Ironing Boards

The numbers associated with the current financial crisis are getting mind-boggling.

Bonuses in the millions (for failing)
Losses in the billions
Bailouts in the trillions
Liabilities in the quadrillions
and so on and so on...

It's both surreal and unreal. So it's time to think of a way to get back to reality. But what could we use?

Currencies are hard to measure at present as we are all hell-bent on debasing the damned things. What is the alternative?

Ah, yes! The faithful ironing board!

In a past professional life I used to make ironing boards for a living (I also used to make tea for a living, but that's another story...). Not glamorous, but on reflection, I'm actually very proud of it. Millions of people now use something 'real' that I had a big influence in developing.

It's 'real' - unlike most of the nonsense going on in the economy at present.

For simplicity sake, going forwards I'll refer to an ironing board as being:

1 IB sells for £10 (for now)
1 IB generates about £2 of profit

So if you make 1000 ironing boards, it should generate £10,000 of sales and £2,000 of profit. On an average day a factory of about 50+ people would make 1500-2000 ironing boards. Quite a bit of effort to generate only £3-4k of profit.

Why bother when Governments and banks can just print billions?? That's the problem that our country faces currently.

So when bankers say they 'deserve' millions in bonuses and billions in bailouts, think how many ironing boards that equates to...