The Redux Future

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Contrary to what we have all been taught, to use the lyrics from the song from the 1972 movie Cabaret, “Money Makes the World Go Around” IT DOESN’T, at least anymore.

In that musical tone in 1976, “Money, Money, Money” by the Swedish pop group ABBA doesn’t seem to be working anymore either.

Yet no matter the reality that the world is drowning in a world of fiat monetary electronic bits and bytes and the loss of wealth through massive leverage continues — money still seems to be as popular as ever.

In the thirty plus years since the first expression of these songs in the global market place, tangible money has been replaced with plastic. Until recently that plastic was the source of at least a short-term credit card floating loan, or unsecured financing of an over leveraged personal lifestyle.

Especially in the United States, where before the current Great Recession began, seventy percent of the economy was financed by this consumptive obsession, we truly seemed to believe that “If Tomorrow Never Comes” someone else would handle the consequences. At least this Garth Brooks song still relates to a real world populated by real people attempting to live their lives in meaningful ways.

Tomorrow has suddenly become today, and it seems that those who said that the future would take care of itself, now have only the line, “Trust us, we know what we are doing.” That doesn’t seem to be the title of any song, but it seems that the time is right for some country music composer to do just that. When they put out the tune it should have a track that plays it backwards, so that you could get back what you lost — like your house, your truck, your kids, maybe the wife or husband, but especially your dog.

Business Insider recently had a post “15 Mind-Blowing Facts About Wealth And Inequality In America.” The first chart of that series shows that in 2006 the wealth of the top 0.01 percent of the American people was 976 times the bottom 90 percent. In 1928 just before the market crash that led to the Great Depression that number was 892.
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Tags: money, Plutocracy, Great Depression, wealth, Babylon, Belshazzar, Humpty Dumpty, Ben Bernanke, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama