Ramble On

Today has had something rattling round my brain. It won't fit on twitter, so here, with my audience of zero, I'll log it instead.

Last night, Apple's share price fell around 10%, through the day there was no bounce at all, last I looked it was down around 12%. Everyone and his mothers brother has been ranting about $APPL on my slightly fiscal slanted twitter timeline for months. It's the saviour of America, responsible for a chunk of the GDP, a sure winner, tipped to reach over 1,000 share value. So I've heard. Well tonight it's around the 450-460 mark.

In theory, there should be a bunch of hedge funds and investors fantastically out of pocket. Confidence in America's entire stock market should have felt a bit of a tremor. But no. Something weird has happened. In general stocks have surged again. The dollar has barely felt any pain from it at all. It's almost as if nobody had any money in Apple at all, and nobody has suffered a loss.

It's nailed home to me the level of ... I don't whether to call it cognitive dissonance or double-think. In the world today. Lets call it double-think. Nicely Orwellian.

The markets are surging higher, finance ministers and politicians are proclaiming we are over the worst, that 2013 will see a return to expansion in Europe and America. Everything is fine. Europe is fixed. America doesn't have a debt problem. The world is fine.

Except it isn't. I only have my own perception of reality to go on, same as any of us. But I don't see the good times rolling. For the last 3 or 4 years in the UK, I've heard of countless employers laying off workers, the people I know are either trying to find better than temporary work (and failing), or stuck in low paid jobs with no hope of finding a better one. I also know of people who aren't technically unemployed, they either can't claim, or claiming and being forced in to a poverty job is less appealing than the cash in hand jobs they can get. I'm know I'm finding it harder to find new work to keep me going. I'm spending less than I was and caring more about finding a good deal than I was two or three years ago.

Town centres have slowly gained more vacant shops or pound stores where large chain stores used to be. I've suffered more crime against me in the last two years than I have for my entire lifespan before. People are talking about moving to much smaller housing because they can't afford where they are, one of them even to the point of only having bedrooms for the kids and sleeping on the sofa.

Of course some of this is my distorted perception. Maybe I've just been unlucky with the recent crime spree. But overall, I can't help get the feeling things are getting a lot worse on the ground ... from the plebs eye view.

Now I look back to the soaring stock markets and vast profits made by the banking sector ... and I ask ...

"From what?"

The system seems to be living in a dream. Like a cartoon coyote who doesn't realise it's run out of cliff yet. Today's schizophrenic reaction to Apple's loss in share price has really nailed it home to me. Either my perception of reality is horribly depressing and unfortunate, or the eventual crash is going to be totally horrific. Tonight I don't know which of those it is, but something is wrong somewhere.