Lost & Found

Last week I was walking back from the pub when I saw a plastic shopping bag under a bush. I would have not normally paid much attention to it but lying beside it, trapped under a stone and its free end flapping in the wind, was a piece of paper with some writing on it. Curiosity took me and I picked it up. It appeared to be some kind of glorified I.O.U. I opened the bag and it was full of them. I picked it up and took it home. I added up all the I.O.U.s and they came to several million American dollars.

Over the next couple of days I found many more bags. Some were stuffed into public rubbish bins; others were stuck in the branches of trees; while others still were just lying beside the road. I had absolutely no idea where they all came from but my house was soon full of them. I stuffed them all into a single room and tidied up. Once done, I ate and decided to watch some T.V.

The news was on and they were talking about the Global Credit Crunch. I was about to change the channel when an expert they had in the studio said something that grabbed my attention. It seems the current crisis in the banking system has been caused by 'bad' loans that should not have been approved in the first place. Eager to get them off their hands, the banks that had previously fallen over themselves to hand them out had sold them to other financial institutions, who had then sold them on themselves. Anyway, it turns out that these loans had gone missing somewhere along the line. No one knew where they were. And since no one knew where they were they couldn't be sure how much they were worth. It is that doubt that has seen the markets collapse.

The fact that our global economic system is evidently able to be fatally undermined by an unsubstantiated concern would normally have sent me scurrying to my Blog to write about it. But it was then I realised what the bags I had been finding were: the mislaid loans!

I telephoned the local branch of the bank I have my overdraft with and within an hour the streets were swarming with police and volunteers. They were looking everywhere. They even had police divers investigating the bottom of lakes and people in waders walking the length of the local river.

So far, we've recovered most of it. There are still a few million dollars unaccounted for, but that won't tip the world into recession; plus we're still looking. But don't worry about the immediate future. Buy that new car, flat-screen HD TV, cruise or whatever else the downturn had been making you hesitate over.

It's going to be all right.