what you actually didn't pay for it since you bought it with a promise. But if you sell your house that day for $350,000 you make a real profit of $150,000, money that if you like you can convert into cash and see and feel and handle and smell and cover your bed with and jump into it like a pile of leaves.

Now, if you are the person who buys that house for $350,000, and the economy goes south like it just did, you might find yourself on the hook to pay off $350,000 for a house that is suddenly worth only $200,000 again. So now you've got several problems; the government still taxes you like your house is worth the 350k, you lost your job and now you can't afford to live there anymore. Now the system is still mysterious but it this instance, it does not work. So you either abandon the house or the bank takes it from you forcibly, but either way, that huge loan won't be repaid and the house cannot be sold for what is was guessed to be worth and so the economy is smaller by $150,000.

Multiply that by millions of homes and you start to get a feel for where that 11 trillion bucks went. It went nowhere, because it was never there. Now factor in larceny, fraud and greed at the highest levels of our economic hierarchy, people who were supposed to know better and, more importantly, do better, it becomes clearer still. People who this system made wealthy suddenly as a pack decided they needed to become fabulously wealthy, and so packaged all these countless $150,000 losses into attractively gift-wrapped bundles of bullshit and sold them to one another in a game of financial hot potato, hoping this fraud would last at least until they dropped dead and then it would be somebody else's problem. Well, it didn't and here we are wondering what's real and what's fake. For lack of a better image, let's just say about our economy that it was not a pipe. More of a pipe dream.