Welcome to the world of money.
Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, the readies, the wherewithal.
Call it what you like, money can break us or it can make us.
In the past year, it's certainly broken more than a few of the biggest names on Wall Street and in the City of London.
And while former masters of the universe crash and burn,
the rest of us are left worrying if our savings would be safer in a mattress than in a bank.
The great financial crisis that began in the summer of 2007 has most of us utterly baffled.
How on earth could a little local difficulty with subprime mortgages in the United States
unleash an economic tsunami big enough to obliterate some of Wall Street's most illustrious names,
to force nationalisations of banks on both sides of the Atlantic
and to bring the entire world economy to the very brink of recession, if not downright depression?
Shouldn't this series be called The Descent Of Money?
Well, I want to explain to you just how money rose to play such a terrifyingly dominant role in all our lives.