Das Kapital
We’ve scrubbed this up a bit, but it’s one of those perpetually-forwarded circulating e-mails whose authorship is lost in the mists.
*
It’s a slow day in a little East Texas town. The sun is oppressive, the streets are deserted, times are tough, everybody’s in debt and living on credit.
On this particular day a stranger driving through town stops at the motel and lays a $100 bill on the front desk. He asks for keys to the upstairs rooms so he can find one he likes.
As soon as the man walks upstairs, the proprietor grabs the bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher.
The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to find the pig farmer and settle his account, and the pig farmer takes the $100 and heads off to pay his bill at the feed store.
The feed store owner takes the $100 and runs to pay his arrears to the town prostitute, who, in turn, rushes to the hotel to pay her accumulated room charges.
The hotel proprietor puts the $100 bill back on the counter.
Just then the traveler comes down the stairs, plunks down the keys and picks up the $100 bill. He says none of the rooms will do, and he leaves.
No one has produced anything. No one has earned anything. But now the whole town is out of debt and looking forward to a brighter future.
*
It’s unknown how long this Flying Dutchman of an e-mail has been adrift, but clearly at some point it reached Ben Bernanke. Mistakes creep in, and the “hundred dollar bill” had become “a hundred billion.” Seized by the power of this concept, he took a hundred billion to Goldman Sachs.
But they just kept it.