Losing everything

Alternative Investments is at his lowest ebb but gains perspective

I've often wondered what it must be like to have a job. Don't get me wrong, I know it's damn hard work keeping track of one’s unearned income, and keeping one’s profit points out of the clutches of taxmen and accountants requires not only the wisdom of Solomon, but also the vigilance of Minerva's owl, and the agility of David Beckham.

At least one of these faculties appears to have failed me, as I'm back on my beam ends, with nothing. After Farouk scarpered, the contractors working on my underground golf course weren't slow to scent a rat, and I thought it prudent to make myself scarce. The plan was to secure a passage home. Alas, the banana-boat man who had offered me safe passage for “three thousand” took umbrage when I explained I meant pennies, not dollars.

Rending the air with strange curses that made me glad I speak no Spanish, he showed me the gangplank and I was left to swim. Fortunately, I reached land before my doggy paddle gave out. Unfortunately though, I am on a more or less barren island with only a scattering of mangy monkeys and a merciless, blazing sun for company. And I found a watering hole and a stack of recent newspapers shipwrecked in a box. After I laid them out to dry they proved quite readable.

So despite my lack of a job and my portfolio to keep me busy, I was able to keep myself entertained – even feeling some sympathy with Dick Grasso, a man who knows a thing or two about the demands of running a whopping portfolio.

Until recently, Grasso was chairman and chief executive of the New York Stock Exchange. The poor fellow has been forced to resign under a bit of a cloud after public outrage over his 140 million dollar remuneration deal. My heart truly goes out to him.

And I'm none too convinced by their new appointee, either. John Reed, a former chairman of Citigroup, has been taken up as the interim chief. After the unseemly fuss over poor Mr Grasso's 'package', Mr Reed has won admiration all round, it appears, by agreeing to take the job for a salary of one dollar.

Now hold on a minute. Can it really be sensible to put Wall Street’s fortunes into the hands of a man who thinks it worth his while to work for 60 pence a year? This seems to me an affront to all the principles that made America great.

On the other hand, he may be a wilier dog than I give him credit for. Peculiarly for a country which has set such store by flexible labour markets, the US does have quite strict minimum wage legislation – and an annual salary of a dollar amounts to quite a grave breach. Furthermore, the country also boasts one of the proudest traditions of spectacular litigation anywhere in the world. The Land of the Free is also the Land of the Lawsuit. Perhaps your man is better at putting two and two together than I have given him credit for.

They are an ingenious bunch, the Americans. Who else, I wonder, could have come up with their miraculous solution to the nation's recent economic woes. Until last month, we all thought the country was mired in recession.

Not so, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, which has recently come up with the cheering news that the recession in fact ended in November 2001. Happily, it appears NBER was misled by the US’ high unemployment figures. This, they have decided, is a ‘lagging indicator’, and if you discount the fact that 9.4 million are still trying to get by on almost nothing, the country's economy is in fact growing, and has been for nearly two years.

Thank goodness for that. There's a lesson for all of us there, and perhaps I too should stop worrying about joblessness.