I was actually reading this book during the big economic crisis in October, and it was extraordinary how close the elements of the two coincided.
The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope opens with the arrival in London of a guy named Melmotte, who moves himself and his family into a big house, announces he's there and starts making money. Now, everyone he encounters - though they deplore his manners - immediately starts orbiting him on the assumption that he's rich. They haven't seen any actual money; they've just seen all the trappings of wealth and assume the cash is there to back it up.
And anyone who's already made that much money must know how to make more, right? Which is a good thing as the entirety of the London high society set seems to be a bit short of cash at the moment. They don't pay their grocery bills, or their servants, or even their gambling debts. Anytime someone asks them for actual "ready" money, they change the subject in such a way to imply that it's vulgar to even bring up the matter and waltz out the nearest door.
Oh, occasionally someone would have to cough up the cash, but it seemed that you could go for generations paying a bit on account here and there and live quite well. Everyone in high society was trading on the image of wealth - so no wonder Melmotte fit right in.
Melmotte's methods - and they weren't all necessarily illegal or even wrong - seem to work primarily like this: he helps himself to the promise of some money from one set of wealthy people, then trades that promise of money to someone else. Occasionally he gets cash for the promise, but mostly he just gets another promise of a different kind. Which he trades around, taking percentages off the top as he goes and pocketing any of the occasional cash.
He's moving around mystery money! Almost none of it really exists as hard currency except on the very bottom where it intersects with people too poor to live on credit and who actually have to pay for things.
Now, two things can happen to send this whole system spiralling down. The first is that someone at the bottom simply can't pay his bills. In other words, once you've pulled on a thread all the way to the end of promises and trades and IOUs, you eventually get to the guy who shrugs and says, "Yeah, I said I would pay the cash back, but I don't have it. Sucks to be you." And if he can't meet his debts, then the people who took that promise and traded the promise of that money for other things can't pay either and so on up the food chain.
The other things is that someone at the top stops being perceived as being trustworthy. So he can't promise payment to get the money to do what he needs to do and the people holding his previous promises start to doubt if they'll ever get paid back. When they try to trade his promises for someone else's promises, however, they find that no one wants them and they are out of luck. Which impacts the worth of the second set of peoples' promises, which lose value, and so on down the food chain.
Now, this is obviously an oversimplification not only of the book but also of the entire field of global economics. But I have a sneaking suspicion that if you started pulling threads in the economic crisis, you'd find a lot of people whose main source of income was coming less from production and industry, and more from the the promise of money and it's movement.
And all this out of a book written a hundred years ago.
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