Global Financial Crisis 2008 – Article No 10
by Humphrey McQueen
A fiction on fictional capital
House of All Nations, the 1938 novel by Christina Stead, described by The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature (1994) as “epic in scale, encyclopaedic in detail, cinematic in form, it is a scathing account of the world of international finance, although once again the eccentricity of private obsession rather than generalized class interests holds the foreground.”
Stead extracted the following epigrams from her characters to form an opening “Credo”:
Jules Bertillon, the protagonist and a merchant banker:
No one ever had enough money.
There’s no money in working for a living.
If all the rich men in the world divided up their money amongst themselves, there wouldn’t be enough to go round.
Here we are sitting in a shower of gold, with nothing to hold up but a pitchfork.
Woolworth’s taught the people to live on nothing and now we’ve got to teach them to work for nothing. Every successful gambler has a rentier sitting at the bottom of his pants.
It’s easy to make money. You put up the sign BANK and someone walks in and hands you his money. The façade is everything.
William Bertillon, his brother:
If there’s a God, he’s more like Rockefeller than Ramsay McDonald.
A speculator is a man who, if he dies at the right time, leaves a rich widow.
E. Ralph Stewart:
Of course, there’s a different law for the rich and the poor; otherwise, who wold go into business?
Michel Alphendery:
The only permanent investment now is in disaster.
A self-made man is one who believes in luck and sends his son to Oxford.
Comtesse de Voigrand:
There are poor men in this country who cannot be bought: the day I found that out, I sent my gold abroad.
Henri Leon:
Everyone says he is in banking, grain, or peanuts, but he’s really in a dairy.
Dr Jacques Carriere:
Patriotism pays if you take interest in other countries.
Frank Durban:
With the revolution coming, there’s one consolation - our children won’t be able to spend out money.
Next: 19 October 1987