Lehman Brothers.

Ah, Already you will know where tonight’s blog post is going, you already have a sense of fear and trepidation. Sweat may be going down your face, as you start wondering what’s going to happen next.

Or, you could be laughing yourself silly.

When I read the news this morning about the fact that Lehman Brothers, the world’s forth or perhaps now former fourth largest investment bank, had filed for Bankruptcy, a sense of Schadenfreude had overwhelmed my senses, leaving a rather wide smile on my face.

Schadenfreude, is a German originating term used to convey the delight humans take when others fall down. We all have this sense, when the rich and powerful become the poor and drunk, or when someone falls over in the street and hurts themselves, somehow we feel better. Where else does a phrase “let’s all point and laugh children” make so much sense?

So when it came time to point and laugh at this latest occurrence of yet another bank gambling with people’s money without thinking, I failed to even feel sorry for the people who have lost their jobs at the hands of some city boys hell bent on chasing their million pound bonus checks, spending other people’s money as though the world would end the next second.

These people, some of them were only going there to make ends meet like the rest of us, now have to trawl around the job market, as shrinking as it appears to be, looking for something else to stave off the nasty people who take TVs away.

The thing is, these people will have no problem in finding another job in London, there are countless adverts every day asking for office staff, perhaps not for all staff but if they want means to live, the means are waiting for them.

But what about those idiots, who enlist far less sympathy from us mere mortals, what about all those f**kwits who caused all this trouble in the first place?

Well the big wigs at the top, they get payoffs as per their badly drafted contracts and therefore will actually be laughing all the way to, well, another bank in any case.

And as for the people who actually help create all the bad debt, with the blessing of the big wigs, they will be either left without a pot to urinate in, don’t know how to cope, fall down in a drunken hole, or perhaps just maybe, they take that trip around the world they’ve all been planning with their £120,000 bonuses.

But the main thing is: They get away scot free with no consequences aside from perhaps unemployment for a short time. Maybe.

And now these useless f**kers it appears somehow have made things worse for everyone.

Let’s start with housing as that’s always a good button to push when you want to make the world blow up. It was amazing how everyone was quick to state that the housing market is now affected by this latest collapse.

Surely house prices are only a concern if you are buying or selling a house? Otherwise it’s a home you live in and as long as you can pay the mortgage, you have no problem. Mind you, why the hell does the US housing market affect anyone else, I mean who would actually spend UK citizens’ money on foreign markets just to make a quick few pence?

They should make far more than enough from the interest on people’s mortgages alone, considering people pay about 5 to 6 times back the amount of the original loan was. Get a calculator out and work it all out with the interest over 25 years for a standard term and your mouth will hit the floor quicker than a chronically depressed lemming goes to leap off a cliff.

But hold on here, it’s not as simple as making lots of money without much effort, there are other factors to throw into the caldron of the damned.

Everything has been going up in price from utility bills to haircuts, things were so overinflated in price for no real reason whatsoever (trust me, I’d love to ask the real reason why prices just get pushed up without any real reason other than these so-called market traders being worried that someone having a poo next to an oil refinery means doom) that this was going to be a common occurrence sooner or later; you would be forgiven for having a complete lack of surprise over all this.

The amounts being quoted in the news with all this mess is well, ok, when did everything become billions here and there, spent like petty cash? This kind of money is obscene, plain and simple. (if someone starts a speech about the money being spent on premiership football, that’s it we’re finished.)

As I type this column, experts have been called in to blame everyone they can think of, the banks, the governments for having low interest rates and allowing us to do what we want and just people for doing what the banks wanted, create mounds of debt. Hell, let’s blame the parents and the devil for making us all greedy while we are at it. Throw in Global warming and you can shout “BINGO, we have a winner!”

But they did touch on one nerve, which does make good sense. We are a consumer-based society. We have been told by various bodies of the world, that buying all this stuff is good, and you need this wallpaper, that arm-pit hair remover and once you have it, you will feel very good.

We don’t really produce anything in the UK any more, we import from elsewhere because it’s cheaper and exported work elsewhere.

And now it’s all coming home to roost. Perhaps now they see one of the downfalls of today’s society.
Enough with the blame, what can be done about it? No-one has the answer at the moment, and no-one ever will. People have been making things up as they go for years, so what the hell, let’s keep going. Things will get better again, they always do.

And that’s the reason perhaps why I’m still laughing, enjoying the downfall of so many. It will probably carry on in this silly fashion for many centuries to come from now on and so many things make so little sense now, that hell, let them carry on and we’ll just sit down and have some pie.

It’s worked for this long, why change the way things are now?