Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

More and more these days, the financial world resembles Alice in Wonderland. With apologies to Lewis Carroll, today Justice brings you three out of six “impossible things” that are actually true.

With each passing day, the world of global finance bears more resemblance to Alice in Wonderland.

The distorting hand of government has turned the so-called “free market” into a series of funhouse mirrors… Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum have taken over the Fed and Treasury… and Wall Street looks on grinning like a contented Cheshire Cat.

At some point, the Mad Hatter’s tea party will morph into a bad acid trip. When this happens, prices (rather than walls) will begin to melt… and many investors will find themselves shocked and awed, yet again, by a hair-raising (hare-raising?) turn of events that really should merit no surprise whatsoever.

It all brings to mind a classic passage:

“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.

“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

And so, with apologies to Lewis Carroll, today and Monday Taipan Daily brings you six “impossible things” that are actually true. The first three will hopefully prove amusing; the second three, far less so.

1. Ben Bernanke, Top Global Thinker

The first dash of madness comes from Foreign Policy magazine - a rather snooty rag your humble editor is now embarrassed to admit subscribing to.

In its most recent issue, Foreign Policy revealed with great fanfare its list of “FP Top 100 Global Thinkers”… Ben S. Bernanke having been dubbed the No. 1 “global thinker” of them all.

“The Zen-like chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve might not have topped the list solely for turning his superb academic career into a blueprint for action, for single-handedly reinventing the role of a central bank, or for preventing the collapse of the U.S. economy,” FP breathlessly opines. “But to have done all of these within the span of a few months is certainly one of the greatest intellectual feats of recent years.”

Wow. Just… wow. Where to begin? One practically needs a mop and bucket.

We’ll go the shorter route by paraphrasing George Orwell: “Some ideas are so stupid only an intellectual could believe them.” Here’s looking at you, Foreign Policy.

2. Yo-Ho-Ho and an IPO

For your next petit four of the strange and bizarre, we head to the lawless country of Somalia, where enterprising hijackers have set up - are you ready for this? - a pirate stock exchange.

“Four months ago, during the monsoon rains, we decided to set up this stock exchange,” a wealthy former pirate named Mohammed told Reuters. “We started with 15 ‘maritime companies’ and now we are hosting 72. Ten of them have so far been successful at hijacking.”

As it turns out, the piracy business is quite lucrative - so much so that a number of old hands have been able to retire with tens of millions. Haradheere, a fishing village 250 miles northeast of Mogadishu, has become the Somali pirate version of Greenwich, Conn. (the hedge fund capital of the world).

Some might find this development unsettling. But on the bright side, these pirates are upstanding local citizens. Not only do they support their community, they even pay a sort of property tax. A fixed percentage of pirate booty (i.e ransom money) goes directly towards Haradheere public infrastructure - hospitals, schools and so on.

Hey, you can’t knock progress, right? In implementing their version of free market capitalism, the pirates are simply emulating the “best practices” they see employed to such lucrative effect on Wall Street. And as they become more like us, our system repays the honor in kind (by becoming more like theirs)…

3. Goldie’s Got a Gun

Moving on, it seems the top execs at Goldman Sachs (GS: 167.24 +2.94 +1.79%) are nervous about all the bad publicity they are getting. So nervous, in fact, that they have decided to pack heat.

Alice Schroeder, the ex-Wall Streeter best known for her exhaustive biography of Warren Buffett, gave the inside scoop in a recent Bloomberg column. According to a friend of Schroeder’s - who in turn heard it from a banker - “senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.”

Schroeder called Lucas Van Praag, the official spokesman for Goldman Sachs, to confirm the truth or falsehood of the rumors. The Goldman spokesman never called back. Meanwhile the NYPD (New York Police Department) acknowledged, in a roundabout way, that certain Goldman execs may indeed have license to carry.

In some ways this story is not very funny. But in other ways it’s amusing as all get out.

In fear that the 500-million-dollar bribe didn’t work, we now apparently have a gaggle of arugula-salad-eating, hermes-tie-wearing white-collar types running around like Dirty Harry, in fear that the greatest Wall Street moneymaking machine ever created (next to the printing press) is in danger of being sacked by a torch- and pitchfork-wielding mob.

Let’s just hope no one gets shot…

On Monday we’ll dive into the other three “impossible” selections (of a slightly more serious variety).