You know what I’m tired of? I’m tired of all these fucking news journalists stood around using METAHPORS to explain the credit crunch to us, like we’re all idiots. Yes, sir!  I’VE HAD ENOUGH. I WILL KILL.

Journalists using metaphors to explain the credit crunch are like a pack of braying dogs with knitting needles, pointing hawkishly at an elastic blackboard while a crow distracts their attention with a big shiny coin and a cowboy draws pictures of willies with stolen chalk.  And that is exactly my point.

I’ve seen journalists standing in-front of cars with their bonnets up (the cars), explaining things about “financial engines” and “stuttering economies” and it makes me want to knife them (the journalists). Again.

There is only one decent metaphor to explain the credit crunch. The banks fucking love bananas, right?  Note: BANANAS ARE LOANS.

And they’re always pissing about with bananas, trying to give them away.  No wait. Start again. BANANAS ARE REALLY EXPENSIVE. But people have to own them. Because, they live inside the bananas. So the banks are giving away the bananas.

Wait, let’s start from the beginning.

Life is like a box of chocolates.
And so are loans. And mortgages. Which are also loans.

Now the banks love the chocolates inside these boxes quite a lot. Sometimes, there are pieces of shit inside the boxes of chocolates – but they look just like the rest of the chocolates. They just taste like shit. Because they actually and quite literally are shit.

NOTE: THE PIECES OF SHIT ARE MORTGAGES WHICH HAVE BEEN DEFAULTED.

The banks love the chocolates so much, they don’t mind putting the odd piece of shit into their mouths, because the taste of the chocolate washes away the taste of fecal matter.

Sometimes the banks sell the boxes of chocolates to one another, trading them around. (REMEMBER THE BOXES OF CHOCOLATES ARE COLLECTIONS OF LOANS – LOAN BOOKS. THEY ARE NOT ACTUAL TINS OF QUALITY STREET. THERE IS NOTHING TO SUGGEST THAT NESTLE PUT PIECES OF SHIT IN THEIR FESTIVE TINS OF QUALITY STREET.)

Suddenly a lot of Americans started to default on their mortgages. This was because the price of oil went up in the summer of 2008 to such a degree that it affected the price of just about everything – not just the price of “Gas at the pump”, which is what cunts call “petrol at the garage” but the “weekly grocery bill”, which is what cunts call “the price of fishfingers”, the “hydro”, which is what cunts call “the gas, leccy and water” and the price of hash browns. Which is what cunts eat.

The reason oil went up in price is complicated, but it essentially comes down to the fact that there is less easy-to-get oil. It’s hard to drill, it’s hard to refine and it’s ludicrously expensive to research and develop the tools to find and reach oil that is either under the ocean, buried deep in the Earth, or is otherwise located in meteorologically challenging parts of the world, or politically unstable parts of the world.  Or at least politically unstable once we invade and take the oil.

Some oil is mixed with sand in Alberta and it is so expensive to refine that there’s probably, but not really, more money to be made raising ostriches to slaughter for their meat with the express intention of selling processed burgers to a murky pool of particularly dispassionate tadpoles.

When it comes down to it, the (former) owners of sub-prime mortgages would rather continue to pay their “hydro” bills, so that they do no have to incessantly masturbate in the dark, than pay their mortgage. They would also rather “pump the gas” and “eat the hash browns”, too.

QUESTIONS: Why does nobody admit that it was the spike in oil prices causing the current recession?
ANSWER: Because future spikes in oil will happen again and again until we use water as a fuel source, making places like Norway unfathomably rich. If we don’t, then we will all become feral animals living off the land in the moments before the world ends. During the New World Order, every Wednesday when Britain traditionally holds Prime Minister’s Questions, lucky members of the public will be nominated to stand around a burning rusty oil barrel to read aloud a prepared statement outlining which politician they would like to see sacrificed and for what reason. A telephone vote will be held, and the best presentation will lead to the relevant politician being burned and fed to the remaining population.

Politicians do not want this to happen, and they are hiding the truth.

Where was I?

Chocolates. Yes, when there were lots of pieces of shit in the chocolate boxes, the banks became nervous. They could see their forlorn boxes of chocolates, and they could count the inordinate pieces of shit they contained. BUT they couldn’t see how many pieces of shit there were in the boxes that were owned by other banks. They didn’t want to take the risk of ending up with, what would essentially be a box of shit, with a few pieces of chocolate thrown in. So they wouldn’t trade, and the economy began to stutter like a car engine.

The banks reached a chocolate-to-shit apex ratio.  It became a shit-to-mouth loan Event Horizon. The banks failed to fast track and the situation became lose-lose in the shit-tasting-mouth-chocolate paradigm.

The Bank of England began Quantative Easing, which sounds like they were trying to gently pull the trapped Dr. Sam Beckett out of a quantum portal to another dimension, but actually just means they made a few extra chocolates to put in the boxes of chocolates. The effect being that everybody is a bit bored of chocolate now.

Chocolate in this metaphor has become money, by the way, and not loans anymore.  Everyone is bored of money.

So that’s alright, then.




This article was bought to you in association with….   Credit Crunch^©:  Breakfast cereal of the poor.

Serious point: Charlie Brooker originally came up with the box of chocolates/shit metaphor in Newswipe.
Image credits: From top to bottom: Joe Shlabotnik, Michael Pickad, Ned Trifle

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