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Slorg's Guide to Speculative Bubbles

And Other Forms of Highway Robbery
"In the days of yore, highway robbery was accomplished with skill, daring, a bribe for the guards, and suitable armament. Returns were high, but turnover of employees and damage to the merchandise was extensive..."

So begins a classic guide of the decadent finance aristocracy to speculative bubbles. Our hats and, for those of us from Aldebaran, detachable cilia-muffs go off to these brave pioneers of the Art of the Swindle (they called it tax farming, we call it privatization, same difference). Still and all, these people can't hold a candle to the kind of scams, cheats, sleazes, punts and related lunacy which characterize the current state of the Galactic economy.

But who are we to complain? The wonders of the free market will take care of us all, right? (Some sooner than later... but that's another story. See Slorg's Guide to Socialism). After all, nowadays accumulation is all about leasing: leasing debt, leasing credit, leasing the right to lease franchises and the like. Who needs to produce anything, when you can simply rachet up the food-chain of the Great Service Sector Scam and sell your neighbor credit cards at 497% Galactic interest rates -- compounded per microsecond? (Note: Earth firms and similar shady customers pay additional 264% markup due to our latest corporate policy, which consists of Not Giving Suckers an Even Break).

Now, there are always a few dangerous Commie pinko nautilus-hugging radicals who claim that capitalism sucks, markets are deeply unjust and that money should not be allowed to run our lives. How could anyone possibly say such a thing? After all, just look at the miracle of unfettered neoliberalism in Southeast Asia: after fifty years of laborious construction, massive deregulation plus a few rich white male US punters can go in and wipe the place out with a few leveraged bots on the baht and raps on the ringgit. Oops, sorry, wrong miracle... is Latin America out of its economic coma yet? Nurse, fetch the stimulants! And don't even think of mentioning Europe -- hell, people might get ideas about this whole socialism thing. Let's look instead at that mighty US economy.

Yes, America, paragon of all the usual anorexic rentier virtues -- rabid free-marketeering, hideous wealth polarization, the brutish savaging of the welfare state, and most of all a near-terminal infection by that vicious and as yet incurable political parasite, the Demublican-Republocrat (the only known political lifeform with two heads but no brain). The US economy is also wheezing along into a record seventh year of substandard per capita growth (1.8% from 1990-98, below the EU and, until recently, even Japan) and manic overbubbling of its stock and real estate markets. But fear not, oh despairing or at least underinvested Earthlings, for Slorg has -- with the benefit of that crackling, fusion-plasma intuition which told our quantum critter in a flash of tachyon emissions that if you want to know what's going to happen to the market, why not just hop into the local time machine and cruise forwards a year or so -- photon-mailed a screed explaining why Wall Street is going to self-destruct in the very near future. Happy bubbling!

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