Don't worry, somebody got rich off of this.

Hey, good news everybody, it looks like our society might not be collapsing into a Mad Maxian dystopia of dune buggies and mutants. At least not this week.

Sorry guys, check back in a couple of months...

"Yes, the shutdown was difficult for 
everybody, but what about my needs?"

-Speaker Boehner

Apparently, a deal's been worked out in the Senate that would fund the government through January 15th and raise the debt ceiling until February 7th. What happens then? I guess we get to do this all over again. We should probably use this reprieve to try and fix the flaws in our system of government that allowed a fringe faction of an unpopular party to bring the entire country to its knees, but luckily for the GOP, we all have a short memory. Oh, and not that this wasn't fun and all, but do you think that maybe next time John Boehner is feeling under appreciated we could all just chip in and get him a cookie cake or a trip to Carvel or something? It might save us a lot of grief in the long run.

Hurray.

You know who wasn't worried for a minute though? Investors. Sure, the shutdown brought our economy to the brink of another global disaster, cut off vital government services, in some cases threatening the lives of seriously ill children and probably cost us what little credibility we had left in the world, but it's not like there wasn't a bright side. The hardest working Americans, investors, made out like goddamn bandits. How? I don't know, sorcery probably. Wall Street has always been kind of a mystery to me.

Pictured: investing.

As I understand it (which is to say, not very well at all), investors parlay their already considerable wealth into even vaster sums by trading theoretical shares of companies. It's sort of like having a job, except instead of getting up and doing things in exchange for money, you can sleep in, while your money makes itself. Anyway, when investors are confident in the economy they buy stock, when they're not confident, they don't and our civilization careens closer to total collapse. And careen it did.


So while we were all waiting with baited breath to see whether or not a deal could be worked out, Wall Street was betting that the House and Senate wouldn't just let us default on our debts. Through the douchey alchemy that is the stock market, this raised the DOW a couple hundred points thus making those least affected by the shutdown even richer than they were when this whole things started. It kind of makes it all seem worthwhile. Or, you know, the opposite of that.

What's everyone so upset about? They're just profiting
off human misery and uncertainty...