If the weather were like the banking system when we wanted it to rain we would only have to ask.
You, or someone acting on your behalf, would simply approach your nearest (or friendliest) privately owned Rain Office
and ask for rain.
Promptly despatched would be three hundred helicopters carrying three hundred monsoon buckets, or more if you wished,
to douse whatsoever area big or small, that you felt you could afford to pay back.
Payment for the services of the rain offices would be made in water. At the end of every month the rain office would
tell you how many buckets of water you owed them.
(Three hundred monsoon buckets is a lot of water and would probably have been borrowed by a big corporation or was it
perhaps a pension fund liquidating the investments of all the yet-to-be-old people's stored up and saved water -
remembering that no one wants to die of thirst in their dotage).
In addition to this vital watering service rain offices could issue water vapour which would be represented as clouds
in the sky by its owners. They would float overhead as a constant reminder of who had the wealth.
The worry of it is that we would have to pay more water back to the rain office than we asked for and were given. After
all, they too would have to turn a profit in water in order to keep their operations afloat. We would elect councils and
governments to borrow the water on our behalf to pay for public fountains and to heat the radiators of our hospitals.
One concern about the weather being like the banking system is that it would be illegal to gather your own water from
anyone but the rain offices. The rain offices of course would have sole legal right to issue the water in all the damns
and rivers and reservoirs and, naturally, the rain.
An independent but official body would regulate the over night liquidity rates (the amount of water flowing from the
rivers and reservoirs). This would be necessary lest the rain offices caused severe flooding or droughts.
It would be considered rude or stupid to question the system, which of course you would do if you were still sane.
Hydrology would replace the bible in terms of mystery.
The only good thing I can think of if the weather were like the banking system would be that New Zealand has plenty of
rain, nice rain too I think. In Dublin it only ever really drizzles - though the weather is never far from people’s
thoughts.
Sure it is better to talk about the weather than something boring and complicated like finance.
email: gmeylan@irish-times.com