A closer look
Elementary school playgrounds in the late nineteen nineties briefly developed a ruthless, high-stakes underground economy based entirely on the trading value of holographic Pokémon cards, completely bypassing traditional fiat currency. Children aggressively bartered their daily lunch money, expensive electronics, and personal dignity just to secure a shiny Charizard, creating a deeply unregulated market that forced panicked school administrators to ban the cardboard rectangles entirely. This bizarre playground phenomenon taught an entire generation of millennials the brutal fundamentals of artificial scarcity, supply and demand, and predatory loan sharking long before they ever took a high school economics class. We all collectively pretend that the global financial system is governed by complex mathematical laws, but it is ultimately driven by the exact same primal greed that made a nine-year-old trade his little brother's bicycle for a piece of shiny cardboard
