The Richest Girl in the World, Part 3/4
A parallel world exchange rate
If you missed Part 1, or Part 2, then there’s your clickity clicks.
If you recall, Katrina was burbling on about her parallel world movie career. In this instalment, however, she may - yeah! - finally get to the fucking point.
Wonders may never cease!
The real ‘Katrina is definitely a fantasist’ arrives when I tell them I’m the richest girl in the world.
Ah-huh. Yep. It’s true. We often get to that stage via questions about ‘famous people’ who also exist in this world. Not too long after the ‘who’s the President?’ question, one popular one is ‘who’s the richest man in the world?’ Well, now, being a feminist, I take a little umbrage at that one. ‘Elon Musk is the richest bloke in the world,’ says I. ‘But he’s not the richest person.’ Dramatic pause for effect. ‘I am.’
Yeah, right. Is the meaning of their little snorty chuckle. “No, really,” says I.
“Right, ok. So how much money have you got?”
I shrug. “About three hundred and fifty.”
They narrow their eyes at me. They need more information.
“Pounds, not dollars.” I continue (our BP:USD exchange rate, by the way, is 1:1.5, so 350 BP is just over 500 in USD).
Lots of folks, to humour me, do ask silly questions about parallel world stuff. Like ‘what’s the parallel world exchange rate?’
The answer to that one is, as it happens, something I’ve been trying to work out myself. When I first started ‘shopping’ – like when I first arrived in this version of Cambridge and took myself off to Sainsbury’s to gather supplies (other profit-driven parasite supermarkets are available – mind you, I went to Sainsbury’s on Sidney Street partly because it’s the nearest to my flat, and secondly out of parallel world loyalty – I have shares in Sainsbury’s and my production company’s done quirky and very popular adverts for them for the last thirty years (some of them with me in); and my dad’s company, Meyer Electronics, has installed solar panels on the roofs of all their stores) – any onlookers would’ve been a little perturbed by the repeated exclamations of vernacular Anglo-Saxon as I examined the price tags.
I did already sort of know that you had an execrable inflationary economic system, given that’s in the intended nature of ‘neoliberalism’ (soundbite for the day: it’s not an economic system, it’s a system of social control, characterised by restriction of the availability of resources, especially money – I call it the musical chairs version of economics), but I don’t think I was sufficiently prepared for the shock of your pricing structure. I came out of that store fifty pounds worse off with little to show for it except the following items: women’s sanitary products, tagliatelle, organic salmon, cream, mushrooms, pepper, tarragon (I had to make do with a jar of the dried stuff – I have since located a farm shop for the good of my health, so it’s all ok now), an acceptable bottle of Riesling (a little for the poaching then remove the salmon and use the reserve juice for the creamy mushroom sauce, the rest of the bottle for my stomach and my sanity), garlic (organic), butter, olive oil (regular for cooking, extra virgin for drizzling), oats (organic - breakfast), eggs (organic free range), milk (organic – I can’t fucking believe you people tolerate paying a fucking quid for a pint of milk – that’s obscene), flour, yeast and salt (I make my own bread) and, well, a few other bits and bobs.
Fifty fucking quid for that! No wonder you have, what is it now, fifteen million British people in poverty, of which some four million children. And you tolerate that!! If that was us, in my world, we’d be threatening – believably – to storm parliament. Naturally, it would never even get to that stage, but that’s our democratic deterrent. It works.
Anyway. The exchange rate. Well, obviously it depends on what products or resources you’re talking about, but my guesstimate is that it’s something around the 2:1 mark. That’s to say, one of our English Pounds will buy two of your English Pounds’ worth of stuff. Some things, however, are far cheaper. The aforementioned milk, for a start. Try ten pence a pint. Beer, one pound if you’re talking a great British real ale. English cider ditto. One fifty to two if you want an imported lager.
Season tickets at the mighty Spurs, well, they range from around a thousand to ten thousand, depending on which area of the stand you want to go in. But our Lillies have disposal income galore, and they are all shareholders in our club (yeah – that’s another part of my mighty empire – I beat that barrow boy Alan Sugar to it in 1991 – now I’ve seen the history of this world’s Tottenham, in which Sugar ruined my beloved Spurs, it’s another indication of our utopia). The shareholdings are as follows: me forty percent, of which ten is temporarily for the manager (Poch, still) until he leaves at which point his successor gets it, ten is still owned by Terry Venables, then it’s twenty-five for the staff (including the players) and twenty-five for the (registered) fans.
Liverpool followed suit soon after (second-best club in the world – sorry, Juergen, but we won the 2019 UCL final – serves you right for having a goalie with a girl’s name, lol). We were the only two clubs who objected, on principle, to the profit-driven Premier league idea (yes, Sugar and Murdoch were in on it together), but in the end we had to go with it otherwise it would’ve been curtains for both of us, which is to say, permanent relegation to the second division. This, as it happens, is one thing we are still very much the same as you – it’s not really English football’s fault – it’s the Europeans, too. Their wage inflation forces the same on the rest of us, despite our best intentions. Still, the shareholder bonus for our season ticket holders effectively pays for their next season’s, and then some.
Houses – now that’s one of your greatest obscenities, and, yeah, it’s another thing you should be thanking Thatcher for. Our house prices are around a fifth of what yours are. It was the start of a long-term, relentless attack on the so-called middle classes, with the intention of making their entire livelihood dependent on the value of their house. And of course they don’t even own their own house – their mortgage lender does. And as for the size of those mortgages – I really, really don’t know how you can survive. In my Britannia, mortgages are capped at three times your income. So that prevents house price inflation. The lower end of the market is regulated, starting with the smallest unit of housing – a one bed flat – at between 3-4 times the ‘Cost of Living’ – which was originally set by the Liberal Socialist government in 2003 at 10,000 currency units (pounds, that is).
In other words, they fixed the value of the currency, having taken control over the Bank of England and established the national bank (Bank of Britannia, amicably known as ‘Bob’). Now ‘we the people’ had taken control over our own money supply we were free to cancel the national debt (and a whole load of private debt along with it – mortgages and small business loans, mainly) and print as much of the fucking stuff as we wanted – without causing what you call ‘inflation’ (‘prices don’t put themselves up, people do’).
Over the course of the first five-year parliament, 2003-2008, the Lizzies created something like half a trillion a year. By now, our GDP isn’t deceptively inflated by ‘the service industry’ or ‘pensions & insurance’ or ‘transactions’ or ‘counting things twice’ or ‘second-hand sales’ (i.e. most house sales – think about it) or whatever, is still ten times what yours is. As for our current cost of living, it’s actually decreased to around 8,000 in real terms. Minimum benefits, however, remain at 10,000. The national living wage is ten pounds an hour. For full time, take a twenty-eight hour working week and fifty weeks of the year, meaning 14,000 – in other words, 1.4 times the Coke.
So you see, with all that extra disposal income, we have a vibrant, perfect economy in which the health of the whole thing is measured, not in ‘GDP’ but in ‘the velocity of money’. Liberal Socialist economics depends entirely on that velocity of money – which is why you have to create loads of it. If you don’t have enough, then you are playing musical chairs and deliberately causing inflation. Not that your economists would understand that, from what I’ve seen. They – and I find this one of the most incredulous things of all – actually believe that ‘increased demand equals increased inflation’!! This is the second Big Lie told by neoliberalism. The first being ‘there’s no magic money tree’. Er, sorry, but haven’t you heard of a printing press? Or numbers in a computer? Once people realised, after your ridiculous quantitative easing crap, that, actually, you can create money out of nothing (well, except some paper and some ink and/or some binary code) then they have to come up with Big Lie Number Two to counteract the inevitable ‘if you can create money from nothing, then why can’t you give us some so no one is poor anymore?’ Their patronising answer is ‘Sorry, poor people, but if we do that then you’ll just demand more, and that means we will have to start raising prices again to keep you subjugated, despite the fact that the costs of production haven’t changed. Oops, didn’t mean to say that – I meant if you demand more, inflation will happen and you’ll go back to being poor. Sorry about that. Now shut the fuck up and get back to work.’
That’s why economics should be on your national curriculum. And that’s precisely why your lords and masters don’t put it on the curriculum! Along with other necessary subjects like psychology, philosophy, cultural studies, politics, narrative theory, law, media studies, and so on and so on. The last thing they want is a mature population with an immunity to lies and propaganda.
Hmm, that’s nearly another few thousand words.
Oh well, here we go again. To be continued…
As she says, it’ll be continued and when it is, here shall a link be also.
In the meantime, darling readers, you do realise that just down there is something called a like button? There’s also a comment button, and a share button, and we really, really love that kind of thing in this crazy messed up different place of ours…
I enjoyed reading this, but I must admit all that talk about pounds and dollars is making my head hurt. Chickens make nice pets and they'll trade eggs for table scraps and a bit of grain. 🐔🥚