The Bank of England has estimated the credit losses suffered by global financial institutions could total a staggering £1.8 trillion in imaginary money, up sharply from its previous arbitrary guess. The banks, which spent the 90s lending huge amounts of cash they did not have, to borrowers who could not pay it back, are now in the grip of “the worst existential crisis since the great ‘meat balloon’ of the 1950s”, confirmed Bank of England chairman Mervyn King.
“The financial services sector has grown massively in the past 20 years, on the back of entirely imaginary money,” said King. “The more imaginary money it made, the happier its shareholders were and the more imaginary wealth filtered down into the general economy. Unfortunately, this encouraged a lot of people to look at how much imaginary money their bedsit was worth, get jobs which paid £50k a year to make imaginary things and then go out and spend that on real stuff, like rotating hub caps and smoothie makers from China.
“Fortunately though, many of the world’s most imaginative minds are hard at work imagining additional funds to plug this growing gap. The recent conjuration of £300 billion in the UK, for example, will allow the banks to begin lending again to those people who have lost their jobs.”
King concluded: “Fundamentally, the £1.8 trillion has not been lost – we’ve simply stopped believing in it. Therefore, we are today proposing a new global initiative to kick-start the system, under which everyone just closes their eyes and wishes really hard.
“Come on everyone… One… Two… Three!”
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