Money: A Murder Story

Discovery Channel Magazine, May 2014

Discovery Channel Magazine is sitting on a hotel balcony in Tripoli, Libya. From here, it is a beautiful place, not at all as one would picture it from the news broadcasts. The Mediterranean Sea is brilliant blue, and Libya’s coastline stretches out of sight in either direction, barely developed beyond a few miles of Tripoli itself. Viewed from here, one thinks: it’s got a Med coast the size of France’s, only warmer, and unlike France it has all the oil wealth it could possibly need to enrich its citizens. What a lucky country this should be.

But it’s not. I am in Tripoli trying to track down the assets of the Libyan Investment Authority, a sovereign wealth fund that is supposed to look after Libya’s oil wealth and invest it for the future, for the good of the people. But things keep going wrong. First, it was the trophy investments of Saif Gaddafi, the son of dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who on a whim would take the country’s money and put it into stupid things like Italy’s Juventus Football Club. Then, it was the bankers. Goldman Sachs managed to lose almost $1.3 billion of the LIA’s money by putting it into complex equity derivatives which mostly expired worthless in 2011, while the bank itself is alleged to have made $350 million in profits. The financial crisis rendered one investment after another useless: the French bank Societe Generale is alleged to have lost the Libyans another billion.

Then, come the revolution, all the money was frozen by the UN, and it still is: $66 billion of assets that should be serving a country where wages did not increase from 1982 until the 2011 revolution, where corruption became not a method of enrichment but a necessary tool in order to survive. In this country of coastline and oil, for all of its abundant gifts, there is no money, not for ordinary people.

It makes you think. How on earth did this happen? How did we get to a position where a country’s natural resources, instead of making the people who live beside them healthy and wealthy and wise, have instead been subsumed by this vague vocabulary of frozen assets and derivatives and structured finance and leverage and embargo? How did our arcane system of money, with its blocks and debts and inconveniences, get in between the people and the things they should own?

And why is this always the case? Why do oil-rich African states end up not with prosperity, but with poverty and war? Why are multi-millionaire investment bankers still getting vast bonuses when their own banks and actions pushed most of the world into recession and austerity? How did we ever get to this weird arrangement whereby if I have a piece of blue paper in my pocket I’m richer than you with your red piece of paper, and if you don’t have any red or blue paper, you can’t eat?

The more you look at it, you think: there’s blood on the floor. There’s been a murder. But have we killed money? Or is money killing us?

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