only to benefit themselves. They may even intend to destroy the part of the economy that holds short positions in Studebaker. But we can’t have a good economy—where everyone gets stout like Cortez—unless capital is able to move from places where it’s less productive (the abandoned Studebaker factory) to places where it is more productive (the Darien, Connecticut, housing market). Moving capital is what traders do. Fortunately C. Scott Garliss gave me a coda to his long and detailed list of information that (sorry, Scott) I have not attempted to reproduce here. He noted that, when it comes to financial markets: “ Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. ” Which—putting it in a way that Keats, Cortez, the day trader, and I can understand—is French for, “Same old shit.” ALBANIA (JULY 1997) In 2011 Lonely Planet named Albania “a top travel destination,” and in 2014 the New York Times put Albania at #4 on a list of places you should travel to. So we can forget about Albania. When tourists arrive, reasons to go depart. Now Albania is just another quaint little country with dramatic mountains and pretty beaches. It’s poor enough to be a bargain (per capita GDP $13,651), but not so poor that it causes middle-class visitors to be embarrassed—or robbed as often as they are in the wrong parts of Jamaica (per capita GDP $10,221). And it’s more exotic than the Caribbean. Albania’s national dish is “tavë kosi” (soured milk casserole). Bring one home for the neighbors! Albania has a stable government, as governments go in the Balkans. It is a member of NATO and a candidate for inclusion in the European Union, and its economy has been growing at a rate of about 4 percent in recent years. The pyramid scheme frenzy and the frenetic aftermath that I described have disappeared like the thief in the night that they were. Speaking of such, I owe Albanians an apology. I upbraided them for their tolerance of shyster greed resulting in the loss of some $1.2 billion dollars. Meanwhile, back in my own country at exactly the same time, a much bigger fraud was being perpetrated—a fraud so large that it would make an Albanian pyramid of Cheops look like a Bernie Madoff mole hill. Bernie’s pyramid scheme was $65 billion wide. Bernie’s victims were investors of supposed sophistication, and he victimized them under a regulatory system of supposed rigor. So what kind of pot was I smoking to be telling the Albanians what color
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