One Trillion Dollars

by Andreas Eschbach

  “It’s all right,” John said nodding. Keep the faith. “I have time.”

  Manuel smiled, partly with anxiety, partly with enthusiasm. “Well, I notice that many fish the fishermen catch go bad before they are sold, at least a quarter of them, maybe even a third. The reason is it that it is a long way to the fishmongers. Most of the fishermen leave the morning after they get back to land, but by then the fish have been lying around all night. No wonder many go bad.”

  John nodded. “Makes sense.”

  “If someone bought a tricycle…”

  “Sorry, but what sort of tricycle are you talking about?”

  “A motorcycle with three wheels. Okay, maybe even a motorcycle with sidecar. You were in Lomiao yesterday — a lot are there as taxi cabs.”

  John asked himself how the youth knew that he was in Lomiao the day before, and nodded. Yes, he remembered seeing a bunch of the multi-colored things rolling around, covered with stickers and a bunch of unnecessary lights. “They are called tricycles? I didn’t know that.”

  “We call them that. I not know what called in other places.”

  “I’m not sure they exist anywhere else.”

  Manuel looked confused — out of his comfort zone for a moment. Then he continued. “I could buy tricycle — a used one. It a good deal. I would convert so I put ice into it. A friend help me that work in repair shop in Lomiao. With it I could drive around all fishing villages and pick up fish when they are still fresh. That will cost me some gas, but it still worth it, because not much fish would get spoiled. I did precise calculation.” He looked at John expectantly. “Do you think it good business idea, Mr. Fontanelli?”

  John looked at the youth puzzled. “Sounds pretty good, yes. Where do you get the ice from?”

  “From Mr. Balabagan. He would like me get fish for him and would give me ice for nothing, but I not going to fall for that.”

  “Why not?”

  Manuel grinned smartly. “You have stay independent if you want success. If I drive for him, I still drive for him in ten years too, and he make all profits. No, I buy fish from fishermen, and I sell to Mr. Balabagan. I buy ice from him too, and soon as I can, I buy ice machine for tricycle.”

  “But it’s riskier that way.

  “Others lose money playing dice. I rather gamble this way. Besides, there other fishmongers along coast, and I want sell fish to best bidder. When a fishmonger has only few fish before pick-up appointment, it be worth it for him to pay little more, because he get better price too the more he has.”

  “Well thought-out.” John was impressed.

  “And when I go to villages anyhow, I be able to make more business,” he said proudly. “I take oil and rice with me and sell for same price they pay at market. But I buy it at Lomiao, because it cheaper there at large market. This way I make more profit.” He folded his hands and looked expectantly to John. “This sound good to you, yes?”

  That wasn’t only good, but he found himself feeling jealous of the young man’s sense of business. He could already imagine the lively boy cruising through the villages with his colorful tricycle. “That is a very good plan,” he admitted.

  “It is, yes! Everyone get something from it. If one third of fish go bad now and later not, that be improvement of fifty percent without it cost more to anyone than it now.” He was beaming with joy, and then he added without getting a touch too cunning: “Mr. Fontanelli, sir, could you maybe support this plan with loan?”

  John flinched. He almost had to grab his chest. “A loan?” he uttered. I don’t give loans anymore. I don’t want to suck all of humanity dry like a vampire.

  “Yes. You see, sir,” he said, going into complaining and begging. “Bank not give me loan. I have nothing, my parents poor too. I have nothing to give. I have only idea. You are wealthy. I think you can spare hundred dollars for while … You get back, with interest and compound interest. I promise.”

  John looked at the youth and still felt sick and miserable, but yes, he had to admit the youth’s idea was good. It was exactly what needed to be done here, and this boy was ready and willing to do it. And there were no doubts that he had the smarts to do it well too. John pulled out his check book. “How much do you need?”

  His eyes lit up, his hands danced as they presented the numbers that he probably had going through his head over and over again. “Okay, tricycle costs hundred and fifty dollars, and to rebuild maybe fifty. And money for first trip and ice and some to pay fishermen …”

  “I’ll give you a thousand,” John said and wrote “Manuel Melgar” on the “Pay to the order of” line of the check.

  “No, sir,” he said. “That nice of you, but I not can pay interest on so much money.”

  “You don’t need to pay interest. I’m giving you the money.”

  He reeled back some. “Excuse me, sir, Mr. Fontanelli. I not want that. No.”

  “I can afford it. Believe me.”

  “That not point. Point … is!” He slapped his chest. “Sir, when … when I old one day I want say I did it all my own. You understand? I have everything to thank for is my idea — my work, and not from handout.” He shook his head again. “It not be any fun this way. Please, sir, three hundred dollars … a loan … business deal.”

  John saw him standing there full of energy and determination and wished he himself had more of both. Keep the faith — right. “All right, if you wish,” he said nodding. “We’ll make a business deal then. Three hundred dollars?”

  “Three hundred dollars.”

  “How many pesos is that?”

  “I’d want dollars, sir.”

  “No problem.” He filled out the check and handed it to the youth who took it with such glee that John felt jealous. What did it matter if they called it a loan?

  Manuel put the check carefully into his pants pocket. “Now all I need is your card.”

  “My card?”

  “Your business card … with your address. So I know where to send my payments.”

  “I see.” John went through his pockets and gave him one. Maybe he’ll show it to his children one day. In time he’ll find out that it won’t matter if he pays back the money or not — it’ll be hard enough as it is.

  The young man was very happy, said thanks many times, wished John well, said thanks again, and then went away with his check. John stood up, patted the dust from his pants and walked to the harbor where the motorboat was waiting.

  “I’m leaving,” Patricia DeBeers told John when he came back aboard the yacht. She was sitting on one of the cream-white sofas in the salon, magazines and coffee cups scattered all around her, and was waving a letter in the air. “I got this today — it’s an invitation to a casting in Hollywood; I’ve been waiting for this for some time.”

  “Congrats,” John simply said.

  “I asked the captain to fly me to Cebu with the helicopter. Is that okay with you? My agency will get me a flight to LA from there.”

  John dropped on a sofa. “I didn’t know that Cebu had an airport.”

  “Macta Cebu International Airport. But I think the flight will make a stopover in Manila. It’s a good idea to get away from here anyhow. Did you hear about the fires in Malaysia and Indonesia? There was a report on TV a while ago. It’s terrible. In Kuala Lumpur it looks like the aftermath of a nuclear war. Everyone is wearing a mask, and the smoke is so dense that the high-rises can’t be seen; they can barely see the sun.”

  John looked out the window; the western sky was oily-gray. It got worse every day. “Yeah,” he said, “I heard about it.”

  The steward appeared. John asked him to bring his mail.

  Patricia DeBeers looked contemplatively at the letter in her hand. “How does this work? How does the post office know so far ahead where to forward the mail?”

  “The most common theory is that we accidently hired a psychic,” John told her as he took a stack of letters from the steward. A large brown envelope caught his attention right away. It was sent from Ro
me, but the name of the sender was unknown to him.

  “A psychic … interesting. Would not it be better to have him work the stock market for you?”

  “I don’t know. How would I get my mail then?” He ripped the envelope open with his index finger. Inside was a stack of papers stapled together and photocopies of documents written with a typewriter, Italian text. He also pulled out a letter, and was glad to see it written in English.

  The large envelope was from the editor of the school newspaper Lorenzo had written for. The letter explained that the second part of the article had been found and that a copy was included in the package.

  The young editor wrote:

  Contrary to what we thought, the fault for the delay was not to the Italian post office. Lorenzo’s stuff had slipped behind one of our shelves. We discovered it there after a donation from a local department store allowed us to get new furniture. I’ve finished school in the meantime, but not without instructing my successor to look forward to the generous donation that you assured me when you got the stuff from Lorenzo.

  Of course there wasn’t a single Italian dictionary on board, so John wrote down all the words he didn’t know or didn’t understand the context of and faxed the list to his secretariat, asking them to translate it for him. Then he went up deck to say good-bye to Patricia.

  John got a good-bye kiss and Benigno got a handshake.

  “What should I do?” Benigno shouted as the helicopter’s turbine whined. “I’m the seventh of eight children. If birth control had existed back then I would not exist today.”

  “Great argument,” Patricia said. “I have a girlfriend who would not exist if her mom hadn’t been raped. I’ll ask you another time if you think rape is a good thing.” She got in and the chopper lifted off the deck and into the sky, half of it already full of smoky haze.

  When John went below deck a fax message from his secretariat was already there. He took it, grabbed pen and paper, and went into his cabin.

  In part one I pointed out that the world’s misery was not the fault of technology or science, but of industrialization, or the economy, to be more exact. But, although our standard of living is far higher now than even the richest potentates enjoyed during the Middle Ages, we still have only one thing in our minds: growth. More and more and more economic growth, using up the earth’s natural resources even quicker and piling the garbage dumps up even higher.

  For what? That is the main question: Why is everyone working like crazy? One could say that humans are simply greedy and can’t ever get enough. This answer has the advantage of being simple — but the disadvantage of being wrong. Look around you and see how little most people are satisfied with. Fatty french-fries, beer, and football — that will do for most people. There may be a few gluttons around, but the majority is satisfied with so little that it is almost frightening.

  No, take a closer look. It you still talk to your parents, ask them. They will tell you that they worked so hard because they had to. Because, no matter how much they worked, they felt they never earned enough to pay for everyday necessities. Even as incomes rise, expenditures rise faster: prices, taxes, fees, levies, postage — everything goes up. Like Alice in Wonderland, you have to run as fast as you can just to stay still.

  And that, my friends, Romans, countrymen and women, is the fault of a stupid little defect in the design of things. A triviality, actually, but remember, this triviality is destroying our planet. Small causes, huge consequences.

  The idea there is something wrong — that there is a mistake in the system has been troubling people for a long time. At first the fault was thought to be money. Boy, did they bitch about money. There’s hardly a religion or preacher that hasn’t damned it, but enjoyed seeing plenty of it when passing around the collection basket. But anyhow, friends, it’s not the money. We could discuss it for ever if there was enough space for it here in the paper or you were interested enough to read it all, but since we have neither, here is the bottom line: money is a great invention and it is innocent.

  The next suspect would be interest. As you might remember from math class, calculating interest is not easy, and it may lead to fascinating results, because the compound interest added to the calculation makes it all much more complicated. Not many people really understand interest rates, but it is actually quite simple. When someone loans money to someone else he wants something for it. The best solution is for the borrower to pay a fee for borrowing the money. The fee is called interest. Sure, if someone borrows a lot it can get him into a tight spot if he hasn’t thought about it carefully beforehand. And someone who has a lot of money, more than he needs, can lend a lot and earn a lot of money doing it by earning a lot of interest. And if he has enough money, he might not have to do anything else for the rest of his life other than lend the money he doesn’t need to spend himself.

  That was something our not so smart ancestors saw as a bad thing, or maybe they were just jealous. But at any rate, the ethics of interest payments have time and again been a bone of contention throughout history. At one time, Jews historically could charge interest while Christians could not. As a result, a number of ugly massacres happened. Even in fascist countries it was forbidden to charge interest, because it was seen as being immoral to earn money without working.

  But despite the Church forbidding interest, interest continued to be paid, because people always needed to borrow money. One simply needs a large sum of money for certain things. It would be nonsense, for instance, to save your whole life just to build a house when you’re eighty. It is better to build it now and save later, so to speak, even if it ends up costing more. Or take someone who wants to start a business. He needs a shop and machines and tools to be able to get his business off the ground. So he borrows it and pays it back, bit by bit. If you forbade this, he would remain poor.

  We’re getting warmer now. It is within this mesh of money and interest that the flaw in the design of things lurks. We will get there in a moment.

  First, I wish to remind everyone reading this that money is an essential part of the way our world works. You buy a Coke in the store around the corner. The storeowner puts it into the cash register and then pays Coca-Cola. The company buys a new computer and pays it in part with the money from the storeowner, which came from you. Your dad works in this computer company, gets a share of the money from the soda company, and dad gives you your allowance. And so forth.

  No doubt you all have played the famous board game Monopoly. In the start you have little money and carefully contemplate which streets you can afford to buy. Towards the end you have a lot of houses and hotels, and collect huge sums for rent and end swimming in money. Now here’s a question: Where did all this money come from? Take a close look. Except for a few small sums of money from one of the Chance or Community Chest cards, everyone that passes the “Via!” the “Go” box, gets the famous 20,000 liras. And now think about how it works in real life. Here too there is a certain amount of money available, and this amount can’t always be a constant. The economy grows — like crazy- so it needs more money. Where does it come from? Of course, it is no problem to print more money — that’s not the point. The question is: How does it get put into the game? I’ve never received a letter from the central bank telling me that it had once again become necessary to increase the amount of money in circulation and that each citizen will get 500,000 liras. I bet you didn’t either, or anyone else for that matter. But how does this work? How does new money find its way into the game? And don’t tell me you don’t care. You should, because here is the fault in our system.

  What I’m about to explain is not something you will ever learn in school (we all know that nothing we learn in school will really help in life anyway), so pay attention. Anyone who doesn’t believe me can look this up in books on economy and finance. The key word is money creation.

  Let’s assume that the above-mentioned cola company wants to build a new bottling facility. It applies for a loan from its bank. The
money the bank lends will normally come from its depositors, but let’s assume that it’s a little short on cash due to having issued too many loans. In this case it’ll turn to the central bank. The central bank is allowed to loan money without relying on assets from customers as collateral. It can create money from nothing and put it into the game. Here, every bank can get extra money, but also, of course, only in form of a loan. This means it must have securities and pay interest, the so-called prime rate. It is what’s listed in the financial section of the paper every day. The prime rate is set by the central bank itself, using the following principles: If the central bank fears that more money is being loaned than is good for the economy, then it’ll raise the prime interest rate. The loans become more expensive and less money is borrowed. The other way around makes loans cheaper and more money is borrowed. The prime rate is a control mechanism for the economy.

  Sounds easy, right? But this is the greatest nonsense there is! Millions of bankers learn this and still think it’s great, but when you think about it for a moment, you will find the mistake in our system is right here.

  Let’s discuss what can happen. From out of nothing the central bank will grant a loan, of, let’s say a hundred million lira. The prime rate is fixed at three percent. If the loan is due to be repaid over one year (we’ll use one year for simplicity’s sake) then the total amount to be repaid will be three hundred and three million lira. But from where does the additional three million lira come from? They don’t really exist. And there is no way to invent it, because only the central bank can create money, and it wants interest for its loans! What nonsense!

  Yes, naturally there is more money circulating around, and for this reason interest is being paid, but with the result that that money is missing somewhere else. And where money is missing, a loan has to be taken in the hope that it will be possible to repay it at a later period. The financial system is vast and complex. Lots of money is moved around, swapped, held up, but one thing remains constant: nothing is lost, not one single lousy lira. In the end it leads to one thing, sooner or later, another loan has to be taken from the central bank to repay the first one.