M J Akbar: Who wants to be the pinprick inside a bubble?
It often needs a startling image to convey the dimensions of a crisis. Bloggers have time to discover such startling analogies. Someone on the net has had the time and patience to conjure up this image about $700 billion, the most dramatic figure among the many mountains of cash that Governments have doled out to capitalism's poster boys in order to save capitalism.
If you stacked up $700bn in 100-dollar bills [100, not 10 or 1], it would climb 54 miles into the sky. If you counted one billion at the rate of one digit a second, you would need 30 years. 700 billion? Don't begin.
Capitalism is in trouble because reality became a version of caricature. Growth became a cloak for venality. Everyone placed on the watch went to sleep. American commentators now admit that warning flags went up 18 months ago, and action should have been taken a year ago at the very latest. But who wants to be the pinprick inside a bubble?
If you stacked up $700bn in 100-dollar bills [100, not 10 or 1], it would climb 54 miles into the sky. If you counted one billion at the rate of one digit a second, you would need 30 years. 700 billion? Don't begin.
Capitalism is in trouble because reality became a version of caricature. Growth became a cloak for venality. Everyone placed on the watch went to sleep. American commentators now admit that warning flags went up 18 months ago, and action should have been taken a year ago at the very latest. But who wants to be the pinprick inside a bubble?
posted by temporal at 10/13/2008
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