Who stole Usain Bolt's money?
For over two weeks in Jamaica, there has been only one news story, as both the elites and the man on the street were shocked that global sprinting superstar Usain Bolt now had only US$12,000 in his retirement fund. Bolt, the closest thing Jamaica has had to a national icon since Bob Marley, advised that approximately US$12 million dollars of his money had been stolen from a small local broker called Stocks and Securities Ltd. The anger of the population was so severe that at one point it may have seemed to the casual observer that this might also shake the local financial system, as it brought back still raw memories of Jamaica’s mammoth financial crisis of the second half of the 1990’s. At the time, Jamaica’s financial crisis had metaphorically "won" a bronze Olympic medal globally as one of the worst in the world, at roughly 40% of GDP.
At one point this new crisis even seemed to potentially threaten the current political dominance of the governing Jamaica Labour Party, partly as the broker was seen as connected to the current government, having, among other things, been where the Prime Minister had an account until September 2021, as recently widely reported in the local papers. Jamaica is a low-trust society, and the non-stop social media memes flooding the entire population's mobile phones seemed to threaten to create a frenzy of frustration in the population in a manner which we haven’t seen in a very long time.
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