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I’m not going to pretend I have any idea what it’s like to have my billion dollar business empire get into trouble in the wake of an international financial crisis; but somehow I have a hard time imagining that trouble for a billionaire, the 94th richest man in the world no less, means getting his Netflix subscription canceled because he can’t pay a $10 bill, or having to scrape pennies together to take to Publix to generate $2 in order to go to the Dollar Tree to purchase cooking oil to make white flour bakes for lunch only to discover that the cheapest cooking oil at the Dollar Tree costs $3. I’m willing to bet Adolf Merckle didn’t have to pawn his and his wife’s wedding band to come up with money to pay the rent for January; and I’m willing to bet he wasn’t walking around his apartment in the days leading up to his suicide trying to figure out what, in addition to his son’s XBOX he might be able to sell to accumulate enough money to hold him over until his next paycheck.

I’ve said all of that to say that if the rest of us can face the music when we run into a financial crisis that’s so bad we can’t afford food, billionaires can face the music too; so excuse me if I can’t pity Adolf Merckle, the German billionaire who apparently committed suicide yesterday on account of his major financial losses suffered amid the ongoing global financial crisis.

Somehow I doubt Merckle lost all his money. He probably just dropped out of “billionaire” status down to multi-millionaire status and was ashamed not to be on Forbes’ list anymore.  More from CNN about Merckle’s suicide