The Forest of High Finance had strict standards. It was not a jungle, you see. Jungles were chaotic, uncivilised places where the strong simply devoured the weak without first consulting a legal team or executing a leveraged buy…
‘Excuse me, Mr Narration,’ interrupted a Field Mouse wearing a tiny pinstripe waistcoat. ‘We also have a board of directors and a regulated commodities exchange.’
Right. As I was saying, before the rodents began billing for corporate compliance…
In a quiet, still green clearing within the forest, the animals decided to abandon the barter system. Bartering was tedious, especially for Barney the Badger, who was tired of lugging forty sacks of pinecones to the lake to buy a single jar of river trout from the Observant Otters.
To solve this, Barney created the Acorn Standard. Every animal was assigned a stash based on their perceived productivity.
Naturally, the Foxes set up the first bank. Within a month, Reginald the Rude Fox had convinced the rest of the forest that holding physical acorns was remarkably primitive.
‘Why carry bulky oak produce when you can trade in Oak Notes?’ Reginald purred, flicking his tail. ‘It is lighter, cleaner and completely backed by the absolute promise that the acorns exist in our deep, underground vault.’
The animals agreed. It seemed immensely clever.
Before long, Reginald the Rude realised that nobody ever actually asked to see the acorns in the vault. So, he began issuing Oak Notes for acorns that had not yet fallen from the trees. Then, he issued notes for trees that had not yet grown. Finally, he created Future-Leaf Derivatives, allowing the Owls to bet on whether a storm might blow down a rival squirrel’s nest.
While Barney worked sixteen hours a day digging burrows to earn a single paper note, Reginald and his inner circle spent their afternoons sipping fermented berry juice on high branches. They bought golden monocles, hired Heavy-coated Hedgehogs as private security and declared their hollowed-out Oak Tower a self-governing tax haven.
‘We do not dig, nor do we hunt,’ Reginald the Rude announced to his board of Wiry Weasels, raising a goblet of aged dew. ‘We simply manage the perception of abundance.’
One August afternoon, a severe drought struck the forest. The streams dried up, the soil hardened and the animals queued outside Reginald’s vault to redeem their paper notes for actual food.
Reginald the Rude stepped onto his balcony, adjusted his silk tie and opened the vault doors. Inside sat a single, dried-up twig.
‘Where are the acorns?’ shouted Barney the Badger, clutching a fistful of worthless paper.
‘My dear mustelid,’ Reginald laughed, hopping into a luxury hot-air balloon woven from spider silk. ‘The acorns were leverage! We re-invested them into cloud-seeding options which unfortunately expired at noon.’
As the balloon drifted effortlessly above the starving, bewildered crowd, Reginald the Rude popped a cork and looked down at the frantic chaos below.
The moral:
Must be funny in the rich men’s world.
