The nice thing about not being rich is that you really couldn’t care less if the dollar slips, stumbles or does the tango. And if the Wall Street mandarins want to balloon shares and make the stock prices reach the moon so what, you haven’t a single piece of paper in any company, blue chipped or gilt edged. I was seventeen when I figured out footsie had nothing to do with flirting.
Great, abs no need to go out on a ledge and leap. That’s the nice thing about it. You are 40 yeas old and you still know nothing about bulls and bears messing up the market (and to you the market is where you buy groceries) and you conceal your ignorance but you really, truly don’t know what a volatile market is and if your foreign saving is getting you a bit more lolly in the home currency hooray. The not so nice thing is that your immediate family members do not appreciate how skillfully you have maneuvered to keep away from financial coral reefs and they wonder aloud why you can’t make intelligent fiscal conversation in public, where everyone else is discussing their tangible assets, your asset being one old TV, a crummy desktop, one sinking sofa and a music system with the DVD section gone phut.
You, says my wife, are embarrassing, where was the need to let everyone know that you have never bought a share, it is nothing to be proud of, not as if you have achieved anything in money terms.
But look at it this way, I say, we have no worries about market fluctuations, we are not even worried about the recession, there is nothing to recess, did you see how stressed our rich friends look, they are always harping on about how much they lost, you don’t have it you can’t lose it.
Wouldn’t mind some of those worries, she says, much better than trying to locate our two ends and while we are on the subject let me say that it is not very funny when folks are discussing big money to tell them you are saving up to buy a new fridge, there is nothing cosmic about new fridges, next time you have nothing smart to contribute say nothing.
So, a couple of days later we are off to this rich repast (did you get it, rich repast, rich as in wealthy, isn’t that clever) and I am being warned as we drive that certain things are best kept in the family and not announced and don’t forget whose wife is whose and try and listen sometimes and don’t look bored and we are not leaving as soon as dinner is over so, for once, can you for heaven’s sake be sociable.
We walk in and there is this heated discussion on about the Davos conference and I wonder what would have happened if the EC had chosen a place in Wales called Mullwrttnlidllywe to hold their conference but it is not my place to make flip remarks and, in any case, I find it very difficult to get heated up about Davos and why everyone is voting for whatever they are voting for so I say, hi people, what’s new, which is a safe sort of thing to say. Well, it used to be.
Bad, says my banker friend, get out now.
But we have just come, I say.
No, no, he says, get your pounds and dollars, go for yen, there is an outflow so move before the surge.
He could be speaking Latin for all I know.
The he puts his arm around me all buddy type and says, where have you kept your savings, put them in property, the prices will shoot up very soon.
He lowers his voice to a whisper and says, mark my words.
I whisper back, marked.
Funny how financial folks always whisper as if someone might overhear and go rob a bank.
I try to look intelligent. If you have a yen for profit, you’ll mark my words, and I am being frank with you.
He looks mighty pleased with his word play and I finger the hundred dirhams in my pocket…should get us through the weekend.
