Yesterday, I went to my first Heartcore class.

I have been working so hard for the last few months that I have done literally no proper exercise. I have done the stoop, twist, and baby lift a few thousand times, but while that does wonders for your lower back muscles and your thighs if you do it right, it’s not a fitness program.

So I went to Heartcore, which is just up the road.

It’s incredibly civilised. The whole place feels like the lobby of an expensive hotel, and there are only a few people in each class. The first sessions’s free, so you feel completely at ease about the whole experiment. They even play that tinkly music which you hear at spas, the nose-flute meditation arias which go with sandlewood candles and paper underwear.

Cool. Pilates in the relaxed environment.

And then the class started, and I felt pain, and it did not stop for fifty five of your Earth minutes. I burned, laboured, flaked out, restarted, struggled, and travailed, and the tiny pixielady at the front smiled benignly on my efforts while of all things Tone Lōc played on the stereo. Seriously, I have not heard his music since teenagers used it to seduce one another on the dancefloor when I was, er, a teenager.

And I knew then that I was in the Evil Day Spa OF DEATH.

And it was awesome.

The financial crisis, then and now.

First, we indulged in fairydust economics. I say “we” because in a weird way we were all in on it. We accepted the proposition, which we knew to be untrue, that we could get richer by doing nothing. It was never explicitly stated, but it was sort of everywhere. Credit was cheap, goods seemed to be on sale all the time, everything came with a free gift. The whole notion dovetailed with the idea that the Internet made things cheaper, or free. It was great. But somehow, we should probably have asked the hard questions, like: how can any nation afford this? How can the world afford this? Where is all this free money actually coming from? Because the rule with this kind of thing is simple: if you can’t understand how it could be in any way true in a sane world, there is a good chance it’s total nonsense. (Note that there are various practices kicking around which appear to violate this rule. Note also that they probably do not.)

The way fairydust economics worked was this: banks made loans to people who generally would not get loans. They were able to do this because they were bundling the debts to get lower rates, which they were able to pass on. It was actually a pretty clever dodge. It was capitalism working for the little guy, in the sense that the scale of the companies involved allowed smaller borrowers to get rates usually reserved for institutions. Then, however, the process became a financial product you could package and sell, which created a demand. There were, however, finite numbers of people who were basically able to repay a debt but could not get a loan. So loans were created to meet a market demand. These loans were not terribly well-considered, and a number of them – a distressingly large number – were made to people who could not afford to repay them. In fact, some of these loans were created in such a way as to suggest that they were never supposed to be repaid: the interest payments were actually rolled into the capital sum, so the borrower never had to pay anything at all until the loan came due, which was a very long time. These less good loans were bundled and sold in the same way as the last lot, and because the market was so strong no one really looked at them very hard. The ratings agencies sprinkled them with fairy dust and pronounced them good. So they were sold, resold, bundled, sliced, and so on, and the market continued to go up. Everyone got richer on paper. It was magic.

And then dawn came, the fairy dust turned back into mud, and suddenly none of these mighty financial instruments was worth anything. The amount of money in the system was radically reduced. (To make up for this, by the way, governments and banks allowed a massive sluice of money from the criminal economy to flow in; many now worry that the door, once opened, cannot easily be closed.)

But the interesting thing here is what happened when all the air went out of the balloon. Let’s suppose that non-existent money – money wished into existence by over-valuing a paper asset and then selling it or borrowing against it – accounted for twenty percent of the total when the crash came. I have no idea what the actual number is. Perhaps it’s one percent. Perhaps it’s fifty. If the damage were evenly distributed, we’d all be that much poorer than we thought. Our bank accounts would be twenty percent less valuable, and that would hurt, but since we’d all be worth financially less by the same proportion, it would be equitable. Some things would suddenly seem expensive. Others would adjust.

But suppose not everyone lost the same proportion. Suppose it were possible for organisations to lobby on their own behalf to prevent that from happening, shifting a part of their loss to others. “Others” in that case would be the wider population, of course. So such an organisation would, effectively, be making a profit out of the whole disaster. Suppose, indeed, that individuals who had been very much a part of the whole insanity had been able to move their money to safe havens, and preserve the inflation of their monetary worth when everything else was contracted. That would be, in effect, a reward for screwing everyone.

Now, that would be something to get angry about.