You don't need to be an economist to get this.. LOL.

PRODUCT recall: neo-liberal capitalism.

Economic Ideology Inc - motto: Refusing To Learn From Our Mistakes Since the Sixth Millennium BC - wishes to inform customers that quality issues have been identified with some of its most popular products including No Regulation Is Good Regulation, Trust Me I'm a Hedge Funder and I Can't Believe It's Not Mortgagable.

It has come to our attention that recent batches of neo-liberal capitalism have not contained the advertised levels of efficiency and improved economic indicators - or the bonus invisible hand promised on the outside of the box. Others have been found to contain traces of bubbles, incompetence, corruption and out-and-out economic insanity.

As such, they may pose a de-housing hazard to small children.

Sorry about that.

Sorry, too, about the mass sackings, the rampant global panic and all those retirees who've discovered that negative returns and positive losses have reduced their nest eggs to a couple of tins of no-name pet food.

Rest assured that, as with China's contaminated food scandals, those responsible will be given a brief show trial before being taken out the back and shot.

Ha. Just joking. The guilty parties will, in fact, receive a good, hard tch tch-ing over Avruga caviar tartlets in the executive canteen before being lightly flogged with a taxpayer-funded golden parachute.

After all, just because we don't believe in statism while we're blimping up on bloated derivatives doesn't mean we can't about-turn when bail-outs are in the offing.

And just because the trickle-down effect didn't work out doesn't mean we shouldn't try trickling up.

At present, many of our executives are down to their last private hovercopter and have no idea where their next pair of solid gold manservants is coming from. But that doesn't mean they're not working around the clock looting the bejesus out of the shattered remains of the financial markets, sorry, I mean identifying exactly what went wrong.

The trouble, it seems, is that many of our high-level customers did not go to the trouble of finding out what they were actually buying. This problem was compounded by the fact that we did not go to the trouble of finding out what we were actually selling.

In fact, if anyone does know what was in all those brown paper bags with the cartoon dollar signs whizzing round the global markets could they please contact our head office ASAP? Something about synthetic credit default collateralisations, was it?

Apparently confusion also existed over the real v the unreal economy. Like the virtual horizon in a 747, we now realise there's only so much a computer screen can tell us about the nose-crushing capabilities of an approaching alp. Next time we'll occasionally look out the window.

In the meantime, we do feel it's important to point out that neo-liberal capitalism would not have bombed so spectacularly if it had been used strictly as directed. The fine print on the packaging made it clear that our merchandise would only operate at its optimum if used under pristine, free-market conditions.

Thanks to the continuing existence of governments and their pesky regulations, this failed to occur, meaning we have yet to witness the magic of utterly unadulterated financial greed in action (a force we believe would achieve far superior results than slightly adulterated financial greed).

Clause 765b of our instruction manual also states that our products are only guaranteed if used by consumers who behave in a 100 per cent rational fashion 100 per cent of the time. We realise this rules out anyone who is actually human but hey, capitalist emptor.

While not all neo-liberal capitalism products contain risks of sudden job loss and recession (even when used in sub-prime conditions by toxic customers), the entire brand portfolio will be recalled as a precautionary measure.

We wish we could tell you its replacement will take into account unavoidable inevitabilities such as avarice, fear and the bust bit of boom and bust cycles but we can't promise anything except, as always, that economic policy always trumps social policy, that tax cuts are the solution to everything and that our emperors are never naked but simply wearing flesh-coloured body suits with super realistic genital detailing.

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Neo-liberal capitalism's fun until the side effects kick in | The Australian