Obvious too

The smoke had turned the evening sun into a bruised coin above the Gironde. From the terrace of the beach bar, the Atlantic looked inviting: blue-grey water, shoulders of surf, children digging fortifications against the tide. Behind them, the sky was darker.

Anna put the bottle of rosé back into the ice bucket. “Right,” she said. “Nobody is solving capitalism before dinner.”

Marcin looked over his sunglasses. “That sounds like something a capitalist would say.”

“Take it steady,” said Pete. “We’ve had a few glasses, one swim, and half a plate of oysters. Oh, f*ck, we are them aren’t we…”

“Everyone is a c*nt” said Isobel. “That’s rather the point.”

A helicopter passed low, carrying water inland. Everyone watched until the noise thinned.

Tony poured the wine. “Fine, but how did printing money end up in that f’cking cloud?”

“It didn’t, directly, I mean, it ended up in a heap of clouds both real and digital,” Anna said. “But you can’t draw a cartoon pipeline from the Central Bank to a burning pine forest.”

“Shame,” said Marcin. “Would make the diagram easier.”

“Not that long a bow though, quantitative easing was, in effect, the hyperinflation of money in the financial system. Central banks created vast quantities of liquidity, suppressed the price of borrowing and inflated the value of assets. The new money did not initially flood into wages and everyday goods; it flowed into bonds, property, equities, private finance and eventually crypto or anything digital—multiplying claims on future wealth far faster than the real economy could create it..”

“Elsewhere being?” asked Kelly.

“LIke i said. Shares. Property. Private equity. Venture capital. Corporate debt. Non-fungible Art. & million dollar bananas. Crypto. Memes. Data centres. Anything scarce, fashionable, or capable of being described in a pitch deck as inevitable.”

Pete raised his glass. “To inevitability. The most profitable tense.”

Anna ignored him. “When safe government bonds pay almost nothing, investors start looking for somewhere else to put their money. That was part of the plan. Central banks made borrowing cheap so businesses and households would spend and invest rather than sit on cash. It helped stop the economy collapsing, but it also pushed huge amounts of money into property, shares and more speculative bets.”

“And in the wider sense?” said Isobel.

“In the wider sense, asset owners got richer. Companies could borrow cheaply. Funds could leverage themselves. Houses became investment vehicles. Loss-making technology firms became visions. Bitcoin became digital gold, then freedom, then an inflation hedge, then a casino chip with a theology department.”

Marcin nodded solemnly. “A currency you cannot spend, backed by electricity you cannot spare.”

“Bit harsh,” said Tony.

“Bit accurate,” said Kelly.

The waiter brought another plate of oysters and advised them, in French, not to drive south. Roads were closing unpredictably. The fire had shifted again.

Pete watched him leave. “There. Reality has entered the conversation and immediately issued travel restrictions.”

Anna squeezed lemon over an oyster. “The problem is not simply that QE inflated Bitcoin. It’s that cheap money changed the price of patience. When capital costs nothing, the future can be dragged into the present and sold.”

“And now they’re selling future wars,” Marcin said.

Tony frowned. “Defence isn’t speculation. Europe has an actual security problem.”

“Whatev’s” said Marcin. “I said the market has already turned the problem into a trade.”

Anna nodded. “That is what finance does. It takes a fear about the future, prices it today, and then starts looking for ways to make the fear investable. Defence companies, drones, surveillance, cybersecurity, autonomous systems, critical minerals.”

“Still more useful than Bitcoin,” Pete said.

“Possibly,” Anna replied. “But watch the language. Weapons become ‘security’. Military technology becomes ‘dual use’. Arms investment becomes ‘resilience’. Things that pension funds once excluded on ethical grounds are being brought back in under a different label.”

“So they found a loophole?” Kelly asked.

“Not quite,” said Anna. “They moved the fence. Instead of asking whether an industry profits from warfare, the rule increasingly asks whether the particular weapon is explicitly prohibited. If it isn’t banned, it can be presented as responsible investment.”

Marcin lifted his glass. “Nothing immoral here. Just a resilience opportunity with missiles.”

“You’re being glib,” Tony said.

“I’m having wine beside a burning forest while markets take bets on the next battlefield. Glib is about the right register.”

Anna looked inland. “The danger is not that every defence investment is wrong. The danger is that once war becomes an asset class, peace begins to look like poor market performance.”

“That sounds poetic,” Tony said.

“It’s accounting,” she replied. “A company borrows against expected future earnings. A fund borrows to buy the company. A platform borrows to grow before it makes money. A household borrows because the house will supposedly rise forever. Everyone spends tomorrow today.”

“And then tomorrow catches fire,” said Isobel. “Or gets the shit bombed out of it to keep the pensions retunrs flowing so that gen f*cking whatever can consume a bit more before shuffling off the mortal coil.”

Nobody answered for a moment.

Beyond the dunes, ash moved like snow.

Kelly leaned back. “But we did need QE. Without it, unemployment, bankruptcies, foreclosures—the whole machine could have seized.”

“Yes,” said Anna. “The choice wasn’t between QE and moral purity. It was between intervention and collapse. But once the emergency passed, nobody knew how to leave. Asset prices had become protected. Every wobble invited rescue. We socialised the floor and privatised the ceiling.”

“Meaning?” asked Pete.

“Meaning investors learned that risk was real until it became systemic. Then the public balance sheet arrived with a stretcher.”

Marcin lifted an oyster shell. “And somehow the stretcher was also an escalator. I mean, we could have slowed down instead. Taken the proverbial chill pill. Let some prices fall, let weak companies fail, accepted that recovery might take longer.”

“And had fewer people lose their homes and jobs?” Tony asked.

“No,” Anna said. “That part still needed protecting. But we could have protected people without protecting every asset price. We could have used the pause to reduce working hours, repair public services, invest in housing and energy, and accept lower consumption as relief rather than failure.”

“A managed slowdown,” said Isobel.

“Exactly. Less speed, less debt, less pressure to turn every future income stream into something tradable. It would have been slower and politically messier, but it might also have been more honest. Instead, we treated acceleration as the cure for a crisis caused by too much leverage, too much extraction and too little patience.”

They drank.

“If ifs and buts were fiscal policy, we’d all be bloody Keynes by now.”

“Keynes would have liked the wine,” Pete said.

“He was one of the Cambridge Apostles,” Anna replied. “Secret intellectual society. Lots of philosophy, emotional entanglement and men taking one another terribly seriously.”

“Gay club, then?”

“Not officially. More a debating society with unusually complicated sleeping arrangements. Keynes later joined Bloomsbury, married a Russian ballerina and helped redesign capitalism between dinner parties.”

“His granddaughter does a good economics podcast,” Pete said.

“Great-great-niece,” Anna corrected him. “He didn’t have children.”

“Fine. Ifs and buts, nieces and nuts.”

A group came up from the beach, wet-haired and laughing. One of them checked a phone, stopped, and turned the screen to the others. The laughter vanished. Another evacuation order.

Tony said, “Still, you’re jumping from finance to climate catastrophe. Cheap money funded solar farms too. Batteries. Electric cars.”

“Of course,” Anna said. “Money is not guilty by molecular structure. It funded useful things and stupid things and destructive things. The question is what the system rewarded fastest.”

“Scale,” said Isobel.

“Exactly. Scale, extraction, turnover, market capture. Cheap debt rewarded companies that could expand rapidly. Airlines bought fleets. Shipping expanded. Warehouses multiplied. Oil and gas firms refinanced. Car finance put more and heavier vehicles on more roads, electric or otherwise, Private equity bought social infrastructure and demanded individualised returns. Data centres and Crypto miners turned electricity into encrypted scarcity, f*cked the cost of living.”

Pete frowned. “How much of the debt funded the industries fuelling the fires?”

“No clean number,” Anna said. “Because it isn’t one industry. It’s the cumulative effect of the whole consumption base speeding up. More flights, more freight, more concrete, more cars, more servers, more energy, more disposable goods, more houses treated as assets, more everything financed against future income.”

She turned the oyster shell over in her hand. “A bank lends to an energy company. A pension fund buys the bond. A central bank supports the market. Private equity borrows to expand a chain of warehouses. A logistics firm buys more trucks. A household takes on debt for a larger car or second or third house. None of those decisions starts the fire by itself. Together they increase extraction, production, transport and energy use until the atmosphere becomes the waste pipe for the entire economy.”

“And the carbon vanishes into accounting categories,” Kelly said.

“Exactly. Growth, liquidity, infrastructure, consumer choice. Each transaction looks ordinary on its own. The catastrophe is cumulative.”

“So no fingerprints,” Kelly said.

“Fingerprints everywhere,” Anna replied. “No single hand. Just millions of hands all being told to wave goodbye faster.”

Marcin looked toward the smoke. “The perfect crime is a spreadsheet with good governance.”

Pete stood. “Swim.”

“What?” said Anna.

“We’re becoming unbearable. cool off a bit eh…”

They walked down through the hot sand. The water was cold enough to reset the body. Pete and Marcin ducked and dived under the few small waves. Anna floated on her back, watching the smoke spread across the upper atmosphere. For ten minutes they were reduced to breath, salt, balance, and the ancient administrative problem of not drowning.

Back at the bar, wrapped in towels, they ordered red wine because the evening had become strange enough to justify it.

Isobel said, “Here is what I cannot understand. We know consumption is killing the planet, and our answer is to double down.”

“Triple down,” said Pete. “Growth must grow.”

“But why?” she asked. “We already have enough things.”

Tony shook his head. “Some of us do. Billions don’t.”

“That’s true,” she said. “But the rich-world promise is not sufficiency distributed better. It’s universal entry into the same furnace.”

Anna nodded. “Because the system cannot distinguish between meeting needs and manufacturing appetite. Both appear as demand. A meal and a private jet are merely transactions of different size.”

“And restraint appears as recession,” Kelly said.

“Yes. If people buy fewer cars, flights, kitchens, clothes, subscriptions and speculative tokens, politicians do not announce that material pressure has eased. They announce a crisis in confidence.”

Marcin tasted the red. “Confidence is when everyone agrees not to mention the fire or still thinks they have time to put it out.”

The first emergency alert sounded across the terrace, phones chiming out of sequence. The message was precautionary: remain informed, avoid certain roads, prepare to move if instructed.

Pete read it twice. “Prepare to move. That’s civilisation’s new slogan.”

Tony topped up the glasses. “You lot are still romanticising contraction. Tell a vineyard worker, a cleaner, a factory hand that consumption must fall. Their job goes first, not the billionaire’s yacht.”

“Correct,” Anna said. “Which is why indiscriminate austerity is useless. The issue isn’t less of everything for everyone. It’s less extraction, less waste, fewer luxury emissions, longer-lived goods, public investment, lower working hours, better services. You shrink the destructive throughput while protecting the human life inside it.”

“Sounds difficult,” said Pete.

“It is.”

“Any easier option?”

“Yes. Pretend green consumption will replace dirty consumption one-for-one, while total consumption keeps rising forever.”

“Excellent,” Pete said. “Put me down for that.”

Isobel smiled, then looked inland. “The fire is the unpaid invoice.”

“No free lunch,” said Marcin. “But we can get the invoice sent to our kids, or better yet get them to scrub our future dishes to pay for it, unless of course the restaurant is burns down in the meantime.”

A gust rattled the umbrellas. Fine ash landed on the table, on the oysters, in the wine. Tony covered his glass with his palm.

“There,” Anna said quietly. “That’s the whole model. We thought externalities meant someone, something, somewhere else. Another country, another class, another generation. But there is no elsewhere left. The atmosphere has excellent debt collection.”

Pete brushed ash from the bottle. “And digital non-fungible investments?”

“What about it?”

“Where does it sit in your grand theory?”

Anna considered. “As a monument. Not the cause. A monument to surplus capital hunting scarcity after we made money abundant. A tradable claim on collective belief, consuming real energy to defend non-real assets, while forests that took a century to grow disappear in an afternoon.”

Tony objected. “All value rests on belief.”

“True,” she said. “But some beliefs keep rain out. Some move food. Some care for children. Some are entries in a ledger shouting that their uselessness is purity.”

Marcin raised his glass. “Pithy. Cruel. Mostly fair.”

“That’s it?”

“No. Can always ask what our pensions own, what our banks finance, what our governments subsidise, what our companies call growth, and which futures our cheap money has already spent.”

Anna looked at the darkening ridge.

“Small steps” she said. “Enough at first to see the chains that bind us.”

The evacuation siren began somewhere beyond the dunes.