It is a sobering thought that a year ago the nominal wealth of the world, as registered in bank holdings, stock and bond prices, real estate and company valuations, was twice what it is today. Where has all the money gone? Was it there in the first place? The $50 billion ‘invested’ with Bernard Madoff seems to have simply disappeared into a celestial, or infernal, black hole, leaving ‘not a rack behind’. I heard the other day of a man supposedly worth $6 billion a few months ago, now down to $500 million, so technically he is not even a billionaire any more. He did not actually do anything to cause his fortune to be divided by 12: just sat appalled, watching it vanish, on TV. He might just as well have cast it at random on half a dozen roulette wheels, and watched it spin and click its way into oblivion. I recall my old friend Jimmy Goldsmith, a genuine billionaire in his day, say: ‘High finance is just a game of noughts and crosses, old boy. The market adds a lot of noughts to your fortune, then it comes back and crosses them off. Ha ha!’ Great wealth has a propensity to disappear twice: once of course when you die, and it goes for good, but often enough it evaporates while you’re still alive: it is ‘such stuff as dreams are made on’.
These quotations, note, are from The Tempest, Shakespeare’s great analogy of fortune magically appearing, disappearing, then appearing again. It is about power and position in an Italian duchy, but might just as well, more credibly perhaps, be a metaphor of Wall Street and the City, their bull-rings and bear-gardens. The source of the action is the well-named Prospero, the god-magician of Credit, and his agent is Ariel, the personification of Dow Jones, Nasdaq and the FTSE 100. Prospero’s daughter, Miranda, is the ravishing embodiment of infinite wealth, to be bestowed on whom Prospero-Credit favours. And Caliban, the primitive monster, is the ugly underside of the casino, symbolising the slavery of work and the smouldering, murderous anger of revolution. All the other characters are from the ship and represent the investors — the fat cats in the shape of Antonio, Alonso and Sebastian, and the small punters, Trinculo and Stefano, credulous, deluded and, for the most part, drunk.
The Tempest can be seen as a series of spectacular tableaux about the world economy, presenting its infinite wealth, possessions and pleasures, for which no real work is required, and then just as arbitrarily snatching them away. The plebeian investors, Trinculo and Stefano, persuade Caliban to indulge in their credit-liquor, rather as millions were taught to sup subprime mortgages and, thus intoxicated, came to believe property could be acquired without grinding effort and careful saving. Caliban sings the miracle-credit, no-work anthem:
No more dams I’ll make for fish,
Nor fetch in firing,
At requiring,
Nor scrape trencher, nor wash dish,
’Ban, ’Ban, Ca-Caliban
Has a new master — get a new man!
Freedom! High day! High day! Freedom!
Freedom, high day, freedom!
Later, the drunken trio are enticed by splendid garments Ariel puts in their way. Dividends? Capital gains? Bonuses? Trinculo sees the robes as the regalia Stefano will wear as King of the casino, with himself as Chamberlain. They ignore Caliban’s earthy warning — ‘Let it alone, thou fool, it is but trash’ — and are soon quarrelling over the gowns. At once, Prospero and Ariel detonate the crisis and unleash the hunting dogs of the credit crunch:
Ariel: Silver! There it goes, Silver!
Prospero: Fury, fury! There, Tyrant,
there, hark, hark.
Exeunt Stefano, Trinculo and Caliban, pursued
by spirits.
Shakespeare even supplies the anguished human noise of the credit crunch with his stage direction, ‘Cries within’, followed by Ariel’s exultant, ‘Hark, they roar!’
Meanwhile the fat cats are entertained by Ariel and his minions at an altogether higher level. There is ‘marvellous sweet music’, and the goblins bring in a table, covered with a grand banquet. The stage direction says ‘They dance about it with gentle actions and salutations, and, inviting the King and his companions to eat, they depart.’ Just so, the kings and princes of the City and Wall Street enjoyed the good things miraculously provided by Credit. It is interesting, according to an informant of mine, what the new-minted billionaires wanted. First came an apartment with a magic address just off Fifth Avenue, and a ‘gated-compound’ house on Palm Beach. Next a glittering Aston Martin, capable of doing 200 miles an hour, and costing at least £200,000. Thirdly, a range of astonishing watches, sparkling with gold, silver and diamonds, with all kinds of complicated astronomical mechanisms capable of telling you the time on Mars and other useful information. One of these baubles was not enough: you had to have dozens. Madoff is believed to possess hundreds of special watches, from antiques to the latest Oyster. All trash, as Caliban says. Volatile trash, too.
As the grandees approach the table with its banquet, there is thunder and lightning. Ariel ‘descends like a harpy, claps his wings upon the table and, with a quaint device, the banquet vanishes’. One would like to know exactly what Shakespeare had in mind as his quaint device. A symbolical Ponzi scheme? A mime of a share suspension? The three grandees, frightened, try to draw their swords, but as Ariel says
Your swords are now too massy for your
strengths
And will not be uplifted.
So the three ‘stand amazed’ and rooted to the spot, just as the great moguls of Wall Street and the City watched, impotent, as the electronic screens recorded their fast-diminishing riches. Ariel ‘ascends and vanishes in thunder. Then, to soft music, enter the spirits again, and dance with mocks and mows, and they depart, carrying out the table.’
Of course The Tempest, which has long been one of my favourite Shakespeare plays, and the only one I would really enjoy directing, is a comedy, of a sort, and all ends well. Unfortunately, the financial crisis through which we are passing, though it has its comic aspects, is essentially a tragedy, and one which will broaden and deepen and intensify with every month that passes, as financial breakdown affects the real economy. Businesses built up over lifetimes are destroyed in weeks, men and women who have never known the fear of unemployment, as their grandparents did, now experience it in horrible reality and perhaps for years, for the rest of their working life. Pensioners who had saved and prepared carefully for retirement now face a penurious old age, even destitution. Worst of all, as the world becomes a rougher, more desperate and frightened place, there is a real risk that the slump, as in the 1930s, will end in war, on a huge scale, that will engulf us all in thermonuclear ruin.
At the end of the play, Prospero says
I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And, deeper than did ever plummet sound,
I’ll drown my book.
No such renunciation is possible, however, in the real world. Events are not detonated by magic but by elemental passions, greed, acquisitiveness, vanity and power-lust. These remain to stalk and haunt the ruins of the financial ‘cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces’ that have collapsed.
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