The Current Mess: Economic (Part I)

In case you haven’t noticed lately, the economic situation these days pretty much sucks. This suckitude varies from the gentleman’s irritation that it’s not as easy as it once was to found a landed estate, to the concern of most of the rest of us that ‘the rent is too damn high’.

Sorry to have to break it to you, folks, but for the reasons which follow, in the words of the poets, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

While I could phrase all of what follows in the terms used by economic experts, I have found that stating things as simply as I can helps me to think a bit more clearly about those things.

So, let’s take apart the pieces of the mess, use simple words as much as possible in doing so, and then try to put the mess together again in a form that we can understand and deal with. Luckily for us, there are only five pieces that are large enough to put together to make the thing look a bit more like the Ming vase, and less like the mess which resulted when the cat bumped it off the mantelpiece and down to the marble floor below.