How Bob caused the global financial crisis

Since the beginning of September, when US mortgage lenders Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae went under, the news has become pretty boring. Markets went down. Then they went down some more. Then they bounced. Then they went down. Then there were bail-outs. And interest rate cuts. But they went down again.
It’s been a treadmill of bad news interspersed with a couple of short-lived rebounds. But as the fear and panic spread, fingers have been pointing in all sorts of directions but the right one.
We’ve had the regulators in the US and the UK pointing fingers at hedge funds. We’ve had the hedge funds pointing fingers at the banks. We’ve had the public pointing fingers at the regulators. We’ve even had commentators pointing fingers at former US president Bill Clinton for “forcing banks to lend to poor people”. There’s so much finger pointing going on that people are going to have to start using their toes soon.
But recently I heard the most refreshing theory about what caused the global financial crisis. And given the amount of wild accusations flying about, it’s about as good a theory as any one out there.
The story goes like this. Remember that tsunami that wiped out a few islands and hundreds of thousands of people? The event itself took attention away from one mastermind and that was Robert Mugabe, the not-elected president of Zimbabwe. He used the distraction to have his henchmen beat the hell out of representatives for the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). How did he do this? He’s a witch doctor! He threw the bones and chanted a bit and caused a great tidal wave to draw world attention away from Zimbabwe while he re-established his power base.
Then, the theory goes, he killed Pope John Paul II. Bob purports to be a good Catholic himself, but we know that’s not true. For one thing, he evidently doesn’t suffer from guilt. And for another, he’s a mass murderer and there’s nothing very Christian about that.
So he throws the bones and chants a bit and the Pope, who was very, very old anyway, dies. Bob then uses the distraction to violently take hold of more farms in Zimbabwe and institute forced evictions of poor people from the towns around the country. Lovely bloke, wouldn’t you say?
Then we get to 2008 when the Zim elections go awry. Bob is stressing because he didn’t win and no amount of rigging the votes is going to change that. So what does he do? He pulls his ill-gotten gains out of banks in the US and the UK, causing them to go under and the world economy to falter. While everyone looks the other way, he shoves himself and almost all of his ministers back into power.
You may wonder how Bob himself is still alive – he’s very old. But I have it on good authority that he has a body transplant every couple of years – they cut off his head and put it on a new body so that he can keep going. In fact he’s probably 236 years old by now.
So really, Bob’s behind the chaos in world markets and he’s loving it. He has his money, carefully denominated in US dollars, hidden under his gold plated toilet. And if things don’t keep going his way, those bones are coming out and there’ll be a big asteroid headed for earth. It’s enough to almost make you hope he stays in power. Almost but not quite.