The stock of my comprehension's in free fall. Who will rescue me?

By Jo Ind on Sep 19, 08 10:34 AM in Business

I don't like weeks like these - weeks when investment banks have to be rescued by Governments, stocks are in free fall and pensioners queue outside their former building societies to ask if their savings are safe.

I don't like it because I just don't get it. It is, apparently, the end of global capitalism as we know it. (Is this such a bad thing?) It is, we are told, a financial black hole into which all our mortgages, pensions and savings will be sucked.

It is cataclysmic. It will affect us all. And yet I can't even get to first base in understanding it.

I understand mortgages, or at least I thought I did. That was before I knew there were people who packaged them up and sold the debt on to somebody else.

Then I realised I didn't understand them at all.

And then there's short selling. You borrow an asset, like some shares, and then you sell it. (How can you do that if it isn't yours in the first place?)

You hope the price of that asset will fall and when it does you buy it back at the lower price, return it to its owner and pocket the difference.

OK, I just about get that last bit, but then I hear you can do this short selling without even borrowing the asset but by kind of betting on it. This is where I have to declare myself well and truly lost.

I hate this ignorance. I feel I have an obligation to understand it because, like it or not, we all bound up in it.
I feel very uncomfortable in weeks like this which expose how deeply my head is buried in the sand.

So I try to understand. I really do. I read the papers. I listen to the men in suits. But however hard I try, I still don't get.

That's why I hate weeks like this.