The economic crises of the past five years, predicted.
I had a chuckle when I re-read Thor Vol. 1, #179 (Aug. 1970), as reprinted in Thor: Siege Aftermath (2010; ISBN: 978-0-7851-4638-4); here's Loki, as drawn by Jack Kirby (pencils) and Joe Sinnott (inks), looking quite a bit like a Wall Street financier:
Yeah, Michael Lewis has the in-depth, blow-by-blow post mortems; Felix Salmon has the incisive analysis; Paul Krugman doles out a hefty helping of common sense to his New York Times columns; and Matt Taibbi brings the laugh-out-loud snark to his attacks in Rolling Stone; but Loki's leering boast is as succinct an explanation of our past, current, and, most likely, future economic catastrophes (LIBOR, anyone?) as I've yet seen.
And really, does the general public really know or care about the convoluted skiens of chicanery, malfeasance, misrepresentation, collusion, general jiggery-pokery and blind leaps of faith that caused everyone's 401ks and pensions to deflate like a Thanksgiving parade float the Friday after? The takeaway is that the global economy's largely based on imaginary numbers, and a few conniving bastards made out like bandits because of it, while the rest of us get to lie back and think of England.
*NOTE to COMIC BOOK NERDS: The panel in question is panel #7, p. 4, of Thor Vol. 1, #179; this was the first part of an especially stupid three-part arc, written by Stan Lee, wherein Loki swaps bodies with Thor, and still gets to use Thor's hammer Mjolnir to randomly break stuff in NYC and terrorize the assembly at the United Nations, which kind of flies in the face of Stan's tweaking of Mjolnir (i.e., "Whoseover holds this hammer, IF HE BE WORTHY, shall have the power of the mighty Thor"). Whatever; Stan was nearing the end of his scripting career, at least for comic books, at this point.
Yeah, Michael Lewis has the in-depth, blow-by-blow post mortems; Felix Salmon has the incisive analysis; Paul Krugman doles out a hefty helping of common sense to his New York Times columns; and Matt Taibbi brings the laugh-out-loud snark to his attacks in Rolling Stone; but Loki's leering boast is as succinct an explanation of our past, current, and, most likely, future economic catastrophes (LIBOR, anyone?) as I've yet seen.
And really, does the general public really know or care about the convoluted skiens of chicanery, malfeasance, misrepresentation, collusion, general jiggery-pokery and blind leaps of faith that caused everyone's 401ks and pensions to deflate like a Thanksgiving parade float the Friday after? The takeaway is that the global economy's largely based on imaginary numbers, and a few conniving bastards made out like bandits because of it, while the rest of us get to lie back and think of England.
*NOTE to COMIC BOOK NERDS: The panel in question is panel #7, p. 4, of Thor Vol. 1, #179; this was the first part of an especially stupid three-part arc, written by Stan Lee, wherein Loki swaps bodies with Thor, and still gets to use Thor's hammer Mjolnir to randomly break stuff in NYC and terrorize the assembly at the United Nations, which kind of flies in the face of Stan's tweaking of Mjolnir (i.e., "Whoseover holds this hammer, IF HE BE WORTHY, shall have the power of the mighty Thor"). Whatever; Stan was nearing the end of his scripting career, at least for comic books, at this point.