In the late 1980s, some local film makers produced a rather silly film about a computer nerd who summons a future sharkish version of himself to the present. It was called Future Past.
Most of the film then consists of him trying to suppress his demonic future self (some sort of insider trading stock broker with what was at the time a cool designer mullet) and send him home to the future or to oblivion.
The only really funny bit of the film was where the future self inflicts himself on the cultish fundamentalist Christian parents, who are otherwise totally disengaged from the protagonist.
They, and the rest of their cult are busy singing their hymn, which goes something like this:
By the bank where Jesus saves
By the bank where Jesus saves
By the bank where Jesus saves.
The future anti-hero plays a key on his harmonica and then diverts these morons onto his version of the hymn:
In the bank where Jesus saves
In the bank where Jesus saves
In the bank where Jesus saves
Jesus is my chief accountant
Profit with the Prophet
Good scene – hopefully whoever wrote it went on to much greater success.
It was quite an archetypical film as far as that era went. That I remember it actually existing does not add any more credit to it than what any post-Oz-ploitation film might merit.
But when we look wearily at similar adventures, such as Jack and the Beanstalk, or my own investments in magic beans (and related end of multi decade friendships), or cryptocurrency, you do need to wonder about what has been going on in recent years.
Ben McKenzie is a bored actor most famed for his role in The OC, and more recently for his marriage to uber babe Morena Baccarin.
During COVID, being less marketable than his wife (she is someone who does always get one steady job after another after all), Mr McKenzie in his boredom decided to use his economics degree and his latent celebrity to become an investigative financial journalist. He was able to interview a lot of the peculiar and outlandish characters who were involved in the crypto currency financial industry.
Hence he co-wrote a book called Easy Money, where he talks about cryptocurrency and related Ponzi economics.
Of quite value are some of his interactions with certain of the gurus of the ponzinomic world … just before FTX collapsed into a pile of financially radioactive liability, the financial genius sometimes known as SBF and responsible for that mess agreed to interviews with Ben McKenzie. Those interviews might, or might not, given the time frame of the book, count towards the evidence in the prosecution of SBF for his various alleged crimes.
What I do dispute in that book is not whether such things happened but whether such things are Ponzi schemes.
My view, as expressed previously in this blog, is that a Ponzi scheme is different from a bubble which has been caused by hysteria of crowds, where FOMO etc has pushed up the price of an alleged asset way past what is rational for it to be valued at.
South Sea bubble, Tulips and Poseidon are great examples of that sort of thing.
A Ponzi scheme is where someone creates a financial system where a potential bubble can be exploited. That is, you lie about the performance of some shares, and promise to keep paying out at that rate.
This is the one problem that I have with Ben McKenzies’s book. He cannot tell the difference between a bubble and a Ponzi scheme. Otherwise, his book is amazingly entertaining and warning about the threat which the cryptocurrency bubble poses to our financial system.
Lost For Words! 