4. Money for Sale

Nature abhors a vacuum. Taking advantage of the financialization of business and everyday life, banks moved to fill the gap.

In the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, an economics teacher, played by Ben Stein, launches into an improvised soliloquy, asking his apathetic students whether anyone has seen the “Laffer Curve.” He asks if anyone knows what Vice-President Bush Senior called this in 1980. No one knows. “Something-d-o-o economics. ‘Voodoo’ economics.”

The 1930s Hollywood film White Zombie incorrectly associated voodoo, African beliefs syncretized with Christianity, with exotic superstitions and occult practices. Unscrupulous practitioners made a fortune out of fake potions, powders, fetishes, and talismans to ward off evil. ...

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