The Three Hundred Million Dollar Hole

A group of minor Wall Street investment firms recently chumped together 300 million dollars to build a transatlantic fiber-optic cable, improving the connection speed between the New York and London markets by an impressive five milliseconds.  If you don’t know what a millisecond is, it’s about the amount of time it takes the brain to think sonofabitch.  If you don’t know what 300 million looks like, close your eyes, picture a really long wire, and hit yourself in the head with a hammer.

Here’s why the bile rises in your throat when you read about this.  Wall Street, as silly as it is, serves a purpose: it invests in stuff.  Hopefully it invests in good stuff so more good stuff gets made, innovation gets funded and good stuff investors get rewarded.  We tend to forgive the ridiculous amounts of money that Wall Street sucks out of us based on this good stuff paradigm.  But a 300 million dollar cable is neither investment nor innovation.  They are taking money earned from real investment to game a system by constructing a wire that has no value outside of that system, a wire that doesn’t even improve the system.  They scoured the coffers to put some nitrous in their T-Model.

An original parable for your consideration:

There once lived a man in a town filled with houses.  The biggest house was reserved for whosoever owned the prettiest horse.  One day the man accidentally dropped a sandwich down a well, and to his amazement his horse became one inch prettier.  After some trial and error, the man discovered that with every useful resource he dropped down the well, his horse became proportionally prettier.  Thinking how nice it would be to live in the biggest house he grew ambitious and started a lumber company, and threw every profit down the well until his horse was ten miles pretty.  The woman who had owned the biggest house was forced to relinquish it, and the man bathed in comfort and glory.  But the woman soon discovered the well and its contents and built a house ten times bigger, hired an army of mercenaries, razed the town and hanged all the horses.

What would Shakespeare say?

 There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.