Goose,Goose

Goose,Goose
There once was a man who had a goose that laid golden eggs. Well, not exactly. It wasn’t actually a goose, it was a house, and it didn’t really lay golden eggs, it produced something called “equity.” In a normal world equity is the residual value of property beyond any liability, but we are no longer living in a normal world. In the twenty-first century equity was an ethereal and vapor-like “imaginary value” assigned to a piece of real estate worth much less than the free money banks were offering people just for living in a house. Anyone breathing these vapors went temporarily insane and saw something that was not actually there. The man used this imaginary gold (equity) to buy stuff, lots of stuff. His goose, I mean his house, grew fatter and fatter every day in what the financial fairies call growth, but what was actually just a bubble. A bubble is a fragile soft breadth of nothing wrapped in “almost-nothing”. The man in our story was not the only one to have a goose however. As a matter of fact, it turned out that there were so many geese running around in this fairy tale that the bubble burst and the imaginary equity floated away. A goose is not only a bird, according to the dictionary it can also be a “simpleton.” There are those who insist that what is good for the goose is good for the gander to which we would say, take a gander at this. The United Stated Federal Reserve is selling bonds to itself with money it just printed but does not really have. It seems that Uncle Sam is still sniffing the vapors of Mother Goose Economics. Our politicians are doing all they can to resuscitate a goose that is already cooked. There has never been a shortage of simpletons. If one is not buying the Brooklyn Bridge today, he is investing in derivatives tomorrow. Using your house as an ATM and going on a forty year buying binge is a story generations a hundred years from now will not believe (if the world is still around-which I doubt). Jesus warned us about the “deceitfulness of riches.”  America has been deceived again.  Aesop almost put this story into his collection of fables of talking animals, but on second thought, he said people would never fall for such a Fairy Tale, it’s just too stupid. –Ingimar DeRidder