From the ashes

My dear Muhammad Ali:

By the time the 'Bailout of Greedy Investment Banks Bill' was passed, it was both too late and too early for me to write about it. Too late because my deadline had gone; too early because I still don't know the details. I will try and write about it in my next letter, but remember by that time your mother and I will be in China for two weeks travelling all over the place, as you and your sister Mashaal did with us last year.

In the midst of the worst financial and economic turmoil that the world has faced since the Great Depression of the 1930s, with the War On Terror lost, with America's credibility gone down the chute and its 'scare factor' down the drain, you wanted me to tell you how things would pan out? Frankly, son, how would I know? How would anyone, though there are countless who are holding forth with the confidence only the half-baked can have, telling us what will happen, as if they are sitting at God's right hand. Economists are the worst of this kind, economists who have brought humanity to this sorry state. And greedy bankers too who pretend to be economists.

They basically are supposed to keep our money in trust and invest it sensibly but, comfortable in their stupidity that they know everything about anything, they are too clever by half even for their own good. Ninety nine point nine percent of them are mediocre morons - I used these words factually and not in gall. Unintelligible jargon that means little does not an economist make. Neither does gibberish that amounts only to different types of scams make a banker. Nor do fancy clothes: see how these 'emperors' are stark naked now?

Its brains, my dear child, its brains. These are just technicians who simply wield tools called 'economics' and 'banking' - a hammer and chisel with which you can either make or break. Put into policymaking positions as the world has been doing for too long and they break. An architect designs a house. A mason makes it by following the design. If masons started designing houses God alone knows what sort of monstrous gargoyles would emerge. The world economy is a monstrous gargoyle, the banking system Satan's head.

The global economy, led by the US economy, and the world banking and financial system, led by US banking 'wisdom', have fallen into the hands of technicians who have got us here in the absence of regulation and oversight. Bankers' 'wisdom' is actually over-smart slyness of the foxy kind, driven by greed and avarice. The best people in policy-making positions are political economists. Since there is no such subject, not only has one to be a student of economics but also of political science, philosophy and history and should have worked with poverty. And they must be very humble, for no matter how good they might think they are, their craft is always hit and miss.