| Blasting With Boyles |
|
As the story goes… or once upon a time… or this story is no bullsh*t, which differentiates a fairy tale from a sea story. In the darkest jungle, two men show up and tell the native population that they’ll buy all the monkeys that they can capture for $2.50 a monkey. Because the village was swarming with monkeys, the native population captured every monkey they could for $2.50. The man and his assistant brought an enormous cage and each of the monkeys, after payment, was then put inside the cage. Then the man announced that he would now pay $5 for every monkey they could bring to him. So, the population went out further into the jungle and captured more monkeys at $5 per monkey. Then the man declared that he would pay $12 per monkey, so the population went as far as they could to find more monkeys and bring them back to the man that put them in the cage. One day, the man who ran the monkey cage announced that he was leaving, but when he came back he would pay $50 for every monkey the native population could catch. While the man was gone, his assistant told the native population that while the man would pay $50 per monkey, he would sell them each a monkey from the cage for $35, so they could then sell them back when the man returned for $50. All the people lined up (some were monkey catchers and some were not) and bought a monkey until all the previously captured monkeys were gone. Later that night the assistant disappeared and neither he, nor the man who initially bought the monkeys, ever returned to the village. Now you understand the stock market, the Federal Reserve buyout, the helicopter Ben Bernanke and George Bush. Except now, you’re the idiot waiting with the $35 monkey. Soon, your neighborhood will be crawling with monkeys — local monkeys, close-in monkeys and far away monkeys. The question now is: Can you smell the Vaseline in the air? Or, is it too late because that stockbroker is never going to buy your monkey? Here’s another story: during the Great American Depression, a farmer had a dozen eggs. He sold them to his neighbor for a dollar and then the next day his neighbor sold them back to him for $1.50. The next day he sold the eggs to his neighbor for $2 and then the next day bought them back for $3. Are you starting to get the picture? You’ve got to have real chickens that are really laying eggs and people who line up to buy the eggs. That’s real production, real money and by the way, real chickens, not passing the buck to the next sucker. You may have noticed that all the chickens, all the real production and all the real money are outside the country. And now all you get to do is buy and sell egg futures. Here’s one more parable: You have a 1952 original Mickey Mantle rookie card. The last one in really good shape sold for $165,000. One day, the Federal Reserve prints 10,000 original Mickey Mantle rookie cards, indistinguishable from yours, so now, how much is your card worth? Can you find the elephants and the giraffe in this picture? Now for the people playing the game at home, how’s that 401K? How much is your dollar worth? And when is the last time you went somewhere and actually saw a chicken lay an egg? The only eggs being laid around here are the eggs being laid on Wall Street and now it’s become a huge scam. The basic truth of it all is as we’ve been buying and selling eggs to each other, investing in monkeys that some day we thought would be worth a lot of money, and holding on to our Mickey Mantle rookie card, thinking that no one else had one and that it was actually worth something. When people wake up and realize that the monkey buyer and his assistant aren’t coming back, it’s going to be a really bad day for us all. My advice is this: get a handgun and a really mean dog. God bless you all. Uncle Ebenezer (a.k.a. the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah) |
Blasting With Boyles
The Wealth Of Nations Or How The Invisible Hand Smacks You In The Ass15 Responses
Leave a Comment
November 3rd, 2008 at 5:43 pm
Nice writing style. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Chris Moran
November 3rd, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Thank you for another great column!
November 3rd, 2008 at 5:52 pm
Loved the monkey analogy. Tomorrow should be an interesting day…
November 7th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
Thanks for another great column!
November 10th, 2008 at 10:01 am
Entertaining as always Peter…I hope everything doesn’t go to hell!
November 10th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
Ok and like the old Israelites…we’re totally screwed.
November 10th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Any suggestions on the type of vaseline that should be utilized to lessen the pain??
November 12th, 2008 at 10:45 am
I get the farmer and his dozen eggs and the Mickey Mantel card, but who the hell is supposed to be the disappearing assistant with all the monkeys? Is that like Goldman Sachs, the government itself or somebody else?
November 12th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Peter, we need a little sunshine in these days of darkness! Please provide your solution even if you don’t believe it yourself.
November 13th, 2008 at 10:03 am
Your advice is to get a gun and a dog?? Yeah, we’re definitely screwed now!
November 14th, 2008 at 9:53 am
Too much monkey business Peter…it sounds like we’re in trouble! Where do we go from here?!
November 24th, 2008 at 8:06 am
Peter, Complaining about the state of the economy is getting old. Why not encourage people to prepare for hard times. Stop spending frivolously. Stock up on food and medical supplies, learn how to grow some food, connect with your neighbors. Make sure you have two ways to heat your house. Take the bus to work or car pool. Learn how to can or dehydrate food. Learn some of the old skills. The times they are a changin.
November 26th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Hi Peter,
Just wanted you to know that Barack Obama won the election and was born in Hawaii according to Hawaiian government officials.
But, just a moment, got a question for you.
Let’s see.
I’m a woman attending University of Hawaii at Mānoa, and I fall in love with Barack Obama, Sr. from Nyang’oma Kogelo, Nyanza Province, Kenya. We date and marry. I get pregnant.
What white woman from Wichita, Kansas would fly back to Kenya to have her baby in 1961. Let’s think about this logically. IN 1961 flying from Hawai’i to Kenya would have been quite expensive. Hospital care in Hawai’i vs. hospital care in Kenya? I just don’t see it happening. It’s not logical. Why would she want her son to be born in Kenya? Why wouldn’t she want him to be born in America?
Not only is this conspiracy theory, that you keep helping to perpetuate on your show with your unsubstantiated YouTube videos made by charlatans, erroneous; but you are besmirching your own good name by continuing to pursue it.
You claim that there’s nothing known about Barack Obama’s time at Columbia University and Harvard Law School as if to imply he made up his attendance at both.
http://www.studentaffairs.columbia.edu/admissions/node/302
Check that out? I guess if he didn’t really attend, they are making a pretty big deal out of his attendance up there at Columbia University.
As for his Harvard attendance, um do you think you get elected to be the editor of the Law Review if you don’t attend?
These are two of the most prestigious colleges in our nation. It would be pretty easy to prove them both liars if he didn’t attend or were somehow a worse student than second from the bottom John McCain.
I don’t get why you go on and on and on and on and on about the lack of release of information about his days at both universities. You can read all about it online. Do you know how to use Google?
Next, I’d like to take one more tact on the whole birth certificate thing.
Barack Obama has been a Senator for the State of Illinois. If he were not born in the USA, don’t you think people there would have hammered him on this issue long ago? People in Chicago are incredibly savvy politically, can’t say the same about other places I’ve lived. They wouldn’t tolerate someone born outside the USA as one of their Senators.
I just don’t get, other than that you’re making a boat load of money, why you’re motivated to perpetuate false conspiracies that have been disproved over and over and over and over again.
You brought up this birth certificate conspiracy again. You did!
What you don’t seem to get, and I’m pretty sure why you don’t, is that there are people who find it just as fun to get people like you to perpetuate their myths and hoaxes. They want their day in the sun, and you are eager to deliver, just like the people who had fun when the media picked up their myths that Sarah Palin didn’t know Africa was a continent and not a country. The liberal media was all over that and had to eat crow later. Well, the right wing media people, like yourself, are just as vulnerable to this mistake. Part of the problem is that there used to be a time when media people like yourself had ethics and principles upon which to stand. Now, you’ll quote YouTube videos made by anonymous people. It’s hilarious really, but you really need to do some soul-searching and figure out what’s real and whata’s not for you. I for one, won’t listen to your show again until you come out with an ethics policy.
December 3rd, 2008 at 11:41 pm
Long time, no talk, Peter.
January 2nd, 2009 at 3:12 am
Hey the column was very good. I heard about alot of place is oakmont. My father Gary Jones Sr worked there from 74-2001 when they closed the doors it just brought back alot of old memoried from storied my dad used to tell me thank you