Fictional Economic Reality.

Apparently the UBS bank lost £1.3billion, not in a tea break but in around a second. At that rate they could have lost the cost to the world of World War II in a couple of days. It was due to a ‘Black Swan’ moment, a moment when something inconceivable happens. The Swiss France suddenly dropped 8%, which then must have kicked in an automatic sell, and poof, all gone. This begs the question, have you ever seen a black swan? I’m guessing only in fiction, as there’s no such thing. But this black swan moment did really happen, like in reality. Which begs a further question, did this really happen or did it happen in a fictional reality? Obviously there are real accounts on real computers and real people on real chairs and we normally envisage fiction and reality as oil and water, but is this apparent clear differentiation in itself a fiction? Do we live in an emulsion of the two? If mysticism is the technical term for this emulsion then in a sense computers are the mysticism of our age. Instead of cutting the throat of a goat to cause a good harvest, two real but unrelated occurrences connected only by a socially accepted fiction, we can by the merest mouse click wipe out the combined value of several thousand lifetimes in a second. That’s fiction, but it really happened. In a sense there’s a war on between fact and fiction. Governments are dealing with fact and traders are dealing in their own contrived mystical fiction and fiction is winning. This week there is unprecedented cooperation between US and European governments to avoid a fictional Armageddon, a catastrophic crop failure because we haven’t killed enough goats. Unfortunately thus far governments have been suckered into using the preferred mystical weaponry of the traders. Lets hope this time they use the authority of reality to move the battle to firmer, more favourable ground.