Why Suffocate You? Because We can!

Riga, April 24, 2015. In a small remote and meanwhile isolated country - member of a larger conglomerate of wealthier and arrogant countries- her PM is giving the mother of all battles, hoping to keep his small country within the gulfs of this loyal and solidarity Union. He is determined to give this fight having the best possible intentions for his people in mind. I believe this is also where he draws his courage from to take on nineteen opponents at the same time. His army in this battle is not great in numbers but its shadow makes it appear a lot bigger than what it actually is. His opponents on the other hand, are equipped with the strongest, most eternal and lethal weapon of all, i.e. TIME. The PM of the small country appears anaemic and exhausted and his face is reflecting the psychological state of his ten million subjects behind him who have undergone a lengthy drop torture in the last ninety days. The stake of the battle has to do with the future monetary environment of the small country, i.e. whether it will continue transacting in gold or in stones. Clearly the PMs preferred choice is gold. Strangely enough and in all honestly, this coincidentally is the preferred choice of the opponents, as well. So, what is going wrong in this equation then and why the battle in the first place?

Let us rewind for a moment. Before we jump to the paradox conclusion that a battle can also be given in a circumstance where the pursued objective and outcome is desired by both conflicting parties equally, hence there should be no battle and agreement should be reached easily, it seems that things are far more complicated. What this tells us is that pursuing the same objective is not necessarily paving a smooth way to get there, but agreement should also be reached on the detailed aspects of the road-map to there and to the sacrifices each opponent is prepared to make. And this is where the shortfall of the process comes into play. Of course there is always a history behind things, no battle is ever taking place for the sake of conflict itself. The history of the case at hand can be described in short, as follows:

Opponents are political friends of the small country, yet at the same time also lenders. On the surface of things they have lend the small country 320 billion worth of gold. In order to provide a more accurate assessment of the type of political friendship I should not fail to mention that the political friends have lent the money with interest. Now you and I probably understand what that means. Would you ever lend money to your close friend and ask to make a profit on it? Well, our friends did. Of course they did not lend all of that money in one trench, they did it in instalments.

The small country on the other hand was inhabited by fore-mostly greedy people who had never seen gold in their lives before. And they liked not only the color of it but also the things gold could buy them. And then at the blink of an eye they forgot that it was only borrowed gold that had: (a) to be put to good use so that it started producing more gold, and (b) to be returned to its rightful owners slightly bigger in size. Hmm...thank God for the small country's good political friends, who instead of getting angry on the pay-pack day when they found out that the gold had been spent, they were generously suggesting to lend us more of the same, so as to enable us to pay back the initial gold. They also taught us about this great concept they called "offsetting" concept, where we were lend huge sums but in the end through the offsetting mechanism (i.e. the immediate withholding of previous debts and accumulated interest thereon) we were only given the small balance left.

What I am trying to say is that only a fraction of the 320 billion of gold ever made it into the small country, however, the nominal value of the debt was sky-rocketing at an unstoppable pace. What had happened in the meantime is that small country entered into a state of gold addiction from which it could not cure itself anymore. It kept begging for more and every subsequent time political friends wanted to make a bigger profit on their money, yet knowing at the same time that small country would not be able to pay back. And this fact begs for a simple straight forward set of questions. Question A: Why would political friends continue giving small country more gold? Is it because of all the ethical values and solidarity that the Union proclaimed to its members and which make it bend the rules of commerce in favour of the said solidarity of the suffering small country? If the answer to that is "yes", then isn't this ethic in frontal contrast to the concept of interest on their gold? Question B: If you continue providing the gold, yet at new unilateral conditions which make small country enter into a prolonged state of misery, is small country wrong in insisting to get the gold at socially better conditions? Question C: If small country decides to resist unreasonable conditions for further gold is it not unethical to delay the rendering of a final solution (gold or stone) by the political friends and to create false hope? Question D: Is it not unethical for political friends to blackmail and threaten small country with destruction, if small country does not give-in to the pressure of political friends? Question E: Is it not unreasonable to not accept facts presented by small country's PM that recipes of recovery have failed in curing the addiction therefore there is no point in insisting on the same treatment? And the Final and One Million Dollar question: Should small country return to trading with Stones instead of Gold?