Fall is just busting out all over. You can hardly stand up safely the good news is just flying around so fast.
The Dow, for instance, is about to go over 10,000 again. Won’t that be nice? Sure. It shows that no matter what’s really going on underneath our economic system, investors want to make money and think they can still do so by buying and selling stocks and sometimes even bonds. Yay for those cockeyed optimists! They make the world go ’round!
Oil has hit a high for the year. You might think this is bad, and it is, if you have to buy gasoline every day. But it’s good as a leading indicator of where we might be going. It means that really smart guys in Saudi Arabia and Texas have decided that the spending power of your average American citizen is improving, and so they can gouge us a little bit more every day until we stop buying so much gasoline again or cars that eat it up so fast. They have confidence that we’re all going to be able to suck it up and get to that magic $5 per gallon price they’re definitely pumping for, so to speak.
And in perhaps the most stunning proof of economic life, Wall Street is set to pay out its biggest payday ever — about $140 billion to the guys who broke the machine and then got the assignment to fix it. What’s that? Don’t seem fair? Nonsense. JPMorgan profits are up sixfold! A whole bunch of others can’t wait to pay off their TARP money! Reports give several reasons for the big payday — melting credit markets, an improving stock market, lingering positive vibes from the bailouts… but we know it’s not that, don’t we? We know that Wall Street is paying itself $140 billion… because it can! That’s why!
All hope for ridiculous future wealth for each of us resides with the rampant, uncontrolled, irrational exercise of organized greed that drives the markets. It looks like we’re well on the way to total recovery in more ways than one, ladies and gentlemen.
