`Wall Street enjoys small gain." What the hell does that mean? Should we file it under notoriously boring headlines like "Small Earthquake in Chile: Few Dead" and forget about it?
Does it mean we can ignore all that doomsday stuff about "Brazil/Japan/Papua New Guinea/Global Economy peering/staring into the Abyss" - along with "Markets Massacre", "Currency Plunges" and "Shares Wipe-Out"? Are we living in a bubble? Is the Celtic Tiger about to bite his tail off? Did we get a bit ahead of ourselves and chuck out the donkey and cart a tad too soon?
Or does "Wall Street enjoys small gain" mean business as usual, with the Celtic cubs swaggering along the same smug, arrogant, grasping path, hurling words like "economic refugee" as a term of abuse?
And the answer is . . . your guess is as good as anybody's. But you know this yourself, since you fed the goldfish, put the cat out early and bellowed for silence the better to hear the definitive answer from Tuesday's Prime Time. And the answer was? . . . You should have consulted the goldfish. Three young economists sat around a table like three preternaturally confident Mystic Megs and agreed on virtually nothing. David McWilliams, a former central banker now working in London, predicted outright disaster. George Lee's incandescent grin lingered after him like the Cheshire Cat's, signifying unbridled optimism. When journalist Matt Cooper dropped the words "hedge fund" into play, this viewer reached for her gun.
But Cooper was right, if for a different reason. "Hedge funds", alas, provide a depressingly interesting insight into those obscenely-paid Big Swinging Dicks who play the markets. These BSDs (aka Masters of the Universe) use millions drawn from the world's six million millionaires as well as from some now sheepish-looking banks, to make billions.
They do this by exploiting tiny aberrations in the financial markets. Though theoretically high risk (in fact, risk is the whole point of them), one such US fund, the majestically misleadingly named LongTerm Capital Management (LTCM), was bailed out recently to the tune of $3.5 billion and the satisfying thunk of collapsing legends. Now, to those of us muddling along on fairly average incomes, this might seem like a wonderfully amusing fate for a shower of BSDs. Until you discover that the banks had to bail them out (as opposed to letting them rot), to avert nothing less than "the potential paralysis of the global financial system".
This is what happens when banks expose themselves to unregulated BSDs who can bet a trillion (i.e. the number one followed by 12 noughts) on the equivalent of the 2.30 at Fairyhouse - in LTCM's case, the Russian and other financial markets - and lose the lot. (LTCM's boss, John Meriwether, famously, once bet 10 million dollars on the serial numbers of a dollar bill.) Major banks forced to shore up the bail-out to save themselves saw their share prices dive as their own investors bailed out. The resulting selling spree saw hundreds of millions of pounds wiped off the Irish market, eroding confidence and the value of Irish pension funds.
Banks can go bust as a result of a BSD's activities, and entire economies with them. It's as serious as that. And it's worth noting that LTCM has two Nobel prize-winning economists on the board.
This is the problem with even scratching the veneer of the financial world. The more you discover about how it works, the type of people in it and the success rate of those paid to run it, the more you want to preempt that whole messy Crash business and throw yourself out the window right now. Joe and Caitriona Soap out here desperately want to believe that these people know what they're doing. But so far this year, they have been monumentally wrong, wrong and wrong again.
They said it couldn't happen to Thailand - Thailand's a Tiger, you see. Next thing we know, the Thai baht is in the toilet and the economy diving somewhere below sea level. They said it couldn't happen to Malaysia; or Indonesia; or South Korea; or Hong Kong; or Japan. Now Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Chile and South Africa are all staring into that great, clicheed abyss in varying degrees of despair.
Joe and Caitriona might not know exactly what an abyss looks like in terms of the BMW carloan or why the "Footsie's buying frenzy" is "petering out" (they thought that buying frenzies were a good thing) but there's something about it all that sounds a bit ominous.
Well, Joe and Cait got some good news this week with the first moves to reducing mortgage interest rates - "at last", in the words of the commentators. "At last"? What short memories we little tigers have.
National Irish Bank's rate is now 7.1 per cent. Only a few years ago, rates were in double digits, rushing towards 20 per cent. We've forgotten all that. We are invincible. Never mind that personal debt has risen by 50 per cent since 1990 (which makes Joe and Cait very twitchy) or that some first-time buyers are paying four times average earnings for new houses compared to 2.5 times in the UK.
To Joe and Cait, the lower interest rates mean a few extra pounds in the kitty. To economists, they spell disaster. The economy is overheating, needs damping down, not encouragement. And the funny thing is, they could be right. It's one thing to be wary of talking ourselves into a recession; it's another to ignore the possibility entirely. And anyway, on a purely personal note, it has seemed for a while now that it's the humans who are overheating and losing the run of themselves entirely. We're only a few years away from the donkey and cart, the twine around the topcoat and the outdoor toilet, yet the whiff of 1980s redbraces-Bolly-and-Porsche Britain is overwhelming.
You can always tell by the cars, says a Dublin southsider. "When you begin to see cars in funny colours - lime-green convertibles, canary-yellow Mercedes - you know that people have thrown caution to the wind. Try to get into Dalkey of an evening, and you'll be run over by dozens of them." Mind you, they say the same about Castleblayney - not about the funny colours, but that the Mercs are lined up three-deep around the town.
Then there's the property market. Who said the fever was abating? Only last week, the release of 170 Dublin dockside flats for sale had buyers behaving like a bunch of demented Japanese bond dealers. At the height of the stampede, one cutie offered to sell his place in the queue for £1,000 but no-one bit. Properties ranged from £110,000 to £350,000 and there wasn't a brick in place, but people were buying them like Smarties. One wouldn't be enough at all, dear; several wanted three or four and were desolate to be told they were confined to two apiece. More than £30 million worth of sales were logged by evening - on a site formerly known as Sheriff Street and bought for £4.3 million a couple of years ago.
In an industry where new house prices are up by 133 per cent in 10 years and building costs by just 40 per cent, it's long been assumed that somebody out there is making an awful lot of money. As young couples sweat through interviews with lenders and tremble at the threat of negative equity, stories abound of carpenters/plumbers turned building contractors, loping around with £20 million burning a hole in their back pockets, lest a development opportunity turns up.
Estate agency culture has been turned on its head as agents suddenly realise that the old rules no longer apply. Fado, fado, when a big property came up for sale, they would know precisely who the buyer would be - a well-known doctor or prominent lawyer, somebody recognisably high society. Nowadays, they have no idea who to cosy up to. It could be the crumpled little man with the spanner sticking out of his pocket. Or that rough-looking 28-year-old with the scowl and three-day-old stubble whose lady friend's bedroom - though how could the agent know this? - is lined with Prada shoes still in their boxes and who begins negotiations for an upmarket kitchen by demanding the price of the most expensive model.
Who knows who has money any more? Who knows how they got it? Who cares, as long as it's spread around?
Dinner parties provide just the forum for these minor league Big Swinging Dicks to roar up in their macho four-wheel drives (never graced a decent grass margin, never mind rough terrain) and engage in epic boasts about their latest financial stormer.
"You weren't in on that? Yah, roight. We got a nice piece of it, they'll double by the end of the month . . . You bought in France? . . . We've a place in Barbados/Florida/Italy, but yah, we bought in France . . . Sure you'd get a farm there for the price of one of the dockland flats we bought last week . . . Oh, you weren't in on that? . . . Yah . . ."
These are the Tiger cubs - flash, brash, tough and arrogant, cursed with tunnel vision and contempt for the less well off. And if it works for them, why not for their apprentices? It's visible in their staff and how they run their businesses. Tourists are remarking on the rotten manners of shop assistants and on the sheer number and bullying demeanour of the security guards who seem to dog the innocent at every turn. The old Irish virtues of modesty, manners and gentle charm no longer rate in these circles.
Maybe, says one observer, it's because we're so new to the boom that we only know how to emulate everything we once despised about Thatcher's Britain. Maybe it's a rite of passage we must endure, in the rush from being good-natured Paddys to Big Swinging Mickeys. Or will it take a market crash to remind us that there is such a thing as society?
And remember, Joe and Cait, money isn't everything. Bill Gates knows that now. He's only 42 but - get this - his personal (not corporate) wealth is worth more than the combined wealth of 106 million lower-income Americans. But last thing we heard, despite his yearning to join the exclusive Augusta, Georgia golf club, they weren't rushing to sign him up.
Meanwhile, Irish cubs seeking advanced tuition in brass neckery will be keenly monitoring our old friend, John Meriwether of LTCM. Far from lying low, he is said to be seeking new investors with a view to buying out some of the banks involved in his own multi-billion dollar bail-out. Beat that.