I have a great idea that will enable we the unwashed to compete head to head with the shadow banking system. It works like this.
All you have is register a mutual company called Iamworth£1.com.
Then go onto Twitter and tweet ‘I am worth £1: reply saying u join Iamworth£1.com herewith £1, mult sum x 5 & R/T to followers with same instructions I gave u.’ (112 characters)
Thus the 25-2500 followers you have on Twitter can in turn R/T £5 to their followers, who will in turn tweet on £25 to theirs, who will tweet £625 to theirs…ad not quite infinitum: but nevertheless, the total by the time everyone’s done their bit will be roughly 2,200,000,000 x [5 > ~] squared.
All 2.2 billion folks with access to the internet will then be joint owners of a mutual with assets greater than the entire amount of wealth ever created by Homo sapiens.
Now obviously, as the chain joins up, the ‘herewith’ R/T sum grows from £1 to more money than ever existed – but nobody need have any fear, because nothing has been signed, no lawyers were involved…in fact, there hasn’t even been a handshake. So nobody owes anyone anything; but Iamworth£1.com is the biggest money player by a near-incalculable leverage factor.
You see, in the same way that shadowy bankers say “my word is my bond” when engaging in lunatic derivative bets, each member of Iamworth£1.com can be certain that all bets have been netted – and so all members may have promised hugely different amounts, but they’re still equal Members…. as in those lovely old building societies and cooperative insurance companies we used to know.
Here’s why: all the founder of Iamworth£1.com needs to do is compose articles of association creating all Members of equal valuation, regardless of the informal promissory notes offered over time in order to join. A promissory note is a debt, but under the current banking system accepted throughout the world all sums owed are assets to be realised over time, at the discretion of the lender.
The idea of an unredeemable debt being an asset is of course insane, but to quote some old adages, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”, and “Sometimes fire is the only weapon with which to fight fire”.
And here is the bizarre end result that would emerge from my idea: every last Member of Iamworth£1.com would be worth at the very least 470 million times the total worth of Warren Buffet.
So then, who’s up for sending the first tweet?
The Slog 