Pig Heaven,,,,,,,,By Alan Abelson
What a signal week for investors!
Not just because the stock market wound up a heartening two-month rise with a proper flourish. Or that the frolicsome spirit that made Wall Street such a delightfully nutty paradise for most of the past four years is most unmistakably back.
Or, for that matter, on a more pragmatic note, that mutual-fund buyers, despite some daunting moments and shrill warnings from the nattering naysayers, have refused to waver in their devotion to stocks, pouring a tidy $17.6 billion into equities in the latest reported month. Or, finally, that the great job machine was sent out to the shop for repairs (payrolls shrank by 165,000 in the past two months), fortuitously enabling Greenspan & Co. to stop being so uptight and stay any impulse to give the monetary screws another turn.
For though these desiderata are very much welcome and manifestly cause for cheer, there are other, far more significant reasons why the past week is destined to prove indelibly memorable for investors, large and small.
Like xenotransplantation.
Ring a bell? Possibly not. But we respectfully suggest you familiarize yourself posthaste with that phase, even if it makes your tongue a little tired.
For potentially, anyway, xenotransplantation could be of greater importance to investors than, hard as it may be to believe, even such an earth-shattering change as the switch to decimals from fractions in reporting stock prices. Indeed, it may well emerge as the biggest breakthrough in Wall Street since the creation of the stockbroker by crossing an optimist with a bull terrier.
Frankly, xenotransplantation was Greek to us until we came across it in our favorite medical journal, The Wall Street Journal. Not only did we learn what it meant -- transplanting organs from one species to another -- but also that the process of using animals as organ donors for humans, which had defied every effort by brave biotechnicians to put it into practice, suddenly looks doable!
In no small measure, the Journal informed us, we can direct our hurrahs toward a small company fittingly called BioTransplant, which has bred a line of miniature pigs that happily do not send harmful pig viruses along with any of their organs when implanted in Homosapiens.
The obvious market is folks in need of new kidneys, livers and hearts. But given the miraculous powers of modern science, we envision brain transplants -- and of brain slivers -- as well.
And it's here that we foresee a huge, revolutionary impact on Wall Street. For its denizens seem especially amenable to xenotransplantation, since pigs have long been as prominent a part of the investment landscape as bulls and bears, as evidenced by the old stock market ditty that "bulls make money, bears make money but pigs make more money than anyone."
Just think of the impact of a modicum of gray matter transferred from those miniature pigs to the multitude of timid investors. We're talking especially about the twitchy souls who squirrel away their dough in money market funds. At last count, there was a tidy $1.75 trillion in those still-water repositories, of which nearly $1 trillion represents individual (as against institutional) money.
Infuse these timorous masses with the right quotient of hoggishness -- or greed, as it is called in human parlance -- and they and their trillion bucks will fling themselves at the stock market. Result: Dow 36,000 by Christmas, guaranteed!
And imagine what a tiny slice of frontal lobe from a cute little pig could do for analysts. Instead of that cautious reckoning that the stock they're touting is slated to rise from its current price of 25 to 200, they can hyperventilate in earnest and boldly predict said stock is sure to hit 400 on its way to 600. Scores -- we're too conservative -- hundreds of stocks will rocket skyward.
There's always a danger, to be sure, that the powers of those miniature pigs will diminish because of overbreeding, and the potency of the transplants will decline accordingly. However, in the event, lucky Wall Street has a ready means of reinvigorating or even upgrading the line of midget swine.
Xenotransplantation, after all, works both ways. Just a speck from the cranial region of an investment banker implanted in a pig's brain would mightily enhance the vital element of hoggishness. Seems only fair, in any case, that those little porkers should get something in return.
Get ready with joy in your heart and money in your hand to welcome the Age of Xenotransplantation. So far as we're concerned, pig heaven just can't come soon enough. |
