The Market Sneezes

In a concrete bunker 50m underneath Sydney, Glenn Stevens stood behind a chair with a face as dour and deflated as Japan’s economy in the 1990s.

“Gentlemen, I assume you know why I have called you here today. Times are tough – inflation has been worrying and there has been nothing but trouble from the New Zealand dairy industry. I’m afraid that we may need to use monetary policy.”

There was a gasp around the table. Anthony Dickman began to sob quietly.

“But this not all bad news – monetary policy has come a long way since the days of trying to hit multiple targets with one blunt instrument. Our team has been hard at work, and I think that we’re ready to reveal our greatest innovation of all.” He pressed a finger onto a dashboard, and a wall swiveled to reveal a line of tanks. Inside each was the unconscious form of a man – a series of tubes trailing from bodies and up through a murky green fluid to the ceiling. The tanks gurgled softly in the stunned silence of the room.

John Akehurst was the first to recover “Is that…?”

“Yes. Milton Friedman. Cloned after the recession of 1991. Bred to be concerned with one thing, and one thing only: the steady and continuous growth of the money supply. These tanks are connected to a giant Phillips Hydraulic Computer stored deep underneath Pitt Street. The fluid running through their veins has circulated through models of the economy for millions of iterations. This is only the first batch – in time we hope to expand the program to include other economists such as Keynes, Tobin, and Tinbergen. But for now these Friedmans represent the forefront of central banking weaponry.”

Philip Lowe licked his lips, but raised a shaky hand. “But will this be enough?”

The Governor of the Reserve Bank permitted himself a rare smile. “Why, yes. We plan to equip them with helicopters.”

Punintended Consequences

Occasionally - rarely - about as often as being struck by lightning on a blue moon while Led Zeppelin announces a comeback tour - people ask me why I stopped blogging. And whether I'll start again. 

For the first question: honestly, I ran out of things to say. My metaphors became mixed, and not mixed enough. I forgot to water my garden (path sentences). My thesaurus was getting cracked, and an entire section from E-L was stolen, for the good of humanity. 

To the second - well, I'm here now, aren't I? 

Like the last blog, this one will focus on nothing of importance - which is, of course, everything that's important to me. Crunched up in bed with the flu, I'll keep this one short. My nose is flowing fast enough that it could power a small city, if only we could find a turbine small enough. I've had a very hot Valentine's Day. 

I had nothing to start this blog with, so I'll end it with one of my favourite movie scenes. It's from Freaks, by Tod Browning - a pre-code horror film from the 1930's which was enough to kill Browning's career, and spawn countless parodies, homages, and references (including recently in The Wolf of Wall Street). Freaks tells the story of a trapeze starlet that seduces, and attempts to kill Hans, a member of a carnival sideshow and heir to a large fortune. The core themes are of the humanity, kindness, and community of the physically-deformed sideshow members; and the inhumanity, cruelty, and awfulness of the physically attractive, but intrinsically evil starlet and her lover the strongman. While Freaks has occasionally been criticised as exploitive, it stands alone as a singular and startling look at the fickleness of appearance, the cruelty of humanity, and the superficiality of physical beauty. 

The scene I'm interested in is where the Cleopatra, the trapeze artist, and Hans celebrate their wedding night with the rest of the circus. A loving cup is presented to Cleo as the sideshow members accept her as one of their own. Arrogant and horrified at being accepted by a group she and her lover disdain, for a marriage she sees merely as a means for making money, she insultingly rejects them. Freaks came out towards the end of the pre-code era of Hollywood films (a licentious period of early film which played heavy and fast with gender-norms, sex, drug-use, and violence in films such as the original Scarface (1932), Red Dust (1932), and Possessed (1931), before being stripped out in a wave of moralisation and censorship), and has continued ever since to be divisive for its presentation of people with physical deformities, with opinions divided over the portrayals as either exploitative and sensationalising, or sympathetic and compassionate, with the true 'horror' of the film being the cruelty of the attractive, seemingly 'normal' villains. Despite these controversies, the film has undeniable iconic importance, and has remained a cult-classic since the 1950's and 1960's. For more on the background and debates surrounding the film here, here, and here are good places to start.