Category Archives: accounting

Happy Days Are Here Again

1 Reply
RECESSION IS OVER!
Credit Crisis Solved By 
New Jersey Accountant
World Rejoices • Blue Skies Ahead
Richieville News Service- PARSIPPANY
Spontaneous celebrations broke out in major cities and small hamlets across the globe as the news spread that Rav Sengupta, an accountant from Parsippany, New Jersey, had solved the looming credit crisis that has been threatening the world economy and in doing so, had set the human race on a path toward new heights of prosperity. Mr. Sengupta, a graduate of Ramapo State College, said he found the solution quite by accident while playing around with a new version of the spreadsheet program, Excel.
“I was just messing around, looking at my Facebook page, shopping on iTunes and texting to a friend of mine while I was checking out the new features in Excel,” he explained via Twitter. “And I realized how easy it was to shift numbers from one column to another and I thought , ‘Hey, this would work for the credit crisis!'”
Mr. Sengupta’s brainstorm, in its simplest form, was to shift the debts accrued over the past decade from one column to another on the world balance sheets. 
“After all,” he told this reporter, via Skype, “that’s what the debt crisis is, really – just a bunch of numbers on a spread sheet. If you know enough about accounting, you can shift them around any way you want.”
The Nobel Prize committee, meeting in a special session in Stockholm, announced that they had awarded the New Jersey business major a combined Nobel Prize in Economics and Peace. In their announcement, the committee said, “Mr. Sangupta, though his hard work, and with only occasional breaks to browse through clips on YouTube, has shown how the world economic crisis can be solved by shifting the debt from working people who would lose their jobs, their homes, their health care and their retirement savings to banks and bankers who now will lose, well, basically nothing. Now the debts are all cleared and we can start over. Problem solved!”
On Wall Street, the news  of the resolution to the crisis was met with good-natured resignation. “Yeah, we knew about that solution,” said Goldman Sachs executive Carl Veneering. “We were just hoping no one else would figure it out. But since you have, what the heck, enjoy it. We can always make the money back next year.”

For more Richieville humor, read the sci-fi novel, Rate Me Red.

It’s All Greek Edition

Leave a reply
E.U. Governments Rescue Greece
Find One Trillion Dollars In Other Pants
Richieville News Service – BONN
After weeks of half-measures and false starts, the countries of the European Union agreed to establish a bailout fund for the troubled Greek economy, after finding approximately $1 trillion in extra cash in the pocket of a pair of jeans.
“Yeah, we thought we couldn’t afford to do anything,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel, “but then I was putting these jeans in the wash and I happened to look in the pocket.”
The “found money” was actually about 780 billion euros that someone had folded into a wad, stuffed in their pocket and forgotten about.  
“Guys at the International Monetary Fund are always doing that,” said Merkel. “Even though I keep telling them not to.”
Greece has been teetering on the verge of economic collapse but other E.U countries, especially Germany, had been reluctant to reward what they saw as irresponsible behavior on the part of the Greek government. That stance changed rapidly over the weekend when it became clear that Greece’s problems threatened the European financial system.
“Hey, there’s always some cash lying around,” said Ms. Merkel. “When we realized the banks might be in trouble, we just started looking harder. We found about 180 billion euros under a sofa cushion, and another 50 billion at the bottom of a sock drawer. It’s amazing how much money you can find when you really want to.”
News Analysis
Greek Workers Need Fiscal Discipline,
Say U.S. Hedge Fund Managers
In return for the E.U. bailout, Greek workers will have to accept harsh new austerity measures and scale back on long-established benefits such as early retirement. So say the majority of U.S. economic experts, such as hedge fund manager David Tepper who earned $4 billion dollars in 2009, thanks to successfuly predicting the federal government’s bailout of U.S. banks. 
Like James H. Simons, who earned $2.5 billion in 2009, and John A. Paulson who made $2 billion by betting against the housing market, the top U.S. hedge fund managers had nothing but contempt for what they saw as pampered and spoiled Greek workers. 
To these financial wizards, who collectively made over $11 billion last year during the worst recession in decades, the lesson of the debt crisis is clear: If the Greek people want their economy saved, then they must be willing to give up their civil service jobs, accept pay cuts and reduced government services.
And it’s not just hedge fund managers who are calling for fiscal discipline. Investment bankers are also issuing stern warnings to the workers of Greece and other European nations. An executive at Goldman Sachs was adamant about the need for strict austerity measures.
“These Greeks have been living on easy street, with their paid vacations and health insurance, but now they have to tighten their belts,” said the executive. The banker, who engineered the Goldman deals that made the firm millions while helping the Greek government hide its debt through currency swaps and other financial instruments, asked to remain anonymous. “The free ride is over,” he added. “I mean, who do these people think they are- us?”