The value of nothing

Subject: The value of nothing

One of the most terrifying sights is when an edifice is torn down. When a structure is revealed to be hollow. When the straw dogs ride into town amidst the shaky sand castles that resembles our surety in "the system".
I'm speaking of our financial system, the system which was built by "experts" who told us that it couldn't fail, a system that was mathematically proven, a system, like the "win win" system in the casino which at the end of the day, "suckers everyone".
Shinzo Abe is casting around to try to stimulate the Japanese economy. A nation which traditionally was extremely conservative and isolationist has a death wish. Its population is getting progressively older and has no way to inflate either its negative inflation rate or to import new blood (people) to reinvigorate the nation and find an economic balance in the relationship between the actively employed and the cost of an older sector who are costing the nation dearly. His idea, to keep on pumping money into the economy to try to stimulate the manufactures and the market by creating a consumer bubble isn't working. The Japanese are too conservative even for that !!
Deutsche Bank is limping along with the burden of trillions of dollars of iffy derivatives and the even greater burden of third party insurance on other derivatives held by itself and other banks. Deutsche Bank, teetering on the brink of nationalisation is to all intents and purposes, bankrupt.
An Italian bank has just failed the banking stress test and there are many of the banks which prop up the functioning of the nation state that are in a similar position.
Afraid what inflation will mean to the re-evaluation of their unfathomable debt and yet stymied by the fact that, without inflation their earnings are flat.
Capitalism is built on confidence, confidence in the financial system, that what they do will receive payment and that sales are rewarded. The problem is that the banking system which is an integral part of commerce has been built, over the last 30 years, on sand with a jamboree of mathematically created products and a super speed computerised system which as reduced the value of things to a nano second and in the wink of an eye has lost sight of what value really means.