Notgnu wrote: The parable of bananasu and pumpkins.
In a distant and contested land, full of desperate people, a group of jolly canucks found an amazing banana tree. Even though the price of bananas at the time was kind of low the Canadians realized that the tree, with a little investment in pickers and boxes and ladders, could give them bananas for a low price (about $1.15 each.)
The happy Canucks made a deal with the locals to get the bananas from the tree and bring them to market. They said “we will bring the ladders and boxes and pay you to pick bananas and we will only keep 40% of the bananas and 40% ownership of the tree.”
There was much happiness and everyone celebrated. The banana chief went on a world tour telling everyone about the wonderful, cheap, perfect fat, ripe bananas.
The Canucks were extra elated when they found great reception to talk of their high grade banana find. People all over the world decided to line up and offer money… but they were not offering money for the bananas, no, they were offering money for rights to own a piece of the 40% of the rights to the banana tree and it’s production.
These people rightly decided that the whole rama-banana operation was worth many billions of dollars. They rubbed their greedy hands together imagining the riches they would reap from their banana tree.
To their surprise and added happiness banana trees in other countries began producing fewer bananas and the leaders of some of the countries decided they wanted to keep a few more of the bananas to give to hungry citizens (mainly so those citizens would not decide to eat the leaders) and then the demand for bananas started increasing.
Now, when it comes to food, bananas and pumpkins are worth the same. You can mush up a banana and mix it with mushed up pumpkins and low and behold you can push electricity through the mush.
Some other dudes, who had spent several years planting pumpkins and watering them in the hot and harsh Nevada desert, almost lost their investment when the price of pumpkin and banana mash went down to $2.50 a pound. The DRC bananas were doing fine because they were only to cost $1.15 each but the pumpkins were to cost about $2.00.
Then the price for banana pumpkin mash went up, and up. It even surpassed the wildest dreams of the early banana collectors. The high price excited the banana farmers and then their 40% ownership in the tree (and in the tree’s yet to increase size) became very valuable ($8.5 billion.)
The pumpkin growers were a little behind, and their operation smaller, but as the price of mash went up they too stood to gain more. Their market price for the farm was already so low. It had declined precipitously when banana mash was not the favoured dish. Whereas the low cost ($1.15) bananas now sell for double what was expected ($2.50 to $3.00) and thereby create double the profits (at $4.50 for mash,) the pumpkins end up selling for more than five times the profit that was originally expected (economists call this “marginal profit.”)
Pumpkins were going to cost $2.00 and be sold for maybe 50 cents more, if lucky. This created risk and it became the reason that no one wanted a pumpkin farm. Pumpkin farms were to be relegated to the dump bin.
But then, low and behold, people suddenly started realizing that pumpkins could be sold for $4.50, just like the bananas! Each pumpkin would then return five of the original fifty cents of cash flow units expected.
Many of the banana farmers, drunk on banana mash dreams, forgot to realize that pumpkins and bananas have the same value, and that you can buy the rights to sell pumpkins at about one third of the price of rights to sell DRC bananas.
$1.8 billion dollars buys you a huge pumpkin patch that is ripe in 2025 and will give 290 million pounds of pumpkins. In the same time frame there will be a fully grown DRC banana tree that, for $8.5 billion in today’s money, will give the rights to about 460 million pounds of bananas.
Check back soon for additional recipes.
Cheers,
Notgnu
(NCU >>> Nevada Copper)