The overachiever

I worked with a guy who did a lot of trading and lost a ton of money in the stock market after 9/11. I'll never forget what he told me "It's all bull****" Me being youn and earnest insisted that the markets were rational, fair, and honest. I couldn't believe that everyone working in the financial sector wasn't honest, and consciencious about the important work they were doing. I'm a little bit wiser now, and when I started looking at all the fake money people were pulling out of their houses, and the smoke and mirrors allowing people to become rich producing nothing, I realized my friend was right. It's all bull***.

So what do we do?
I mean, it's good to know, if a little disillusioning. But what does someone like me, working at a regular job, hoping to save for the family's sake, do with this information?
I'm not asking rhetorically. What's the conclusion? Stay out of the market? Invest wisely and conservatively? Buy gold? Eat drink and be merry? Live in Alaska? What?

Live in Alaska?

I wish!

Nuclear powers do not have to do short covering because there is no way any other country could hope to collect. The only option the creditor country has is to be able to export enough goods to the debtor nation and thus it is important to keep the debtor nation's economy running. So we can relax. Everyone needs us to be rich in order to keep eating.

Anyone can learn to play the markets. All you need is a few thousand dollars of investment capital that you can afford to lose learning.

"Some senior City figures said the "positions" were so huge that dumping them on one day could have been enough to trigger Monday's stock market meltdown, the worst since 9/11." (Martin Luther King holiday)

Folks this is the kind of catechesis Cardinal Egan couldn't buy with a sackful of indulgences! No one paid any heed to Greenspan's "Irrational Exuberance" (aka Moralistic Therapeutic Deism) critique of the irrational dearth of light being generated by all that heat. So, how do capital markets explain "the problem of evil"? How do the Central Bankers reconcile the loss? Demand a sacrifice from us all, that's how. Cutting the earnings (interest) on any capital we have saved, while writing down ("forgiving") any negative equity all those prodigals may have wracked up. Now we know how the elder son felt in the parable, right?

This is a salutory lesson here is Cheap Grace - the "positions" (aka "bets") on the derivatives traded in the currency futures are worth no more (or no less) than the phsychic capital folks attach to them UNTIL real evil enters in, and everyone starts looking for the "real" capital they put their faith in.

So too atheistic secularism (communist or capitalist) since the Enlightenment - we've divorced our lives from the Eternal Life our Creator has endowed us with, we've created "derivatives" and trade in them instead. God's economy reckons with the "real" currency of Caritas, in his Divine Wisdom he permits evil to teach us the folly of our ways...

Any society that restricts the free flow of charity in the public square (Catholic Charities impeded by "ant-discrimination" statutes) or more fundamentally denies man's inate God-given ability to comprehend His natural law by imposing a State-hegemony-derived dictat of legal fiction (the tyranny of relativism) is living in the cloud cuckoo land Goethe's Faust imagines himself to have been raptured away to at life's end. Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus was a lot closer to Augustine's original heretical antagonist - the Exonomy of Grace demands an eternal debtor's prison, Hell is real.

Double entry accounting makes a lot of sense - for every sin we owe a reckoning, and Christ's mercy will ransom all who ask for it, since his current account is infinite, offered at the altar at every Mass, but those who prefer to carry a tab at the local payday lender with their empty promises of prosperity around the corner, haven't reconciled their earthly treasures with their "positions" in Heaven, heck who needs double-entry book keeping anyhow? Islamic finance seems to work just as well, and the liquidity of sovereign investment funds is good enough to pay the bills right (what price human freedom, eh, an atheist Communist Yuan or Royal Arab riyal has the same purchasing power no?)

NO! its purchased at the price of your souls....

Yup. I have spent the last two years learning economics in grad school and reading the Financial Times and let me tell you, it has moved me in a leftwards direction. (Before that I was also mostly interested in politics and culture.) Take the example of when Lula was elected, markets pulled out capital like crazy, to stem the flow their central bank jacked up interest rates which means a lot of pain in the real economy.Although this subsided pretty quickly, it is shocking to look at the data, and think this all happened because some investment types were spooked that a center-leftist won an election.