WASHINGTON, D.C. Federal Reserve Chairman Benjamin Bernanke sent the stock market soaring today as he announced an immediate reduction in the number of post-season college football games, saying that “bowl inflation” was undermining the sport.
Bernanke: “Senator, did you even know there was a Poinsettia Bowl?”
Addressing Congress later in the day, Bernanke decried what he termed a “bowl bubble” that had been blown up by the demand for male-oriented holiday television content. The time would soon come, he warned, when teams with sub-.500 records would get bowl bids.
“If there’s a bowl game on today, the office can’t be open.”
“Demand for televised sports events has increased exponentially over the past five decades as idle male workers, seeking to avoid gainful employment during the last payroll period of the year, cite network ’bowl’ designations as a basis for deferring or avoiding altogether the manual labor that must be performed yadda-yadda-yadda,” Bernanke said in the dry, academic style favored by central bankers.
“Uh, yeh, I’ve got like a fever and an upset stomach, so I won’t be in today.”
Equity traders took the bowl reduction as a sign that the productivity would increase, and placed heavy bets in the manufacturing and service sectors. “With fewer bowls,” said Craig Fiske of J.T. Edmunds Securities, “there’s less absenteeism in Q4 and less water-cooler chit-chat in Q1.”
Gator Bowl: The beginning of the end.
After the hearing Bernanke relaxed a bit, visibly exhausted by the volatility he has presided over in his first year as Fed chairman. “When I was a boy there were four major bowls–Rose, Orange, Cotton and Sugar,” he told reporters. “Each had a basic commodity in it and that meant you didn’t have runaway bowl growth. New fruits and vegetables don’t pop up every day, you know.”
The beginning of the end came with the Gator Bowl, he said. “Nobody eats alligators, nobody grows alligators–alligators contribute nothing to the economy. Now you’ve got bowl games named after towns like Fort Worth that don’t have a friggin’ Starbucks, fer chrissake!”
Copyright 2007, Con Chapman
