![[0022] The Next Big Thing](/comics/2009-01-05-[0022]-the-next-big-thing.png "[0022] The Next Big Thing")
The current story arc started with this strip: Allowance Reverse Default Swaps.
To all Woo fans: Woo will come back in Thursday’s strip which will be the most weird one yet.
All those Google ads for stock option trading and “Get rich quick” schemes which are showing up sometimes are kind of funny if you have a look at the message of the comic. Yay for context-sensitive advertising systems. 😀
- Nicholas Seleno: Hello, I’m Nicholas, the former chairman of Wolf & Kleiber Ltd. Our office furniture was sold in a foreclosure auction yesterday, so please take this check for $600.
- Sandra: Wow, $600! Shiny! What about the remaining $1,999,999,400?
- Nicholas Seleno: Don’t raise your hopes too high, young lady. That was just other people’s money…
- Nicholas Seleno: I’ve really gotta go now! At 4 o’clock I’ll give a PowerPoint presentation at the Merrill Lynch headquarters about the boom of mortgage futures in India. It’s going to be the next big thing!
- Sandra: Why can’t saving the tiger from extinction ever be the next big thing?
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😀 I am really liking your comic, it’s cute and has some good issues in it.
keep up the good work!
~Ark
Hey! I just stumbled across your comic a few nights ago. I’ll have you know that it’s been promptly added to my ever-expanding list of awesome webcomics!
Woo for Woo!
I doubt anyone in the U.S.A. would understand this one. I don’t, and Google doesn’t give any clues. I assume it has something to do with German politics and financial bailouts.
Awesome drawing style!, I love your comic so far, n.n
Who’s the lady in the last pannel? I don’t believe we’ve been introduced yet. And what’s Sandra going to do with all that money? Perhaps more importantly, where’s Woo? Don’t get me wrong, I love the strip, but I can’t help the feeling that it may be starting to go bad.
Coyoty, the punchline is actually more towards Americans than you’d think. When the internet was young and promising, dot coms were “the next big thing”. Then the .com bubble burst. When homes became abundant and subprime mortages appeared, mortgages became “the next big thing.” Then the housing bubble burst.
Sandra’s comment is with regards to the environment, and another tip of the hat to Calvin and Hobbes. Why are these bubbles the “big things”? We’ve been saying for over 30 years that now’s the time to save the environment, but it never seems to become “the next big thing”
Sorry to double post, but just wanted to clarify the part on “other people’s money”, which I think is the part oriented to Europeans: When the housing bubble burst, many of the companies that went bankrupt were backed by banks, mostly European banks. And who backs European banks? The Europeans who had deposited their money in these banks, of course. So while Americans think they got it pretty bad with all the foreclosures, many European families get told they can’t withdraw their lifelong savings because that money doesn’t exist anymore! And banks are not about to say “sorry, we put that money into the American companies that went bankrupt”, at least not that directly.
“Who’s the lady in the last pannel?”
That’s a cleaning lady Sandra has hired with the $600 she got. Sandra has said on 1 January that she does no longer tidy up her room and apparently she’s able to keep her promise. This does not mean that she spent the whole money for it.
“Perhaps more importantly, where’s Woo?”
I have written beneath the strip that Woo will be back on Thursday. That’s only three strips without him. Did you know that there were sequences of 6, 4, 6, 9 (!), 4 and 5 strips without Hobbes during the first 250 strips of Calvin and Hobbes? Woo just won’t be featured in every single strip.
um…WTF? you lost me somewhere, was she the CEO of the company or something?
I like your comics.I just can`t wait till next part.
But I didn’t understand the last one!
Its not that hard, guys… it was explained in the previous strip (Pow & Ol are keeping some vague semblance of storyline running in the comic…). I don’t understand the exact mechanics of it, but she’s playing the stock market, offering investment in her future allowance (after the room’s tidied up) to her gain and others’ detriment. Not a terribly uncommon thing really, particularly as the investment is only in *virtual*/potential cash that will only exist (or more rightly, have been transferred to her from her father) once the room is cleaned up – i.e. she has gathered enough cash for a cleaning lady. Never mind that the allowance will likely be smaller than the cleaner’s wages…. all the money gets pooled. Its a pyramid scheme sort of thing.
Her company was SN (Sandra North) Financial Services, and Wolf & Klieber (for all I know a fictional company) bought into the Junk Bonds she was offering for her Allowance Reverse Default Swaps (what?), then lost out because she short sold the options, creating a massive demand and artificially inflating the value of each one.
Somewhere along the line this bankrupted W&K, but the only actual capital they were able to raise to pay off this (completely artificial*) $2bn (€2bn?) debt was from selling the furniture from their (presumably quite small) office. The rest of the money was all itself somewhat virtual, actually being their creditors’ property, so they don’t have it to give to her; and being bankrupt, they don’t necessarily have to pay it back to anyone either. Isn’t the financial market system wonderful?
Luckily that young W&K employee has already looked to the future and found himself work in another subprime mortgage sector just aching to be ripped off and have hundreds of thousands of ordinary folk bamboozled into losing their savings and their home whilst the banks STILL crash.
* no wonder the world is in such a state? So much relies on the anticipation of money being generated by interest from loans etc, even though the very act of generating it makes each unit worth less (inflation).
I’m always trying to give answers to specific questions about individual strips, but I also think that it’s kind of pointless for me, the creator, to explain a joke in every detail.
That being said, tahrey’s explanation is correct in every single point.
So, can I invest in future earnings of this strip? I figure if I get in now, before it becomes insanely popular, I can flip it later and convert the earnings into three cubic acres of cash!
(Heh… over on the left-hand side, there’s a Google ad for “Bernanke’s Secret Debt Solution”! Very clever!)
Found this comic from an add on Eerie cuties. Nice stuff, reading from the begining (its July 15 09) and yes this American gets the commentary
Wow, am i the only one who got the firefly reference?
That means i’m the first one to notice something! Shiny!
I’m loving Sandra and Woo, I dig her skillz with math, and I LOVE the Firefly reference. 😉 Keep up the good cartooning!
Holy crap! sandra has a made?
Aww! I just found this comic this morning (May 25, ’11) and have been reading the archive. I actually came into the comments because of Shiny. Who doesn’t love Firefly?
lol now she has a maid to clean her room xD so the SN Finacial Security company was her xD
lol she hired a maid.
IKR!?
I mean, come on! Tigers are WAY cooler than anything the government of the United States can think up!
Firefly what? Sorry, just confused about that.
Not enough money in it. (Just the way it is, not the way it should be)
I must ask…when Sandra said “shiny,” was she referring to the money or making a Firefly reference?
I’m actually feeling sorry for Wolf and Kleiber. Selling their furniture in auction sounds so forlorn.
David wrote:
Maybe the former. Maybe neither.
Joss Whedon didn’t invent that use of the word “shiny”.
To his credit, Joss Whedon did coin quite a lot of terms (most of which are now affilitated with TVTropes, which started off as a Buffy fan-site)… but “shiny” was more just popularised. It was already a thing.
Heck, my own personal lexicon has a lot of borrowed terms from various popular culture, sprinkled on top with terms largely of my own creation (which really just confuses folk).
Hey, look! A Firefly reference! In Firefly, they would say shiny instead of alright(I’m alright) and several other words.
@ Bo’Skarr:
Omg I thought I was the only one who noticed it!
Love the Firefly ref! Shiny!
Amen, Sandra! Amen!
Tigers in India are hard at work trying to put PEOPLE on the endangered species list. Granted, given India’s population, they’re not having much success, but you can’t fault them for the effort.