"Every time a child says 'I don't believe in fairies', there is a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead."
J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan
The days when you could store all your worldly wealth under the mattress, or under the floorboards like George Eliot's miser Silas Marner, have not entirely disappeared - though it never was a very good idea. But still, most of our money exists: only in the brief moments we turn a little of it into cash. The rest of the time it is blips on computers, stored in cyberspace.
If you are wealthy and powerful enough, these blips can be almost infinitely elastic. The Cincinnati investment advisor Paul Herrlinger claimed to be bidding for the Minneapolis store chain Dayton-Hudson for $6.8 billion in 1987 - about $6.7 billion more than the assets of his company. In those heady days, when anyone could borrow anything, he was widely believed on Wall Street and Dayton-Hudson shares climbed $10.
After his lawyer tried to head off disaster by explaining that his client was ill, Herrlinger was asked by TV interviewers on his lawn whether the bid was a hoax. "I don't know," he said. "It's no more a hoax than anything else."
