Phantasmix Stock Market Blog

Americans now work approximately eight weeks¹ longer per year than in 1969 – in the space of a single generation – for roughly the same income after adjusting for inflation. The new standard workweek is 70 hours² and the growth rate is increasing.

1 “Work, Stress, and Health,” National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health Conference, 1999

2 “Extreme Jobs: The Dangerous Allure of the 70-Hour Workweek,” Harvard Business Review, December 2006

– Tim Ferris, author of The 4-Hour Work Week

I’m very close to re-organizing the site, please bear with me. Meanwhile, here’s a book that I came across and will read soon. I’m drawn to dystopian sci-fi literature like it’s a car wreck. Horrifying, yet I can’t stop looking.

The Space Merchants by C. M Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl, 1958

In a vastly overpopulated world, businesses have taken the place of governments and now hold all political power. States exist merely to ensure the survival of huge trans-national corporations. Advertising has become hugely aggressive and by far the best-paid profession. Through advertising, the public is constantly deluded into thinking that the quality of life is improved by all the products placed on the market. However, the most basic elements are incredibly scarce, including water and fuel. The planet Venus has just been visited and judged fit for human settlement, despite its inhospitable surface and climate; the colonists would have to endure a harsh climate for many generations until the planet could be terraformed.

The protagonist, Mitch Courtenay, is a star-class copywriter in the Fowler Schocken advertising agency who has been assigned the ad campaign which would attract colonists to Venus. But a lot more is happening than he knows about. It soon becomes a tale of mystery and intrigue, in which many of the characters are not what they seem, and Mitch’s loyalties and opinions change drastically over the course of the narrative.

Re-reading Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefèvre, here’s a possibly relevant excerpt from the book:

One day I saw in the Paris Herald a dispatch from New York that Smelters had declared an extra dividend. They had run up the price of the stock and the entire market had come back quite strong. Of course that changed everything for me in Aix. The news simply meant that the bull cliques were still fighting desperately against conditions – against common sense and against common honesty, for they knew what was coming and were resorting to such schemes to put up the market in order to unload stocks before the storm struck them. It is possible they really did not believe the danger was as serious or as close at hand as I thought. The big men of the Street are as prone to be wishful thinkers as the politicians or the plain suckers. I myself can’t work that way. In a speculator such an attitude is fatal. Perhaps a manufacturer of securities or a promoter of new enterprises can afford to indulge in hope-jags.