I am putting the final touches on a fiction book (Feral) in which one of the characters remarks that wealth isn’t real. How could it be when stock market fluctuations, or even a market cyberattack makes so much of it disappear in a matter of hours if not minutes or… seconds?

When you write a story, you fret with a multitude of concerns. Typos, for one. I have many reservations about this particular story (yes, including typos), but one bothers me most. I don’t have to write fiction to wax disdainful about wealth. That point is demonstrating itself right now, in living color—well, mostly in red, thanks to none other than (yes, pun intended!) red China.

I won’t pretend to know much about what transpired in that magical realm where Capitalism thrives under the heavy hand of Communism (problem numero uno there, perhaps?). But they built entire cities of high rise apartment buildings, burning a lot of resources, sending the prices of wood, steel, and concrete through the roof (and thank you so much—right in the middle of my kitchen remodel). Fast forward to today, and those buildings sit. Or stand. Or rise. Or gather dust. Mostly polluted dust, by the way. Oh, yeah, and they’re empty.

Wow. Puff, poof. Magical indeed.

Then one also reads stories about how they play the stock market over there. Yeah, I said play. Because for a while they didn’t know the difference between it and Vegas, except, that of course, the house was losing for long enough to keep the gamers happy. But the house has lost its generous ways, brutally so. All the card hands are busting, and every dice roll is coming up snake eyes. To round it all up, the government’s attempt to pixie dust their currency from one hat to another isn’t turning up any fat rabbits.

Before I get to sounding way too xenophobic, let me offend everyone by saying, we’re not much better over here. After all, it’s our love for all those bargains (yay, go Walmart!) that fueled that bubble over there. Not long ago, we inflated one all on our own over here with our Mac-mansions (supersize me, dude) and our belief that we can get ridiculous loans to refinance them later on the back of ever-rising real estate prices. Then we ran out of pixie dust. And before we go faulting the one-percenter fat cats, let us reflect with self-admonishment that proportionally speaking, our magically, plastically leveraged lives mirror that of the Federal budget.

As it turns out, because all of that, and maybe Greece and Puerto Rico (those partiers!) all that real growth and upturn here in the solid U-S-of-A is still not holding up stock prices. For a few days, they’ve been “finding their new floor.” You know, because wealth sometimes gets tired of the penthouse and needs to go hide in the basement for a couple of years.

All this leaves me wondering whether I should care, or plunk more “real” wealth to snatch me some “bargains,” or find less cleverly cynical topics for my blog. But I’ll tell you one thing folks. In all seriousness. None of this is real. Don’t set your feet on it expecting steady ground. Not unless your soles yearn for a new floor with every whim of human panic or every careless error of those who should govern with care and manage with wisdom.