Here, on a sleepy stretch of shoreline at the far end of Asia, is surely the biggest and most secretive gathering of ships in maritime history. Their numbers are equivalent to the entire British and American navies combined; their tonnage is far greater. Container ships, bulk carriers, oil tankers – all should be steaming fully laden between China, Britain, Europe and the US, stocking camera shops, PC Worlds and Argos depots ahead of the retail pandemonium of 2009. But their water has been stolen.

They are a powerful and tangible representation of the hurricanes that have been wrought by the global economic crisis; an iron curtain drawn along the coastline of the southern edge of Malaysia’s rural Johor state, 50 miles east of Singapore harbour.

My name is Bri and I’m 24 years old. I learned on August 24 that I had been offered an internship with E. Jean Caroll, advice columnist at ELLE magazine and all-around kick-ass woman. This was simultaneously surprising, exhilarating, and terrifying, as I have been homeless and living in a beat-up old trailer for the past six months. My screaming, bouncing, and erratic flailing awoke my sleeping boyfriend in a panic. He was sure that something terrible had happened. In the previous two weeks, I had lost my employment, again, (I was laid off from my full-time job in July 2008 and have vacillated between temporary assignments and unemployment since then), my trailer had been towed with all my belongings inside of it (I’m currently living in a beat-up, non-running RV on a dusty back lot in Riverside, and my trailer is still in the impound yard where the storage fee is increasing $80 per day), and soon after my car had broken down. I poured the small cushion of accrued savings that was meant to help me re-stabilize into fixing the car. We were in dire straits and had drained our last financial resources. What else could possibly go wrong?

A couple days ago I was on my G5 on the way to meet Jaypee in the Adriatic, when the pilot came back and said “Ben, we don’t know where we’re going or where we’ve been”. What? Ok, so I bought the TomTom online trying to save a little and it was just a coincidence we were cutting through the Triangle.

I knew what the problem was, but I didn’t want to alarm the pilot. I carry a spare sextant with me and told him to just keep going til he could shoot the sun at noon.

The real reason the nav system hiccuped is the incredible invisible force starting to affect the earth’s magnetic field as well as satellite transmissions–Dr. Evil would pay more than two million dollars for this weapon: Derivatives.

Have a look at the various categories on this site: http://www.usdebtclock.org/ and ignore the rate of household wealth loss or how much bigger the bailout growing over GDP. Check out the ” Estimated Currency and Credit Derivatives” category. Some people argue that this huge 644 trillion dollar number actually offsets itself because half of it would be people buying, and the other half selling. We would like to think that, but recent history has indicated otherwise. Big firms sold options, which are derivatives, and insured them through AIG. That went well.

This is going to take a lot of media to spin positively, but as Jaypee pointed out in the previous post, media is now “reluctantly” in place. Got media? Check.