The current pandemic highlights the age old conflict between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ in the human context.
‘Real’ are those things that do exist in nature – which is all of reality: food chain, housing, hospitals, ICU beds, ventilators, power plants, toilet paper, schools, transportation, communication, health care and many, many other things. Now add two more things: viruses and climate change.
‘Unreal’ are all those fictitious things that humans made up, out of thin air, to aid in their age old domination games in various forms of social organizations, now the most weird of them all: ‘Capitalism’, in order to create slums and palaces.
One very short list of ‘unreal’ is “banks, interest rates, currency supply, tax-cuts, subsidies, grants, off-shore accounts, inflation, recession, deficit-financing, leveraged buyouts, credit-rating, hostile takeovers, toxic assets, derivatives, stocks, bonds, investment portfolios and CEO compensation packages.”
This conflict was highlighted for me by an article I read this morning about how some Canadian provinces won’t be able to pay their health care workers, in the middle of a pandemic, because they have exhausted their “borrowing capacity”. See
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfou... All this crazy conflict is represented and artificially maintained by humanity’s craziest invention, as I described it in a previous blog. See at:
https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...
I think the biggest red flag in terms of real vs unreal in this context is the comparison between the global GDP and the global derivatives' volume. It's respectively $85 trillion and somewhere between $500-1200 trillion (depending on how you measure it). This means that "ghost money" is up to more than 10 times more than "real money" (here defined as actual production, rather than derivatives, which – at the end of the day – are credit products little more than mere bets on mostly imaginary things, such as the performance of indexes or interest rates).
If this fact isn't enough to scare any sane, minimally intelligent person, I don't know what is.
Parenthetically, to remember my actual expertise, most readers of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol don't realize that it has strong (and perhaps partly unwritten) financial underpinnings. Scrooge, by hoarding money instead of putting it back into investment and circulation, goes against the modern capitalist practices. No wonder he angers the "ghosts"!