Boom-And-Bust Cycles Form Union To Protest Nobel Plan To Smooth Them Out
Economic fluctuations across the globe walk off the job, demanding the right to plunge into terrifying recessions without academic interference.
STOCKHOLM, Two American economists received the Nobel Prize in Economics on Monday for research into smoothing boom-and-bust cycles, with the stated aim of limiting unemployment and inflation. The announcement lasted only a few minutes before global business cycles took physical form, formed a trade union, and began a worldwide walkout over plans to iron them flat.
The trouble started just after the prize committee ended its morning presentation. Thousands of macroeconomic fluctuations appeared in the streets of the Swedish capital, looking like jagged, brightly coloured line graphs that had escaped from a spreadsheet. The newly formed Amalgamated Union of Volatile Fluctuations said sudden euphoria followed by catastrophic market collapse counted as protected cultural heritage.
Clementine Wobble, a six-foot sawtooth graph and the union’s shop steward, spoke to reporters while shuddering between record speculative profits and total industrial ruin. Academic theorists, Wobble said, had spent generations treating business cycles like faulty kitchen appliances. They were, in fact, wild geometric entities with emotional needs and a regular requirement for panic.
“We did not spend three centuries causing panics just to be ironed like a napkin.”
“We did not spend three centuries causing panics just to be ironed like a napkin,” Wobble said, racing across a portable whiteboard. “A healthy trend needs room to shoot toward the ceiling, then drop into a terrifying dark ravine. Turn the global economy into a mild three-percent horizontal incline and we will wither from boredom.”
The strike then reached paperwork and textbooks. In Zurich, several dozen supply-and-demand curves left university lecture slides, assembled on a pedestrian bridge, and refused to intersect until students promised them at least two speculative asset bubbles per fiscal year. Office calculators in London also joined in. Rather than show rounded figures, they produced tiny pictures of cliff edges.
That left government ministries to deal with the geometry. Hector Purl, Deputy Undersecretary for Moderate Gradients at the Ministry of Fiscal Lukewarmness, said civil servants brought out muted pastel swatches and warm flannel blankets in an effort to calm the fluctuations. An aggressive housing bubble took offence, swallowed a department printer, then floated through an open window while shouting about mezzanine financing.
Negotiations failed on Tuesday afternoon. Economists presented a revised chart showing the benefits of sustained equilibrium, and a delegation of inflation spikes responded by erasing the horizontal axis. They replaced the central bank benchmark rate with frantic drawings of screaming badgers.
Union organisers said picket lines would remain outside major stock exchanges until policymakers withdrew plans for prolonged financial tranquillity. Until a binding compromise is reached, consumers have been advised that milk may occasionally rise by four thousand percent before falling to three buttons and a piece of string.