As 2003 ended, American investors rushed to put their money in a whole new set of IPOs. They particularly rushed to the big red rice bowl in the sky to put their money in mainland Chinese companies. In Chinatown, they sell paper currency for Chinese New Year, issued by the Bank of Hell. One cannot help wondering if this same bank is lead underwriter for these stocks, based as they are in a regime that has all the transparency of the Great Wall at midnight – during an eclipse.
Indeed, even as the American punters rushed in, Chinese banks, showing a little more acuity, had stopped buying US Treasury bonds. But American investors seem to have carried out no due diligence on the inscrutable Chinese financial markets.
Maybe it’s a religious impulse that explains the difference. Apparently some 70 percent of Americans believe in hell, with a larger majority – 83 percent – believing in heaven. Then again faith in hell probably shot up in the US over the last couple of years, as people opened their mail and looked at their brokers’ and pension statements. Many then probably agreed with Mephistopheles in Marlowe’s Dr Faustus: ‘Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.’ All those plunging stocks should have postponed any thoughts of retirement heaven on a Florida golf course.
In any case, the increasing longevity of the baby-boomers and their obsessive concern with their health suggest some element of insincerity in their faith. If heaven exists, and it’s so good, and we are all pretty much assured of going there, then why bankrupt Medicare to postpone the joyful moment?
Could it be that many of us have a sneaking suspicion that if heaven exists, so must hell, and maybe we have not done all that we should to avoid it? I mean, those who have the franchise on hellfire and damnation estimate that anyone who is not ‘born again’ is going to be mighty warm for all eternity. But who among us has never made an inadvertent error in our own favor on our IRS or expense returns? And how many of us can swear that we never ignored the yellow light and went through on red?
Besides which, we can’t rely on homeland security to keep foreigners out of hell. With all those Buddhists, Catholics, Jews, Muslims and lesser faiths crowded together, you begin to suspect it’s the collective body heat of all those unblessed billions crammed into tight confines that raises the Infernal temperature so high.
Of course the theological jury is still out on the issue of predestination versus free will, so we cannot be sure whether the Inferno’s management team has in fact planned ahead for population growth, or if, like US prisons, the overcrowding has taken it completely by surprise.
For those stock market investors who are also believers, it must have been reminiscent of the ten plagues when the internet bubble burst and the Dow fell to earth like a lead balloon. Millions saw their retirement funds collapse like Jericho’s walls. And now Eliot Spitzer has proved with maps and diagrams that the halos that once garlanded the mutual fund industry were simply tawdry tinsel.
The former chairman of the NYSE was pumping stock he held at the same time as he inflated his own remuneration. Tyco, Enron and WorldCom are simple evocations of what unscrupulous CEOs whose IROs don’t read this magazine might do with investors’ money. And the brokers have all promised, yet again, never ever – cross their hearts and hope to die – to confuse analysis and sales.
However, so ardent is the faith of American investors that they go rushing into China at the first rumor of big gains as if the last three years had never happened. Of course, guilty as they are of one of the seven deadly sins – avarice – we all know where they will end up. But shouldn’t there be an eighth equally deadly sin of gullibility? No wonder crooks keep running away with people’s money – folks keep handing it over. Personally I’d rather play mahjong. For very small stakes.
