I will start this chapter with an oxymoron in the title. An oxymoron is a word whose meaning I didn’t know at the age of 14 and it means a contradiction in terms. Writing a “brief account of everything” is an oxymoron, because it is impossible. Impossible in the real world, material world, because all kinds of mental verbal and conceptual constructs can be created. It’s possible to argue, with a perfectly straight face, that the hare will never catch the tortoise in a race, because at the point when it gets to where the tortoise was, the tortoise will have moved on to the next point, and in the space of time necessary to catch up, the tortoise will by then be a bit further down the road.

There’s only one right answer to the question of who’s faster, the tortoise or the hare. It’s the tortoise of course, because the hare fell asleep along the way.

The distance keeps on shrinking but by applying pure logic, you can conclude that even if the distance is reduced to a millionth of a centimetre and the hare covers that distance, the tortoise will still have moved one ten-millionth of a centimetre further. And so on, ad infinitum. But I know that watching the two of them in real time, actually racing, not as a series of stroboscopic images, the hare will ultimately catch the tortoise. And so I summon the courage to write about everything in brief, knowing that it’s impossible, because writing a brief account of everything means that the glass is both half-empty and half-full. But since the world does have a dual identity, then everything can also be brief. Just not as short as in that sci-fi fantasy story where the most powerful computer in the world calculated the ultimate truth in the Universe and got the answer “42”.

The question:”Is the glass half-empty or half-full?” is the same as asking “Which follows the other: does day follow night or night follow day?” Of course, the answer “42” is always a good one.

To be extremely brief, though, the state of the economy and finance is rotten. To be a little less brief, if you defy the laws of nature, corrections will take place in a rigid system, known by the scientific name “economic crisis” and which appears to come out of nowhere but which was actually programmed into the system. Briefly put – the economic crisis and the bursting of the bubble that follows is not a problem but a solution. It’s a problem for millions of people, of course, to say nothing of governments and bankers whose standard of living will worsen …