Stocks took a dive, and I checked my Wall Street brokerage casino account.

The chips were down.

This would come as a shock to that child who thought she was headed to college and to the dancers at the Crouching Cheetah Lounge.

Well, baby, daddy threw snake eyes. Can you front me a five?

I considered leaping out my office window, but it seemed hardly worth the trouble, being nine inches off the ground.

This brought to mind The Wall Street Journal headline after the crash of '29, something like, "Stocks down, markets orderly." Love that Journal. Right up there with that other New York crime headline, "Headless body found in topless bar."

When you hang out in the stock market or the Cheetah, sooner or later you get your head chopped off.

You need to know the racket. It's that old Dean Martin song a drill sergeant used to make us sing toting 60 pounds of gear through the dunes of California: "Tiny Bubbles."

Evidently, aside from smoking reefer, that lean 'Nam vet liked wine. He must have thought it hilarious that a platoon of guys with cottonmouth had to sing about it. Toughen 'em up for the Big Muddy.

Personally I liked the song and the sergeant, too.

But about those bubbles.

Market corrections have something in common. They follow market bubbles caused by monetary expansion engineered by the Federal Reserve on behalf of Congress, which holds the purse strings under our Constitution.

The Fed creates money and credit to finance government spending and borrowing. Here's how economically destructive this counterfeiting is.

The government says productivity is up. If that is so, if we are making more goods than ever before, such as computers or cars or houses, then prices should be falling. In an economy without counterfeiting, that is what would happen.

Rising productivity should equal falling prices. But in a world where thieves own a bank, such as a Federal Reserve, that creates all the money they want, prices rise despite increases in production.

Witness housing. Housing starts were at all-time highs at the same time housing prices hit all-time highs. In an honest economy, how can that happen?

It can't.

The Fed pumps counterfeit money and credit into the economy. It's a lose-lose for most of us, but it's a win-win for government.

Monetary inflation finances government borrowing, creating public debt. It also raises prices on goods and assets, such as gasoline, bread, houses and stocks. Then government seizes higher taxes on those things.

The next time a political windbag waxes hot on the windfall profits of a private business, consider the ill wind they blow upon you daily through higher prices, compounded by higher taxes on those prices.

Federal tax revenue set an all-time high last year. Real estate taxes are up. Housing replacement costs have been inflated upward, so insurance costs have followed.

All this comes from the mob's crime of counterfeiting.

It so skews the economy that even the most skilled entrepreneurs and investors make bad decisions, trying to guess not just the need for goods and services or the value of businesses, but also where the counterfeit loot will land.

Where oh where will the sour dough go?

Will it flow to stocks, real estate, bonds, commodities? And when the money bubbles up in one part of the economy, when will that bubble burst?

In our casino economy, the odds are with the house.

Considering who runs the joint, you might keep a portion of your portfolio in the three Gs: guns, gold and groceries.

If you have to leap out a window, they might come in handy.

Phil Lucas is executive editor of The News Herald in Panama City, Fla. Contact him at [email protected]. To find out more about Lucas and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.