The Dynamic Financial Markets!
By their very nature, financial markets are dynamic, fluid, changeable, protean.
The constant churn of millions of buyers and sellers meeting upon a worldwide trading floor means that these huge markets find an equilibrium every split second and then move on to the next split second and the next equilibrium and so on.
It is like a beautiful machine, and the people that design these markets must at times just lay in bed marveling at it.
For you see, once you tether human nature to technology, ingenuity, and market capitalism, then the net effect is a steady rise in your personal financial well-being.
To maintain that equilibrium, so important to living systems and financial markets both, there must be a seller for every buyer and vice versa. And, you see, in the natural course of events, there has to be a loser for every winner.
A loser for every winner.
This brings us to my portfolio.
While other fine people at the office seem to have wadded up a handful of hundred dollar bills and thrown them into an active volcano…only to have that same volcano spout thousand dollar bills that come raining down upon the original hundred dollar bill guys, I throw my precious wad of hundreds into the volcano and wait.
And wait.
The beautiful machine is at its work, and can’t be hurried!
Anxious for some word of the fate of these paltry few bills, I sleep at the foot of the volcano and, wakened by a muffled rumble, finally see against a blood red sky the following: the flock of bills flee to the sky as if trying to escape, then ignite and consume themselves with a brief flash of color, like magician’s stage paper, leaving nothing but feathery black wisps floating down upon the air to show just how completely they have been consumed by the efficiency of the markets.
Is there a brief sound, something like “pfffftt”?
I can’t be sure, but I think so.
Under the impression that I haven’t shown enough enthusiasm for the process I sell a few trifles, beloved heirlooms and automobiles and the shingles from my new roof and such, and throw another wad of hundreds into what I am now calling the slavering maw, just a pet name I have for it, the slavering maw of another volcano, whose performance, you see, has historically run in a counter-cyclical pattern – this data goes back centuries – it runs in a counter-cyclical pattern to the stodgy old run of the mill volcanos I have been dealing with to-date, whose results are stymied and all sludged up by their insistence on running in a plain old cyclical pattern. You see.
Again I wait, with what I like to think is a pleasantly expectant but not greedy look upon my face.
This time the volcano doesn’t even give me the courtesy of making the absolute destruction of my so-called wealth visually interesting. It just goes about its business of making money for everybody else.
It is as if I haven’t thrown any money in there at all, or as if money doesn’t mean what I think it means, or as if I am a flea on the back of a big lumbering mammal that is methodically scouring the earth of all living things.
It turns out that it is playing a delay game, which means that understanding the true destruction wrought upon my well-being by all this volcano investing will have to wait till the end-of-the-month financial statement.
When it arrives, that thing, that letter, that statement, that damned missive from the underworld, it more or less throbs with bad news. As I walk back from the mailbox with it in the evening, holding it at arm’s length, it casts an eerie glow upon my frightened and increasingly impoverished face. Other people on the sidewalk give me a wide berth, and I can’t say I blame them. I’m looking pretty weird by now.
Well, that didn’t work, so I find another volcano, again sell various trinkets like the house, stage a life insurance scam, and supplement those with some things I stole from a house a couple of cul-de-sacs over, just jewelry and what-not, and throw the proceeds into that volcano.
Oh, and I took some milk money from the kids at the bus stop. A lot of parents are steering young people away from dairy anyway, and I like to help these things along.
There’s starting to be a certain repetitive rhythm to this exercise, this throwing away of my money, my very life you might say, a rhythm such as you see in the supple, beautiful, and inspiring dances of the indigenous peoples of the globe who are in touch with the cycles of life and who also might practice human sacrifice on the side just to cover their bases, or in the rhyme schemes and meter of modern poetry which seems to have come to the conclusion that we are all just scraps of protoplasm floating through a mindless void and we all may as well sit on the floor and chant like some sort of nuts to pass the time.
This volcano proves as non-responsive as the one just before it.
It has a proud manner I would say, haughty if you know what I mean, not deigning to give any indication of what it intends to do with my pitiful offering, not letting on one way or the other how exactly it intends to destroy it. But destroy it, it will.
Under the advice of financial planners in the newspapers who offer counsel during difficult times, I am steered toward spreading my ten dollar bills, well one ten anyway, a five torn nearly in half, three ones, and some spare change, spreading them around among a diversified portfolio of volcanos, let us say twenty or thirty of them, so as to well and truly have a spot at the table in all the varying dynamic industries transforming today’s soaring economy.
They, in turn, these twenty or thirty volcanos, consume my pittance in a fiery gulp, if I can permit myself a small moment of poetic utterance, really, in a fiery gulp, as if they are all trying out for the role of the volcano in Lord of the Rings.
And then just sit there.
The whole notion of some sort of return on my investment seems a foreign one to them.
As far as they’re concerned, I exist to keep feeding them, perhaps as the seals on Seal Island at the zoo view the people throwing food at them.
It just never occurs to them that the people, having thrown the food and they having eaten it, could expect something in return.
By their point of view, and by extension, the point of view of these voracious volcanos that I speak of, the transaction is complete once the initial toss has taken place.
They do not wish the fish-throwers, or in my case, the hundred-dollar bill throwers, any ill will — make that ten-dollar bill throwers — they do not wish them any ill will, but they can’t really understand why I am still standing around with this hopeful look on my face.
Hasn’t our business concluded? Hasn’t our time together come to an end?
Note too that all around me are people trundling wheelbarrows to the foot of these seething eruptions of wealth in order to catch the fortunes that spew out the top of their portion of the volcano and rain down.
They have to sprint from spot to spot to catch the wealth, but they have gotten pretty practiced at this and do a good enough job.
Do they look a little sheepish, groaning under the load of all that bullion and pieces of eight and golden idols from the tombs of ancient kings as they look over at me, standing there in, I admit it, a pitiable manner with my hands together and open, happy now if only pennies came my way and I want to be prepared to catch them?
Oh, precious, precious, pennies!
I have considered whether it is too much to pull out the front pockets of my pants just to show how empty they are, in the manner of a hobo from the 1930s, but decide to go for it, having always been an all-in performer. This isn’t the time to underplay a scene.
Well, if they do feel sheepish, they are hiding it pretty well, and in any event they are busy, trundling the newly-created wealth from this volcano and throwing into an entirely new set of volcanos which, in turn, return three- and four- and five-fold their original investment.
It is best at times like these, you know, encroaching abject pauperism, to adopt a philosophical attitude and give the impression of a person who doesn’t care much for external wealth and who instead is subsisting on the internal richness of his thoughts.
