Capital and Marks-ism
Capitalism, n Formerly, a system in which money was invested in the future production of goods. Increasingly a system in which money is invested in the future of money.</br></br>The most revealing aspect of last week's currency chaos is the entirely reasonable assumption by the media that nobody understood it. Primers and Q&A's festooned front-pages of papers that claim the nation's most sophisticated readership, not only to analyze the consequences of the strong German mark and determine their implications, but to explain-or try to-what in the world was happening.</br></br>Today, men everywhere praise capitalism-at least those men surrounded by material goods. But last week's crisis suggests that, just as few people in the country seems to know much history, science or culture, the mechanisms of modern capitalism are widely misunderstood and that this is a field much dependent on faith: You put money in the bank, and after that, all is currency transubstantiation.</br></br>And why not? Capital activity now threatens to attain the unknowable. ECUS, ERMs, shorts, leveraged bets, "one-lots," "lining up," "front-running," hedges and futures seem less the language of business than the stuff of exchange eschatology. One account of the week's money mess actually included the language: "The central bankers propose, the markets dispose." No one tried to comfort the losers in last week's debacle by reminding them that the market works in mysterious ways, at least not in so many words.</br></br>Cows, n. Friendly beasts with a suggestive set of associations: At once the symbol of wealth (when fattened), of false faith (when golden) and of bovine stupidity.