Imaginary International Trade

The Grand Hotel Palace shone under the sun in the late afternoon. There was no crowd at that hour. The man who went there with a habitual step did not look at the grand spectacle which unfolded before his eyes. Mr Alfred Von Müller was obviously a regular visitor and it seemed obvious to him. He went to his usual table and ordered a tea.

Soon three people joined him.

Antonio da Palma, a small sixty-year-old with an allure of Napoleon of Portuguese nationality, supposedly representing a bank whose name he could not divulge until the first transaction of cash-for-cash exchange.

Dr. Julio Attias, fiftieth-century Argentine, specializes in oil, gold and complex banking transactions. Sometimes his doctorate is in economics, sometimes he is in law so much so that one can legitimately wonder if he has not been self-awarded.

Mr Josip Hideg, Hungarian EPFL engineer, former owner of a computer company called Horizon Management Services, which had its proud hours at the time of the punched cards and author of a Private Placement Program (PPP) based on Medium Term Notes (MTN's).

They will talk for hours talking cash currency exchange for cash tens or even hundreds of millions in bank or security house, while everyone knows that it is difficult to change even tens of thousands Of francs without filling a ton of paperwork.

They will talk about hundreds of thousands of tons of gold while world production is less than 2000 tons and Warren Buffett, one of the richest investors in the world, says the total amount of gold in the world - Gold above the ground, that is - could fit into a cube with sides of only 20m (67 feet). A figure that is widely used by investors comes from Thomson Reuters GFMS, which produces an annual gold survey. Their latest figure for the world's total gold is 171,300 tons. A cube of 171,300 tons would be about 20.7 m (68 feet) on each side. Or to put it differently, it would reach 9.8 m above ground level if exactly covering Wimbledon Center Court.

They will also talk about Medium Term Notes (MTN's), Collaterals, bank guarantees, tires, scrap metal, raw materials, oil and countless merchandise of all kinds.

The moment of their meeting where they will be the most pitiful will be the one where the bill of the four teas or coffees will be presented to them. One of them will come out of the cash or the credit card of a creditor and will have the ridiculous honor of settling the invoice for this meeting.

In analyzing their conversation, it is noticed that they will talk less about transactions than about themselves and about their exceptional relationships with a powerful man or a rich woman.

Yet none of them ever concluded and cashed the fruit of a single transaction in the ten or twenty years that preceded this meeting. So why are they continuing?

Because, like the pathological player, they think that the next time may well be the right one and that they must absolutely succeed.

Because they are prisoners of the social identity of the image they have given to their parents and friends who are also their creditors.

Because it is their pride ...

So if one of your loved ones is in this situation, help him by directing him to a center against psychological addictions because ... it really is!