"Spring being a tough act to follow...God created June"

It is bright and beautiful in Paris this morning. A romantic day. After a week of cold rain, the sun is out...the flowers are in bloom...and lovers walk arm in arm along the Seine.

A very unromantic note comes to us today in the Financial Times. The hard-hearted scribblers at the salmon-colored paper tell us the "Post-nups" are becoming very popular in the financial industry.

What are "Post-nups"? Well, dear reader, you've heard of pre-nups? Couples who are deeply in love...who stand before God and all their friends and relatives, solemnly promising to love and cherish each other through thick and thin, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer...'til death do them part...nevertheless, often have their fingers crossed. Before even stepping up to the altar, these lovers take the stars out of their eyes long enough to read a long document prepared by their lawyers, in which they agree in advance how they will split up property in the event that everything doesn't go exactly as planned.

Our sharp-eyed Dear Readers will spot the contradiction immediately. You can't logically sign one contract - in good faith - with no 'out clause,' and simultaneously sign another contract specifically hinting that you really didn't mean it when you signed the first. If the signatory parties had been sincere about the first, they wouldn't need the second.
Logically, lawyers should argue that if you were in bad faith as to the first...you were in bad faith as to the second, too. Consequently, neither should hold up in court. By extension, all pre-nuptial agreements might be considered invalid. And all marriages too.

Well, now the lawyers have found another way to separate rich clients from their money - by getting them to sign up for Post-Nup agreements. These after-the-wedding agreements are becoming popular, says the FT, because there is so much money at stake in financial industry households.

"The massive infusion of cash into the so-called hedge fund communities in New York, Connecticut and California has proved to be fatal to many marriages - and a windfall for lawyers, psychiatrists and forensic accountants who specialize in the super rich.

"There is no question that a huge infusion of wealth to relatively young people has a disastrous effect on the marriage's stability," says Bern Clare, a Manhattan divorce lawyer.

"Hedge fund and private equity divorces are often far more bitter than those involving film stars, according to Scott Weston, a Los Angeles matrimonial lawyer."

We don't know if that is true or not. But we can believe it. Money makes the world go round. Many people keep score in life simply by looking at their financial statements. They are, of course, the people Oscar Wilde must have had in mind when he said they "know the price of everything and the value of nothing."

Not only do people in the financial industry have a lot of money...money means a lot to them. So, they fight over it. And the lawyers get rich.
The FT cited a recent case where the dependent spouse, a wife, insisted she needed $800,000 a month in child support payments, even though she already had an income of $7 million a year.

To you and to us, dear reader, these amounts seem unbelievable. Seven million dollars per year...plus $800,000 a month in child support! Why do people think they need so much money to live happily? We have very simple tastes. We could easily get by on half that much.

Money isn't everything. We provide additional proof this morning by looking at a place with a lot of money - Zimbabwe. Nowhere on the entire planet is money piling up at a more rapid pace. The printing presses in that hellhole must be working around the clock. Consumer price inflation is increasing at an annual rate of 1,729%!

"My bad," says Robert Mugabe, the nation's democratically elected tyrant.

We look to Zimbabwe not merely for entertainment but for instruction. It shows us that not only is money not a good gauge of wealth and happiness, neither are asset prices. Rich Americans look at rising stock prices.
'All is well,' they say. 'We're getting wealthier.' Poor and middle class Americans look at their house prices. 'All is well,' they say. 'Our houses are worth twice as much as they were 5 years ago; we're getting wealthier.'

Alas, it is not so. As money comes off the presses in Zimbabwe, it has to go somewhere. More of it goes to the rich than to the poor. So, ASSET PRICES RISE MORE THAN CONSUMER PRICES. Guess which stock market has gone up the most in 2007? The Zimbabwe stock market! It's up 600% so far this year...up 12,000% over the last 12 months.

Imagine that you live in Zimbabwe. You are one of Robert Mugabe's cronies and you get your hands on $50,000. Of course, the first thing you want to do is to shuffle it out of the country. But short of that, what do you do? Do you invest in real capital improvements...new industries...new equipment...new property? No chance. Not in an economy that is rapidly collapsing. People don't have enough to eat. They can't buy fuel.
Public services are crumbling. Transport, education, health, trash collection, police - they are all disintegrating. It used to be the richest part of Africa. Now, thousands of refugees sneak out of Zimbabwe every week. The place is a disaster.

Instead of investing in fixed capital improvements, you put your money into stocks - hoping that the stocks will go up faster than your currency goes down. The result? A speculative, asset-price boom - even while the whole country is falling apart.

Meanwhile, America has its own asset-price boom...its own crony capitalists...its own printing presses...

But even as asset prices go up, the real economy slows down. Today's news tells us that the GDP is barely growing at all. And the Fed says housing will be a drag for longer than expected.

Bill Bonner is the President of Agora Publishing. For more on Bill Bonner, visit The Daily Reckoning.