Dwain and Henry – A guide to the current financial crisis.

Henry is a very rich banker from New York who votes republican so that he can get richer. Dwain is a dude from Ohio, he has a limited grasp on geography. He has heard of someplace called Europe, although he can't point to it on the map or tell you what the capital city is called. Dwain also votes republican but he is not sure why, somebody told him it was the patriotic thing to do and he knows he’s defiantley a patriot. Dwain is on welfare, he his 5 children by 4 mothers, a big pickup and a bad hair do.

Henry is smart, very smart. One day he was trying to dream up ways of getting even richer and he came up with a cunning plan. Since nobody else would lend Dwain any money to buy a house, he figured that he could and then he could charge Dwain extra interest, especially if payments were deferred for a few years. Now Dwain doesn’t really have much of a long perspective, he plans for the end of the week when he’ll drink a few beers and maybe the up coming holiday when he’ll go and shot stuff with his buddies. So when Henry says “have $500000 get a nice house and pay it back in a couple of years", he just thinks – cool, so long as it has a big garage!

Is Henry worried that Dwain won’t be able to make the repayments? Nope, this the smart bit. He packages up the debt, with lots of others like it, hides the downside and sells it on to the Northern Cock Bank in England as a high return investment. He is out of trouble and has made loads of money out of both Dwain and Northern Cock. Northern Cock are also happy because lots of investors in other banks in England are saying, wow look at Northern Cock, they are getting better returns than us, I want some of that. So lots of other banks buy similar packages from Henry and his buddies.

And what about the people who are supposed to regulate all this? Well Mr George and his mate Alan believe that this things are better left to sort themselves out and anyway, Henry votes republican and donates to George's birthday party - so he must be a good guy. George is a bit simple and can only concentrate on one thing at a time and he is far to busy funneling tax payers money to his mate Cheney, via lots of dodgy dealings in Iraq.

So everything goes unchecked until one day when Dwain has to decide between a very expensive repayment on his home loan or a new pick-up and he thinks to himself "damn those alloy wheels look fine". So he defers on the debt, Northern Cock goes belly up and the whole World comes crashing down.

As for Henry – he doesn't care because he is hanging out in his beach house in Gran Camen, drinking a cocktail and spending his inordinately huge bonus.