10 little monkeys jumping on the bed...

Este artículo me lo pidió la revista del colegio donde trabajo. Esta en inglés así que al traductor...

After years of continuous spam I finally came across a worthwhile mail:

“There is a town surrounded by a forest filled with monkeys. A well-dressed man arrives and publishes in the front page of the local newspaper an ad, willing to buy every monkey brought to him for $10. The local farmers, knowing the forest is filled with monkeys, ran to hunt for monkeys. The well-dressed man, as promised, payed $10 for each of the hundred monkeys that were brought to him. Since there were less monkeys in the forest, hence it was harder to hunt them, the farmers lost interest. The well-dressed man then offered $20 for each monkey and the farmers ran to the forest again to hunt for some more. Once again, the monkeys started disappearing and the well-dressed man raised the offer to $25, and the farmers ran again to the forest, hunting the few monkeys that were left until it was impossible to find one. At this point, the well-dressed man offered $50 for each monkey but, since he had to attend to business in the big city, he left his assistant in charge of buying the monkeys. Once the well-dressed man left for the city, his assistant turned to the farmers and said:

• Look at this great cage filled with thousands of monkeys that my boss bought for his private collection. He doesn't even remember he has them! I will let you have them for $35 each and when he gets back from the city you can sell them back for $50 each.

The farmers gathered all their live savings and bought the thousands of monkeys that were in the great cage and waited for the well-dressed man to get back from the big city. From that they on neither the well-dressed man nor his assistant were seen again. The only thing they saw was a great cage filled with useless monkeys bought with their life savings.”

That is how Wall Street and the Stock Market work. In a nutshell.

Greed and ambition are the driving forces of a corrupt system lacking of moral and ethical values. Corporations have become, as Ambrose Bierce so accurately defines it, “ingenious devices for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."Our postmodern market is supported by speculation, in the exchange of illusions, also known as stocks, which fluctuate in the basis of the pragmatic, yet cynical and false, pretense of free trade. It seems the buyers, that's us, encourage the economical bubbles and the proliferation of useless merchandise which nominal value far exceeds its real one. We are bedazzled by an avalanche of advertisement directed to a public needy of fictitious products covered in a veil of technicisms.

In his 847^th Maxim, Publius Syrius states that “everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it”. The failure of neo-liberal measures applied in weak and under-productive economies has now spread towards mayor markets embellished by the promise of quick revenue and easy credit which were never meant to be paid (as the great Albert Einstein said: “compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe”). The real state business saw its economical bonanza when the administration of President George W. Bush decided to “encourage” national consumption by lowering the interest rates in mortgages. The American public grasped their chance to see their new house built, their kitchens refurbished and their SUV's tuned only to find themselves unable to pay for their luxuries when the sand castle of the financial institutions was washed away by the tidal wave of reality.

When the curtain was raised and the corruption of a virtual economy was unveiled, the real mechanism controlling the world markets collapsed. The once trustworthy banks, investment institutions and real state companies showed their true demeanors. Pyramidal networks plumed under the pressure of thousands of investors who saw their money vanish faster than the CEO's. When the banks, owners of the thousands of mortgaged houses, tried cashing in these properties the value of the materials used to built the structures was actually higher than house itself. New desperate measures were taken, billions were pumped into the banks, same strategy used in ex-president Jamil Mahuad's government, and, of course, with similar results. Now Thomas Jefferson's quote: “banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies”, maintains its accuracy and meaningfulness.

The focus of the postmodern market has switched. We have forgotten the purpose of this man-made and necessary institution. Economy should be centered in the individuals, not the individual. The Native Americans sing: “We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children”. Under the rubble left from this collapse, a ray of optimism is seen in the horizon. Maybe this is nature's way of reminding us of our real priorities. Maybe it is time to revalue our lifestyles and shift the dominant tendencies that have, ultimately, destroyed the modern world's hope of a better tomorrow. Maybe we should remember that monkeys have the same real value as stocks: none. Maybe, if we correctly interpret this catastrophe, US Republican Representative Dan Quayle's blunder may prove useful: “the future will be better tomorrow”.