THOSE of you who live in multi channel land may have come across a programme on NBC Super Channel called The Money Wheel. It consists of high financial talk from totally expressionless young men and women in New York while the real activity goes on at the bottom of the screen.
Where the subtitles usually appear in the course of a foreign language movie, bands of figures scurry across the box from right to left at breakneck speed. On the top band, blue letters on a background convey messages such as "GE 743/g" and "MIN 6/i" while underneath the secondary band with white letters on a blue background conveys vital information such as "SOX .176.16" and "UNCH 1040."
Last Friday the figures on the bands caused the inscrutable masks of the commentators to slip a little, and there was a definite feeling of disappointment if not distress in the air.
By Monday Wall Street had stabilised, but in a knock on effect some £300 million was wiped off the value of Irish companies.
The stocks and bonds on Wall Street, according to the New York Times, took their pummelling because of an announcement by the US Department of Labour that 700,000 jobs had been created in February good news for lots of families.
THE clear message is that there really are people out there, and plenty of them by all accounts, who consider fall in the unemployment rate as bad news. As Butch Cassidy asked of the Sundance Kid (or was it the other way round?), when a posse, tracked them relentlessly: "Who are those guys?"
"Those guys" are the guys who have the money. They are the guys who run the world and the successors of the guys who used to do so. They are the guys to whom, unlike the business people of an earlier time, the "bottom line" is god. They are the followers of the new ideology.
A long time ago a famous man put it this way: "The only trouble with capitalism is capitalists. They're too damn greedy." He also said that "excessive fortunes are a true menace to liberty" and described stock speculators as being "worse than murderers". Who was this guy? Was it Stalin? Or Lenin? Or Marx? Or Engels? Or Trotsky? Or Connolly? As you might have guessed from the rhetorical nature of these questions, the answer to each one is No.
The guy who made these statements was Herbert C. Hoover, the 31st President of the United States, the man who refused to mobilise US federal resources after the Wall Street crash because he felt that too much government intervention would destroy the integrity and initiative of the individual citizen.
Today those who would agree with Hoover on state intervention would excoriate him for his views on greed. Those who would agree with Hoover's successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, on anything other than his conduct of the second World War would be verbally stoned to death by the fanatics of the ideology which is fast taking on some of the aspects of the Soviet communism it defeated.
The communists had a utopian, perhaps even a noble, ideal encapsulated in the maxim: "From each according to his ability to each according to his needs".
Very quickly the means to achieve this end turned to terror, mass executions, labour camps in Arctic Siberia and the dreaded midnight knock on the door of a Moscow apartment. For those to whom the end justified the means, the means became an end in themselves.
In the world the fanatics of the new ideology would like us to espouse, frightening similarities to the Soviet experiment are beginning to appear. The new "end" looks good: no inflation, the creation of wealth, the establishment of a world market in which competition will increase efficiency and bring prices down.
All this, the theory goes, will lead eventually to a world in which everyone will have a reasonable standard of living with some standards being more reasonable than others. That's fine by me, I'm no pinko fellow traveller like Herbert Hoover.
I'm not sure that the new ideology will work, mind you, but I really start to worry when the discussion centres on the means by which the Brave New World will be achieved.
There is general agreement that there will have to be "tough decisions" that people will have to suffer along the road to prosperity. The conventional wisdom is that those who will suffer most are those who are already suffering most: the poor, the sick and the elderly. In this context the news that 700,000 people have been lifted out of the poverty zone is bad.
There's even more to it than that. The ideology's more extremist adherents want to go further. The reign of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, some of them argue, was good in that the economy prospered, inflation came down, the economic indicators improved. To achieve these praiseworthy goals it was perfectly all right to round people up, take them to a football stadium and have them tortured and shot.
Those are thoughts worthy of a Stalin, and I for one just don't feel like being executed in order to bring the interest rates down.
The "new ideology" on Russia follows a similar line. It's perfectly acceptable for people to amass large fortunes through murdering their business competitors and indulging in other criminal activities because the "bad money" will become "good money" once the sons and daughters of the hoods pass through Eton and Roedean and learn how to behave properly.
The descendants of the Robber Barons will, they say, become wealthy legitimate business folk, perhaps even philanthropists. This, the ideologues argue, is how the great nation of the United States developed.
NOT so. The ideology, in this instance, as well as being short on morality insults an America which owes the foundation of its greatness to Thomas Jefferson rather than to Al Capone to James Madison rather than Billy the Kid to the Founding Fathers and not the Godfathers.
Remember those theories advanced at the time of the collapse of communism which claimed that market forces and democracy were inextricably linked? To the cold minds of the new ideologues people who vote against the true faith deserve the Inquisition if democracy conflicts with market forces you can guess which of the twin pillars of Western civilisation they will want to demolish.
A friend of mine accuses me of being a "puritan" on these issues. Perhaps he's right. Maybe shooting a few thousand malcontents is worth it in order to stem inflation. Maybe the human rights situation in China is worth glossing over in order to make a buck out of bilateral trade.
Maybe it was OK to liquidate a few million Russians in order to reach for a great ideal. Maybe the deaths of two small boys in Warrington or of a Muslim news vendor at Canary Wharf are worth the goal of a "united" Ireland.
I don't believe so, and that's my bottom line.