If you are a grown adult with a 401K and adult financial things of that nature, you may remember 2006 as "the year when the economy was booming, before I had to move into the box." M&A deals were everywhere! Companies were being bought and sold left and right! Bankers and consultants and assorted other finance industry hangers-on were getting rich! And so was everyone else, until it all came crashing down in a massive global disaster just a short time later.

Well: it looks like the 2006 economy is BACK. This can only be unequivocally good news.

The big story is that M&A, short for Motherfucker and Assholes Who Get Fabulously Rich by Buying and Selling Companies to the Advantage of No One But Themselves, is booming once again. Four deals in the 11-figure range in just two weeks! "Record corporate profits and cheap borrowing costs are attracting buyers even as stock prices soar to a five-year high, with more than $140 billion of announced M&A deals this month," Bloomberg says. "Big-time deal-making is back after a nearly six-year absence from Wall Street," says the WSJ. "In the same way that success breeds success, deals breed more deals," a Wall Street lawyer told the NYT. Which is to say, this is only the beginning. Get ready for more and more and more. Billions! And billions! And billions! Of dollars!

Rich people are paying even more outrageous sums for artwork, once again.

So expect another couple years of frenzy before this all comes crashing down again. In the meantime, enjoy it. (I'm talking to our reader on Wall Street, not to you. You just continue sending out those resumes.)

[Pic via]