Monday, July 12, 2010

A bit of fiscal stimulation in action.

Spotted in the comments at Leg Iron's place and I thought it so good I nicked it...


It is a slow day in the small Minnesota town of Marshall, and the streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody is living on credit.

A rich tourist visiting the area drives through town, stops at the motel, lays a $100 bill on the desk and says he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs before selecting one for the night.

1. As soon as he walks upstairs, the motel owner grabs the bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher.
2. The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to retire his debt to the pig farmer.
3. The pig farmer takes the $100 and heads off to pay his bill to his supplier, the Farmer's Co-op.
4. The guy at the Farmer's Co-op takes the $100 and runs to pay his debt to the local prostitute, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer her "services" on credit.
5. The hooker rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill with the hotel owner.
6. The hotel proprietor then places the $100 back on the counter so the rich traveler will not suspect anything.
At that moment the traveler comes down the stairs, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, picks up the $100 bill and leaves town.

No one produced anything. No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now out of debt and looks to the future with a lot more optimism.

6 comments:

microdave said...

Thanks for posting, Rab. I saw this recently and meant to copy it, now I have!

Anonymous said...

It is all an illusion anyway but what happens if the first recipient pays the $100 not to someone in the town but outside who has no immediate debts in the town?

It is like a pyramid selling scheme which is OK as long as the cycle in being maintained which, in the case of the pyramid (aka in the USA as a Ponzi scheme), will inevitably will have to collapse at some time.

The other point for discussion is the bank that has had it's vaults of gold plundered in the night. No one knows except two people, both bank employees, who dutifully change the locks, and the bank continues.

Everything continues as normal as long as the bank does not lose public confidence.

It is all an illusion.

Shug Niggurath said...

Hotel proprietor is still out his $100 (when he returns it to the traveller). Tight cunt probably caused the rest of them to be that late with their bills they were in a mad panic to pay.

So the hotel owner is a cunt.

Clive said...

Whose blog keeps track of all the knee-jerk health headlines that are continuously sneezed all over the shittier end of the MSM?

Here's the latest one: "Running 'can slow ageing process'"

So can suicide. And since it's the BB-fucking-C, there's no reply section for comments.

The Big Dollop said...

Rab

I posted something very similar to this back in November of 2009

Cheers Bro

TBD

financially illiterate said...

Shug:
The hotel owner never had $100 to lose,surely?He owed the hookers cash to the butcher.
The hotel owner is a twat,but he's a twat for spending money that was never his to spend in the first place.What if the hooker decided to buy a bus ticket for somewhere far away rather than pay her bill?What does he say when the traveller wants his cash back?He's fortunate there was a circle of honorable debtors to cover his theft - seems to me he didn't even think about how he was going to pay it back.He just spent somebody elses cash and bugger the quinciquonces..or am I being too stupid here?