The Gambler

Look around the world and you'll find double standards everywhere. Rupert Murdoch presents himself as a fine, upstanding religious man yet has no problems owning a newspaper that's made its name by plastering its pages with pictures of semi-naked women. Al Gore wants everybody to slash their carbon emissions, yet he's busy buzzing around in private jets and heating his 8 room mansion.

But the biggest double standard of all has to relate to gambling.

From my early school days, I was warned against the evils of gambling. It destroys lives, the teachers cautioned. It's a mug's game, my family cooed. It's more destructive than alcohol, the funny looking Reverend that used to wander into our classroom every couple of weeks announced.

Yet if a child announces (and I should preface this by saying that any child who DOES announce the following needs to be lobotomized and thrown into juvenile care) they want to be a stockbroker, the teachers and the "career guidance" experts start wanking themselves silly. "What a great career?". "Banking will really take you places." "Get a degree in Economics and you'll fast-track yourself to a job in The City."

Now there's a double standard bigger than one of Al Roker's stomach staples.

So let me get this straight. I'm warned off spending a couple of nights in Vegas to play some blackjack and drink radioactive colored drinks, but I'm encouraged to take a job that involves taking a punt on a glorified roulette wheel with OTHER PEOPLE'S CASH. The logic is staggering.

Wall Street and the stock market is a gambler's dream. Behind the analysts, the business TV shows and the smug grins, the brutal fact is that these people are paid to take my pension fund, stack all the chips on "23 black" and then spin the wheel.

If lady luck smiles down on our banking friends, they get the chance to piss away their bonuses on $20,000 bottles of wine and I get the chance of retiring with enough money to pay for an upgraded gurney to wheel me out of my senior citizens' home when the inevitable mass organ failure strikes.

But if the bankers' gamble doesn't pay off, they simply blame "market conditions" and I get to look forward to living off cans of kidney beans in my twilight years.

Right now, the horses aren't really coming in for our Wall Street friends. A host of banks like Citi Group and UBS have written off more money in junk debts than some small countries collect in taxes. The write-downs are the surprising result of lending people who are broke large amounts of cash to buy a house, and then being surprised that none of them can afford to pay any of it back.

You have to admire their balls at making such a gamble, but even somebody with my sub-standard social sciences background can tell you that lending money to people who don't have any income isn't without a slight element of risk.

So when the banks and the politicians complain about "unusual market conditions", just remember who it was that created these conditions in the first place. And when your company starts laying people off and economic growth slows, remember that your teachers were right - gambling never pays.

Well, OTHER people gambling never pays.