The economy is down/So you already know it’s gonna be a lot of hommies in the town.

 — Jadakiss on “Broken Safety”

At the edge of the Euro’s collapse, how are we to understand a kind of capitalism that seems to have no interest in its own medium-term future? George Soros of all people has called it a “self-reinforcing process of disintegration,” and that asshole knows something about crashing currencies to make a quick buck (see “The Legend of George Soros” in Krugman’s Return of Depression Economics.) In my last post, I referred offhand to penultimate accumulation, and I really like the idea. The way speculative markets work, investors who can correctly predict (and/or cause) any sort of major event can make a lot of money off it, even if that event is the collapse of Greece or the Euro or a wrathful god’s seven plagues. If you can take a short or long position (or both!) on anything, one man’s rain of misery is another’s profit opportunity.

Penultimate accumulation would be the move to grab any remaining unexploited opportunities as quickly as possible before the building falls down on everyone’s head. For the “self-reinforcing” part of the metaphor, pretend some of those in the building, after pulling out all the copper wiring, realize they could make a killing on load-bearing supports. The profits are biggest for the first one to take a beam, at which point the others are compelled to join in — after all, the building is about to fall! The sooner they grab what they can and leave, the better.