Of course, criticising (or even straying slightly from the accepted wisdom of) world capitalism isn’t a sensible thing to do these day. At best you’ll be called a fool. At worst someone with the proper sense of perspective will lump you in with the Nazis. A right-wing libertarian, or one of those New Labour zealots who think you’re weird if you don’t want to turn everything for a profit, will happen along and use the word socialist in the same tone of voice as paedophile.

Still, here goes. Watching the global financial meltdown and people running hither and thither screaming about the end of the world, several voices popped into my head. The first was Ben Elton, before his plummet from grace, reading from his first novel Stark:

At the beginning of the day a factory full of jars of jam might be worth a thousand pounds. At the end of the day; a day of ‘good trading’; a day of ‘rallies’ and ‘confidence’, we might be told that the same factory is worth two thousand pounds.

What has happened? Only a few hours have passed. The factory has not changed. There is no more jam in it than there was. There has been no time for the new slogan ‘Let him dip his fingers into something fruity, Mum’ to take effect. The slimmers’ version still tastes bloody awful. Nothing has happened and yet the factory is ‘worth’ twice as much. Where has the extra cash come from? Nowhere, that’s where. It doesn’t exist. It is entirely theoretical and if people choose to dispute the theory, if they all choose at once to say ‘but that’s impossible. All right then, give me the cash…’, the money would instantly disappear, like the puff of smoke it is.

And then Guinan from Star Trek: The Next Generation piped up (yes, I’m using quotes from Ben Elton and Star Trek to illustrate what I see as the absurdity of global finance. Sue me, all the posh books you like to quote from were popular culture once):

When a man is convinced he’s going to die tomorrow, he will probably find a way to make it happen.

Then the voice of my mother, her wisdom floating in as if from years ago:

If your friend jumped off a cliff, would you?

Five Live’s financial correspondent Pauline McColl was on the Midday News yesterday spilling the beans on how ECONOGEDDON is down to nothing more than the hunches, guesswork and herd instinct of stockbrokers. That five minutes of the programme is mysteriously missing from the Listen Again option on the BBC website. No doubt an urgent meeting was held in a smoke-filled room somewhere and the message was sent to the BBC ordering them to expunge the dangerous intelligence that McColl had dared utter.

I think about this often. Far be it for a fascist like to me - hellbent, as I am, on the ultimate impoverishment of all - to question a system that has made so very many deserving souls so very rich for so very long, but our financial institutions are basically built on bollocks, aren’t they? It’s voodoo. I’ve lain on my bed on many, may occasions trying to make things happen by willing them to be but so far I’ve had no joy. It’s not fair.

I’m reminded of the Ron Suskind essay, Without a Doubt, about The War Against Terror, and the faith- versus reality-based ‘communities’. I can imagine a champion of capitalism sitting me down and giving the same pitying lecture:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

I’m not the first person to think like this - there’s probably an asylum for us all somewhere. There’ll be a knock on the door soon, I imagine.

But if you were to run your life on the basis of rumours you’d heard down the pub, you’d soon find yourself chased down the street by a man in a white coat with a big butterfly net. You’d be skint, divorced, homeless and dead in short order. And yet the guys with braces sold billions as quickly as they could and then bought billions as quickly as they could yesterday on information little stronger than gossip.

You don’t need to be Derren Brown - these people are some of the most suggestible on the planet. If any of them are reading this, send fifty pounds to my Paypal account (my email address is at the top of the page) and I’ll tell you which way the market’s going to go tomorrow.

Try going to Sainsbury’s and saying to the checkout person, ‘A hunch tells me that the price of Stella is going to fall. Here’s 37p for 4,000 cans’ and you’ll end up thirsty. But go to work in the City, say ‘I think the price of Global Megacorp shares are going to fall’, convince enough people of the same and KERSPLASH! Global Megacorp is in the toilet.

It’s not as if I’m entirely ignorant of the mechanics. My degree dissertation (for which I got a first) was an examination and evaluation of the various predictive methods you can employ in order to derive ‘buy’ and ’sell’ signals from stock market data. All of them rely on historic data in order to give a ‘hint’ of the future. All of them come with the health warning that, despite the cliche, history is not doomed to repeat itself.

Unless the methods have changed radically and new predictive systems have incorporated chaos theory in the last 15 years, I can’t see past how all this isn’t just one big faith-based initiative. That the future of every last one of us is in the hands of a small group of (mostly) men who are at the mercy of their moods and whims. Putting Prozac in the water coolers on the floors of the world’s stock exchanges is an idea I wouldn’t sniff at in the current climate.

Most people will say that that I’m unwilling or unable to face up to accepted reality. I would retort that they are merely slaves to a prevailing orthodoxy. Still, that’s just me. Must get back to polishing my jackboots in preparation for the ultimate triumph of world socialism.