Is the market inching to oblivion? Size does matter! Even if Godzilla turns out to be some kind of hermaphrodite reptile in the movie, it is clearly not just the horns of the bull that gets the testosterone of Wall Street gurgling in the glands of traders. Bears are cuddly and shambling: they don’t rear up, rampantly fecund. Bulls have big cojones and snort and roar: when they tread the ground, the earth moves. They fit the self-image of the masters of the universe, the traders whose hormones are so thick they are running in the gutters of the Street at the moment.
Sometimes, as Sigmund Freud once said – presumably when his couch was booked to capacity for the foreseeable future – a tunnel is just a tunnel and a cigar is just a cigar. Perhaps. But not in the throbbing heart of Manhattan, as trading and merger frenzy reaches new copulatory heights of heat. Preliminary observation suggests that the average cheroot in the growing number of cigar bars tumesces an extra inch for each thousand on the Dow. When it hit 9,000, those smuggled Havanas in the bars and restaurants of the Big Apple engorged to a priapic nine inches.
When you order a $2,000 bottle of vintage wine to wash down your slice of bull, only the wine waiter and the rest of your table know what a big boy you are. Clench your jaws around a Montecristo B and you are letting the world gauge your self-esteem in a way that has rarely been so overt since the last overstuffed codpiece was hung up to dry in a renaissance closet. Some of them (the cigars that is) run up to twelve inches long already, perhaps suggesting that the Dow has a few more thousand to go.
Can it be a coincidence that Washington is easing up on sanctions against Cuba? Not at all. Corporate America needs those genuine Cohibas to keep the stocks surging. It needs to swagger like Romeo con Julieta and to do so with authenticity. Havana seed cigars from Dominica are no more Havanas than Suntory is Scotch. What the market needs is a very protuberant $50 cigar to match all those Bell Babes mating and merchant banks plighting their palpitating troth to each other.
Can it be a coincidence that President Clinton, the crusader against child-smoking, is oft-depicted in Churchillian pose with a large cigar (the spin-doctors’ jury is out on whether he inhales or not) while every tale of his outstanding private life leads to yet a further surge in his poll ratings? Americans like a president who proves his masculinity in visible style.
And so on to Viagra, omnipresent on everyone’s lips, and seemingly in everyone’s bathroom cabinet along with the Rogaine, unless you have just landed in a flying saucer or spent the last six months in a Trappist monastery where detumescence and a big bald spot are de rigeur.
In most respects Freud was a fraud, but he was on the ball with this one. Sublimation is the name of the game. These brokers and traders have been working too hard to have sex as well. Their professions have been substituting for their personal life: they have been measuring their virility by the size of their bonuses and the swollen Dow. But now the advances in pharmacology have ensured that the generation that gets books on tape because it’s easier than reading, can now have paradise in a pill. They can short the stocks by day and still go long on the nights.
Pfizer’s stock price has spurted up as everyone wants a piece of the action. And what a lot of action there seems to be, drawing on the deepest biological and psychological urges of mankind. They are such potent forces that people are prepared to take these little blue lozenges and to risk all sorts of things that have traditionally been associated with sexual overindulgence.
In keeping with the modern age, Viagra apparently has similar effects on women, raising the question, does this pill produce a desire that was not there before, or does it ease the frustration of those whose will does not match their wilt? Could couples get into a Viagra race, each spiraling up the dosage until they collapse with the suddenness of a Bear market, never to rise again? Or could there be a sort of arbitrage market for marital mergers as the couples try to ascertain each other’s pill-holder value.
There may be unseen side effects on the markets. Maybe, faced with the real thing, the sublimation would have to stop, and the marketeers would stop churning the stocks and take to the motels and holiday homes to burn the midnight oil in more pleasurable ways. As Warren Beatty disguised as Senator Bulworth says, ‘We stand on the edge of a new millennium.’ There’s just no telling how far we can fall.
The Speculator
