---

Piracy lives! But not in the black eye-patch, cutlass wielding style of old. Nay! Nowadays, me hearties, it lives in the plush settings of air-conditioned offices and limousines; and the pirates - some piratesses, too - travel in limousines and private jets.   

Of course, back when Bluebeard and Captain Morgan traipsed the Caribbean bumping off all those honest hard-working Spanish and French and Dutch sailors, and stealing all their hard-won gold and silver and doubloons; they moved around in ponderous sailing ships that needed large smelly crews who lived on hardtack biscuits and salted fish.

Nowadays, though, modern western pirates are land-based, shower frequently, better-dressed, and tend to move in style. Doubtless they still go wenching but now guzzle chi-chi wines rather than cheap rum.  

Today's pirates are also more subtle. Today's pirates bundle mortgages, assign values to assets, and describe financial packages. Replacing Bluebeard's noisy cannons and curved cutlasses, today's pirates use newly-coined words and complex figures to plunder and pillage. Today's pirates, as Arthur Andersen did with Enron, use the power of the computer to create abstract concepts of revenue and thus create and then plunder a billion-dollar enterprise.

Instead of showing the actual money that changed hands when one guy sold a commodity to another guy, today's pirates create something they call revenue by describing how a commodity has 'increased in market value'. Having described and, by complex accounting process having proven, that there has been an increase in 'market value'; one set of accountants then tells another that there has been such an increase in the value of a company's assets.

The other set of accountants - many tucked away in big banks and investment houses - then agree with that newly described valuation. Following this agreement, they allow and encourage the loan or investment of money that is based on that newly described value.

With that increase in value, the company that sells and the company that buys, both 'book' a profit or increase in value by describing and displaying that profit or increase in its 'Profit and Loss' statement. Both go a step further and show that assets have increased in value, and it is this value increase which allows the company to describe and display an increase in its 'Balance Sheet'.

Working together, a separated but globally inter-connected group of accountants, using the new tools of computers and current accounting rules, are able, and have been able, to steal the real assets of millions of ordinary people. Ordinary people like you and me.

Accounting piracy

Enron was a huge steal. Countrywide Financial has been another. Now, in the latest twists, the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers show the consummation of yet another set of acts of accounting piracy. Then last Wednesday came the crowning act.

President 'Dubya' Bush, looking his usual earnest self but somehow still not managing to look too bright or intelligent, stood before all America - indeed, the whole world - and asked all Americans to pay up to $700 billion dollars so as to help rescue... you've guessed it - the pirates!

Imagine that! Think back to 1660, in the grand old days of open ocean piracy, when Bluebeard and Captain Morgan ruled the Caribbean; did the Royal Navy collude with the pirates, or did the Royal Navy 'bluejackets' try to eradicate the pirates?

Come to think of it, I do believe that Captain Morgan was knighted by King Charles ll and became Sir Henry Morgan and was made a Lieutenant-Governor of Jamaica. So maybe piracy has always been an acceptable way of doing business.

So maybe what's happening now in world financial circles is no different than what Bluebeard and Morgan did and, horror of horrors, that our modern pirates still seem to do.  Maybe our modern pirates will get the same quality of reward. Come to think of it, back in Morgan and Bluebeard's hey-day, Bermudians also engaged in what was called then called 'privateering' - which is nothing more, really, than an elegant way of describing piracy.

I warn you. Watch that quiet, mousy little accountant from next door. He (she) ain't what he (she) seems. Behind closed doors and staring at his (her) computer screen, he - or she - is really a swashbuckling modern pirate.

You have been warned![[In-content Ad]]

---