Get ready for new Highscores.

Sitting in a plane in the fog recently I had the time to read a mainstream media viewspaper. Of course the main dish was a story about the financial crisis and the need to print a lot of money for some bank or other.

I don't know about you, but I am a little skeptical about the large sums of money that are being pumped into the financial system by governments worldwide. It is not that I have anything against saving jobs or preserving the little trust in banking that still remains. The sheer size of these sums is so large that it is just too hard to take any of this serious anymore.

Oh sure, I am aware that all of us and our children and our children's children will spend an ever increasing portion of our salary to repay these sums. And I am just as aware of the fact that all that money that is being printed by the reserve banks of the world will boost inflation to new record heights – thus devaluating the little amount of money us small guys own. Even in the last ten years the perceived value of money has changed a lot. Today numbers need to be a lot higher to be impressive.

This reminds me of the technical evolution of pinball machines. In the Seventies the mechanical score counters of these machines used to have four digits. If you managed to score 5,000 to 8,000 points you were a pretty good player. Then newer and newer pinball models hit the markets, soon the mechanical displays of the pinball machines turned into digital displays and the score counters increased from five to six to seven and more digits. Now you need to make millions and millions to be a good player.

Kind of makes you wonder … maybe it is possible to take a look at a pinball machine to know what state the economy is in. In the Seventies a thousand Deutschmarks or Dollars were a nice sum of money, today it barely covers a months rent in most cities. While it once only cost a quarter or less to play a game of pinball it now costs a Euro to play one game today.

So what will the future bring? One possibility may well be the collapse of some of our western economies because the interest of all the accumulated state debt alone will be so high that it can't be serviced anymore – forget about reducing the principle.

Another possibility may be that we all decide not to repay our debt to the reserve banks. After all they created the money out of thin air just by issuing it. Why don't we do the same with the accumulated debt? Make it vanish into thin air again. From nothing it came, to nothing it goes.

Game over. Please insert a new quarter.