The
stock market is as crooked as the dice game in Guys and Dolls.
By Donald Kaul
The stock market is down. It must be some crazy thing China has
done. Those Communist countries just don’t understand how capitalism works.
No, wait! The market just went up. Did China fix its capital
markets already?
Not really. More likely it’s that our Federal Reserve has hinted
that it’s not going to raise interest rates any time soon because a bunch of
economists are afraid of deflation.
Oh lookee there. The market is down again. It seems that a Greek finance minister has threatened to resign and people are jumping out of windows all over Europe. Why? We’ll explain later.
It’s all a hustle. The stock market is as crooked as the dice
game in Guys and Dolls. One of the best scenes in
that classic movie and play is when “Big Julie from Chicago” decides he’s been
losing enough. To turn things around, the wise guy demands a change of dice.
Then he pulls his own set out of his pocket.
“But these dice don’t have no numbers on them,” Nathan Detroit
says.
“That’s OK,” says Big Julie. “I got ‘em memorized.”
The stock market is like that. Every day the pros roll a giant
pair of blank dice and at the end of the day they tell us whether we’ve won or
lost and why. And the commentators always know exactly why.
Sure they do. But did you ever wonder why people who are so sure
of why things happened before can never tell you what’s going to happen next?
Can a hiccup in Greece or China really matter that much over
here? And what’s the significance of the price of oil falling? Or rising?
Don’t ask me. Ask Big Julie from Wall Street. He owns the dice.
Yet I stay in the stock market, even though I know the game is
fixed. I’m like the gambler who keeps playing roulette at the local casino even
though he knows the wheel is crooked. Asked why he says:
“It’s the only game in town.”
I retired (more or less) 15 years ago. Had I converted my nest
egg back then to cash and buried it in the backyard, I would have fared better
than someone who invested it in certificates of deposit. The other day I looked
at the interest rates my bank was paying on savings. A whopping 0.2 percent.
That’s not keeping up with inflation — and we don’t have any inflation.
So I put most of my money in the stock market and pray a lot.
It’s a tricky thing for a skeptical agnostic to pull off. Sometimes I win and
sometimes I lose. And I don’t know why.
I certainly don’t believe anything the so-called analysts on
television tell me. If they really knew what was going on, they’d keep it to
themselves and make a fortune.
In any case, most of those analysts sell stocks for a living.
When they’re on the tube, they never say: “We’re in a stock bubble here. Things
are going to collapse soon. You might want to think about getting out.”
Instead, when the bubble — stock, real estate, dot-com, whatever
— pops, the market nosedives, and the TV geniuses say: “Wow! Where did that
come from? Who knew?”
Then the banks get taken care of. And the hedge fund managers
get taken care of. And the rest of us, the pilot fish of the economy, regret
that we didn’t pick a better whale to seek shelter beneath.
As I’ve written before, my father — a Ukrainian immigrant — was a
shrewd observer of the human scene.
When some politician would argue that raising the minimum wage
was bad for the economy but cutting taxes for the rich was good, when the stock
market went up and down for no apparent reason, he’d nod his head and say:
“They’re all in it together, kid. Remember that.”
And I always have.
OtherWords columnist Donald Kaul lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. OtherWords.org.