In the spirit of a little light-hearted capitalist banter, and hoping we don’t offend too many of you, I offer the following dispatch.  As I am a capitalist with a bit of a “dark humor” streak, I will offer up the following business opportunity to anyone interested…

For those of you who may be unaware the little city of Christchurch on the South Island of New Zealand has suffered a devastating earthquake. Fortunately the quake struck in the early hours of the morning, meaning that most people were tucked up safe and warm in bed at home, and gratefully no one was killed.

This has not spared the inhabitants from suffering from a lack of clean drinking water, power and in some instances a roof over their heads. So, being the capitalist that I am, I immediately envisioned an opportunity.

You see, I’ve been searching the globe for a template of how disasters, real or imagined, can be dealt with effectively. I believe I may have stumbled upon a template for imagined disasters that I’m sure many of you will be familiar with. You’ll recognize it immediately, as I’m not the first to come up with the framework. I do believe we could apply it to the current situation, and even expand it further.

So, as a result of my extensive research on the subject, and being the humanitarian that I am, I have decided to do my part and also offer to spread the wealth. As such I make this appeal to please send me all of your spare candles. I will buy them from you for 10 cents apiece and shoot them down to the South Island, offering to sell them for a buck a pop to everyone without electricity. Don’t worry about where to send them, just address the package, “Chris in New Zealand”. There’s bugger all people down here, they’ll know where to find me.

Once the candles arrive in Christchurch I plan to pay school kids to deliver them on bicycles, thus giving them something to do while the Nintendo is down. Yeah we know… greedy capitalist bastards – and exploiting kids to boot! I look at it as a public service, get ’em outdoors and off their arses. From these efforts we expect an ROI of over 500%.

If we’re successful, and I know we will be, we’ll plan to take it to the next level and offer global franchises. If that works, we’ll use our extensive network of financial industry contacts, those that still speak to us that is, and subsequently list it on the NASDAQ. Once that’s accomplished we will lobby for, and likely receive, grants from the government, and have faith that the UN will back us.

Once we’re experienced “Disaster Consultants” we intend to expand operations and move onto Pakistan to sell them some great big mops. Once we’ve established our credentials over in “dangerous” environments we’ll be able to draft ourselves into Afghanistan were we’ll bring peace to the region by buying off the Taliban with truck loads of those scrapped cars from Obama’s “cash for clunkers” program. We have intelligence that suggests the Taliban leaders will be too chuffed with their “new” Land Rovers to give a toss about shooting at the invading forces anymore. Its worth a shot isn’t it?

As for the local Afghani, we’ll create a little artificial demand to raise the price of the “scrapped” autos so the average person would need to take out a loan to purchase one. We’ll securitize the loans and flog them to Goldman Sachs, Citi and JP Morgan, who will get government tax breaks (kickbacks) for charitable contributions.

Of course everybody will end up with dodgy loans to Afghanis, but we don’t see this as being much worse than dodgy loans to Americans or Europeans. In fact we see it as a leveling of the playing field, where the genius of derivatives can be exported to less developed nations. In short everybody wins.

All of the above will eventually allow us to earn a fortune from speaking fees and book deals. We may even get on the cover of TIME magazine for our generous contributions to mankind. We know this is a proven business model since Al Gore has successfully shown us the path.

Please submit your interest to me below in the comments space.

Mark here… Chris’s piece, although intended to be humorous, exposes something that isn’t so funny. This is basically the method that the US government and others have used to bilk the populace out of trillions of dollars while lining the pockets of their investment banker buddies.

This disaster was an act of God. The housing bubble, the stock market bubble, the bond bubble, currency bubbles… all of these things were/are engineered. Do you believe for one second that the Goldman’s of the world didn’t know what they were doing, and that it wasn’t a well-orchestrated plan to separate the average Joe from his money?  Sure, at the end of the day Joe still had a choice, and as so often happens, Joe’s greed got in the way of his common sense.

We have another set of choices before us now. We see the writing on the wall for things like paper money, big government and “free” everything. Gone are the days of entitlement. But, it’s going to get ugly before it gets better; and better it will get, eventually.

So, stick with us as we try to steer our, and your way, through this mess. And remember, keep your humor and your wit about you, you’ll need both.

Live Like You Mean It,

Chris and Mark