First Men

Myths and legends of the market The JC’s guide to the foundational mythology of the markets.™ Go Premium Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Mythology Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

They were from Salomon brothers. They found broken embers in the forest, evidence of a now-vanished prior civilisation of child-like faeries — the Synthæse, or “Children of the Forest” — who eschewed all earthly rancour, regarded physical settlement of disputes as sinful and instead voluntarily exchanged their differences in a standardised, non-physical, “synthetic” terms across a centralised marketplace.

The First Men grasped these eternal verities and — isn’t it the way with mortal men — thoroughly bastardised them, instead of comparing idealised values plucked from a hypothetical realm of plationic perfection, offsetting actual physical loan contracts in different currencies to create this unwieldy machine age contrivance called a swap (originally to rhyme with crap) and indoing so inadvertently creating the conditions for financial weapons of mass destruction and, eventually all out world destruction. We now await some furry little creatures to save us from ourselves.

See also

• The Children of the Forest
• The Good Man
• The Dark Lord of the Swaps