The Efficient Market Theory out of the University of Chicago, discredited over the years because market participants can’t understand anything they’re talking about over at the University of Chicago, really does work - if you account for the fact that somebody’s gaming markets in the first place. This should come as no surprise to loyal MacDougal Post readers, who’ve met many of those same somebodies right here in these hard-boiled pages.
Zigmund Floyd, Director of Indictable Market Behavior at Wall Street investment banking behemoth, Filch & Finagle, made that point as well as anyone over a steaming cup of McDonald’s cappuccino, at least I think it was cappuccino, way too early the other morning. “We grab everybody’s dough all the time", Zigmund extolled. You want efficiency, look at my year end bonus, for starters.”
It was 3 AM and McDonald’s was in the throes of its recent initiative to add 50 thousand jobs and increase store hours, and the place was empty and the parolees, I mean new-hires, were off shooting craps behind the dumpster or something. Like who did McDonald’s expect to sign on for 3 o’clock in the post-evening pre-morning anyway? Laid-off yuppies?
Face it, what kind of laid-off yuppie …. Never mind; this has nothing to do with efficient rigged market theory. But geeze, only a usual suspect would even consider prowling around at that God-forsaken hour.
And your diligent blogger, dedicated to ratting him out.
The cappuccino, or whatever, got poured when we finally tracked down one of the convicted felons and about dragged him back to his work station. It was zesty enough, with traces of verve and mellowed ebullience, piping hot to the lip without that hint of imminent cauterization you‘d expect to find in some other fast food cappuccino if anybody else were nutty enough to open their sparkling glass doors to the forlorn post-evening pre-morning nothingness.
“So you’re saying”, I tried to probe, “that all appropriate information is already in the market prices, and ….”
“F#%$ no. I’m saying the Don yells, “Sell, Sell, Sell” and calls in to the other Dons, “Sell, Sell, Sell”, and the other Dons yell “Sell, Sell, Sell” to their guys, and then we’re all yelling, “Sell, Sell, Sell”, and we issue ourselves phony-baloney shares and sell, and the Dons sell their phony-baloney shares too, and the Family sells more phony, and all the Families sell much, much more phony, and the Dow gets whacked for 8 thousand points or whatever, and the rest of you are f#%&!%, and your real shares are f#%&!% as well, and we collect big fat year end bonuses.”
“Oh.”
“Totally f#%$!%, McDougal."
“I know, Zigmund.”
“Totally, totally f#%$!%.”
“Oh, shut up.”
“You don’t know how f#%$!% you people are.”
Nobody was left at McDonald’s when I took it on the lam through the smudgy glass doorway and slipped into the utter solitude of another post-evening pre-morning vacuum- except for one complete jerk, and I’m never talking to that creep again.
This put-America-back-to-work-flipping-burgers thing isn’t going all that well either, if you ask me. What we need to do is hire skilled hard hats and start tearing down some flipping single family housing units, if we‘re ever to read any decent economic statistics in our flipping lifetimes again.
