market metaphors need a new beast

BULL
BEAR
The usual market metaphors.
They work, if we're talking about
capitalism and banking supporting a manufacturing economy.
Of course, now we have capitalists running around
trying to wreck everything in sight so that they can
win their hedged bets.
Businesses, countries,
Western Stock markets going up and down like a yo-yo
Much like fat-boy here, some people are controlling the yo-yo action.

We need some new metaphorical beasts

CHICKEN (Little)
Brokers see an advantage in sowing panic
in the markets.
When idiots panic, they run around
like chickens with their heads cut off,
or screaming 'the sky is falling'
The only people who benefit are the traders
and all those who can see the chicken run coming,
and have a billion on the side.
i.e. Sorros, Buffett


OSTRICH
Governments willfully close their eyes.
They have set loose so many chimeras
that circle the planet, trying to find new victims.
The IMF
The WTO
free capital flow
globalisation
hedging and derivatives.
They set them loose thinking
'they ain't gonna get us.
they're designed to screw poor foreigners.'
Well, while their heads were in the sand,
the bastards took the upper hand.
Now, we're dancing to their tune.


CHAMELEON
Bankers have done their best to such
the cash out of the markets
without realising that they were doing harm.
Fraud usually someone.
Now, these same bankers are all
economic experts and they seem to
think that 'Europe is unsteady'
The 'Euro is shaky'
The market are in the dumps.
This situation exists because of the
same bankers actions, past and present.
All of a sudden, they're concerned about the
national debt of the Western countries.
Actually, no. They're shaking things up just
to get their commissions up.

HYENA & WILDEBEEST
guess which one we are.
Who's the hedge market trader?
see below

-Costick67 (8^P

checkitout:
this is from Alternet, Mark Ames
http://www.alternet.org/story/146964/top_billionaire_hedge_funder_sees_himself_as_a_hyena_devouring_wildebeests_

Top Billionaire Hedge Funder Sees Himself As a Hyena Devouring Wildebeests
We're ruled over by people who despise us and think of us as prey and themselves as hyenas, busy devouring everything they can.
May 21, 2010 |

Ray Dalio is a billionaire hedge fund manager who makes more money in a single day than most Americans will earn in their entire lifetimes. That’s because hedge funds are the top of the Wall Street food chain — and Dalio runs the largest hedge fund of all, Bridgewater Associates. Life’s good at the top of this food chain: in 2008, a bad year for most Americans, Dalio took home $780
million. That same $780 million could have paid the salaries of about 20,000 teachers — and those 20,000 teachers could have taught about 400,000 American students (using author Les Leopold’s calculations). A lot of people might find this offensive and unjust, but not Dalio—he thinks this is all part of Nature’s Plan, and it just so happens that Nature favors the hedge fund managers:
“I believe that self-interest and society’s interests are generally symbiotic [bold--Dalio’s]…That is why how much money people have earned is a rough measure of how much they gave society what it wanted.”
So now we know why hedge fund managers are raking in record pay (last year, the top 25 hedge fund managers earned on average about $1 billion each), while hundreds of thousands of America’s teachers are getting fired all across the country: Nature hates teachers and other do-gooders. Sure, Dalio’s hedge fund is flush thanks in no small part to all the teachers retirement funds that Bridgewater managed to tap—without those teachers pooling their money together, he’d have a lot less to plunder, and society would never even know what a great person he is.
To which Dalio would answer, “Be a hyena. Attack the wildebeest.”
Did you write that down yet? Because that’s Cruel Reality According to Ray Dalio, a self-described “hyperrealist” and author of a bulky book of maxims leaked recently via the financial blog Dealbreaker. Dalio titled his collection of maxims—some 250 in all-- “Principles” and he makes every Bridgewater employee memorize it. A weighty title like Principles might have you thinking he’s the Descartes of the new millennium. Except that his philosophy comes down to something like this: I [am too rich to] think, therefore I am [a delusional asshole].” Or better yet, “If I’m so rich, then you ain’t smart.”
You can read Dalio’s Principles thanks to the folks at Dealbreaker who leaked it last week. Imagine some Ayn Rand geek a few decades later and a few billion dollars richer, and you get Dalio’s Principles, exemplified by his “Be a hyena” maxim:
When a pack of hyenas takes down a young wildebeest, is that good or evil? At face value, that might not be “good” because it seems cruel, and the poor wildebeest suffers and dies. Some people might even say that the hyenas are evil. Yet this type of apparently “cruel” behavior exists throughout the animal kingdom. Like death itself, it is integral to the enormously complex and efficient system that has worked for as long as there has been life. It is good for both the hyenas who are operating in their self- interest and the interest of the greater system, including those of the wildebeest, because killing and eating the wildebeest fosters evolution (i.e., the natural process of improvement). In fact, if you changed anything about the way that dynamic works, the overall outcome would be worse.
That’s right, America’s largest hedge fund manager sees himself as a hyena, and the rest of us as his wildebeest. As awful as it reads, coming from the mouth of one of the oligarchy’s most powerful barons, it also reveals what an idiot Dalio is. Does he even know anything about the hyena he compares himself to—specifically the spotted hyena, since that’s the only hyena that regularly feasts on wildebeest? Can he handle the truth? Because he’s not going to like it—not unless a macho hedge fund manager like Dalio is into being dominated by bitches.
THERE'S MORE IF YOU CAN STOMACH IT