Money's Too Tight To Mention

www.paulcoia.com

I received an update on my pension forecast this week and what miserable reading it makes. Being one of these insufferable people who first paid in to a pension after my first paper round, I was horrified by the latest printout which looks like the sales graph from a firm selling asbestos flavoured cigarettes.

I realise that it may recover over the many, too many, years I have left until I retire, but perhaps it won’t and I’ll be left wandering the streets, tap dancing and playing a harmonica with an old paper cup at my feet for donations – not from music lovers, obviously. This stealing of my old age is the reason I’m finding it tough to remember that I usually see myself as being one of nature’s givers; unnaturally kind, diffident, and unstintingly selfless to others - especially when they want to talk about me. The global financial mess is starting to hurt and I’m struggling to prevent the milk of human kindness in me from turning distinctly cheesy.

I can, on occasion, fall for sob stories and feel sympathy for despots, dictators, murderers, granny bashers and, at a push, Manchester United supporters, but don’t ask me to sympathise right now with investment bankers. They have been getting away with little brain and big rewards for too long and multi tasking for them has been screwing our pension funds and their wives at the same time. But now the game’s up and they’re pleading that they didn’t get it wrong, they were simply as unlucky as a duck who’s allergic to feathers.

We all know, of course that this is nonsense and that they brought it on themselves, so I couldn’t even muster a tiny bit of sadness as I watched the mobs marching through the streets of Washington this week with placards calling for them all to be jailed. I was only sorry that I couldn’t be there helping to round up anyone in a pin striped suit and send them on a camping holiday in a nice orange boiler suit, to a little place near Cuba. Does this make me a bad person? If it does then as Michael Jackson, another great magician at making money disappear, once said, I’m bad, I’m bad, I’m really, really bad. And I don’t give a stuff.

The banking fraternity has been licked more effectively than the glossy new food stamps they’re bringing home and they have experienced the insecurities and pitfalls that we mere mortals take for granted. Pawning their Blackberrys and tossing aside pretensions while binning their spreadsheets and wiping their bottoms with yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, these masters of their own imploding universe are now using words like Doomed, Bankrupt and Unemployed rather than Hedging, Derivatives and Short Selling.

So, it’s been one giant leap for the world’s money men and one small step for the English language. Somehow, whilst sewing elbow patches on their Saville Row suits and rushing round Poundstretchers spending their Job Seeker’s Allowance, they have started speaking English again. They are now, as they used to call it when they had a job, talking Vanilla.

An acquaintance who works for one of the banks that has just been taken over has four cars, two large houses with no mortgage on either and spends more on school fees in a year than I earn. His daughter told me last year that she had been put on the school council which now meant, and I quote, “interfacing with the Teachers in a different way to rationalise pupils’ input”. This poor kid was then thirteen years old.

Her dad would have previously described his current situation as having Short Term Cash Flow Issues Due To Endogenous Retreat In The Employment Market but no one was in any doubt about what his daughter was saying as she arrived at her school the other day and announced to her classmates, “We’re poor now”. Mind you, the word Poor is relative as daddy has a few million squired away in the bank so I’m not taking round food parcels just yet.

One of these newly unemployed Wall Street numpties rang me last week from New York. His name is Ronald and I have never met nor heard of him before. He has now taken a new job selling shares and rang me with a jolly voice that even Ronald McDonald would find nauseating, telling me I will erect a statue to him in my garden and worship it each day as he’s going to make me millions. He can’t understand why I won’t buy shares from a complete stranger on the ‘phone so, refusing to accept No for an answer, he capped it all this week by saying “let’s start small then to give you confidence. Can I put you down for seven hundred thousand dollars worth?”.

My laughter drowned out whatever he said next and I told him, in words of four letters, never to call me again.

You may not agree with my lack of sympathy for people like Ronald but I hope you can see why I’m finding it difficult not to laugh out loud at their predicament. Of course it’s serious and, as these sharks look for alternative employment, we will all be affected by new scams as well as the existing fallout - everything from our house sales falling through to pensions being decimated even further. But at last we can have a conversation with these people who have stolen our peace of mind. Even if English isn’t their first language they can now understand words like Stuffed! Get Lost! Game Over! Goodnight!

I hope the ones who are still in employment can understand these four letter words too. Sort. Your. Mess. Fast.