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26 April, 2009

The Financial Crisis - Solved

This blog is stolen from someone, I don't know who because I heard it from someone who heard it on the radio. For those, like myself, who didn't hear the original Ill endeavour to explain the basics of the idea.

With the exception of a few bits of gold, that good old Gordon didn't sell off, there is actually no money in the UK, no really there isn't.

Look at any note in your pocket and you see that it says "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of". Not that the note is actually £5, £10, £20 or whatever just that someone will pay you it.
Try walking into you bank handing over a tenner and saying "please honour the promise and give me ten pounds in gold or coinage" and see what you get. The whole point of currency is rather eroded these days and the promise on the note as relevant as an Alistair Darling prediction.

Before I digress I had better move back onto subject.
If you are reading this blog on a Windows computer then the chances are it has a bit of software called "system restore". This allows you to effectively wind back time on your machine, if for example you try to load something that trashes everything you already had. It takes your computer back to any date in the past prior to the moment you sodded it up.

There is no money, (see above) but there are huge computers all over the world that hold ones and noughts that we translate into having money. When you buy something, pay money into an account or draw out cash from a machine, somewhere a computer will be updated. Even if you pay the local shop, eventually it becomes just another entry in our cyberspace banking.

The financial crisis didn't happen in reality, if it did there would be fields full of the "lost billions" stacked as far as you can see, but there isn't. Those of us who lost money on savings can't go and watch it drifting in a soggy mess off the coast somewhere or see its dying embers in a colossal bomb fire, because all that happened was a lot of cyberspace numbers just went blip.

So, and this is the clever bit, all that has to be done is a huge "system restore". Wind back the banking computers to the time immediately before it all went lumpy bits up.
The missing billions are returned.

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