Wall Street exposed

It must be tough being a financial advisor. At least it is if you're trying to win my business. There's a Catch-22 logic to my thinking. Those who know enough about the stock market to make their clients rich, should already be rich enough themselves to never have to work at all, much less at trying to make me rich.

Don't even get me started on the workings of Wall Street. One of the few people I read on the matter is Robert Mankoff. Actually, you don't read his work as much as look at the cartoons and read the captions. Still, when it comes to financial matters, he's spot-on.

Here are a few of my favorites, which typically feature a report on TV news:

• "On Wall Street today, the stock market corrected its previous correction, and is pretty sure it's got it right this time." Published in The New Yorker on March 8, 2010. 
• "On Wall Street today, news of lower interest rates sent the stock market up, but then the expectation that these rates would be inflationary sent the market down, until the realization that lower rates might stimulate the sluggish economy pushed the market up, before it ultimately went down on fears that an overheated economy would lead to a reimposition of higher interest rates." Published in "The Naked Cartoonist," 2002.
• "Bad news on Wall Street today, as the bottom fell out of the market, the sides collapsed, and the top blew away." Published in The New Yorker on July 22, 2002.
• "Analysts blamed the market's volatility on computer-directed trading while computers blamed it on analyst-directed trading." Unpublished, but available at The Cartoon Bank.

I could go on and on -- but Robert already has. And he's probably laughing all the way to the bank.