The idea of Fortuna's Wheel is first considered in Boethius' magnum o'pus The Consolation Of Philosophy; it's later discussed to a lesser extent in the Pulitzer Prize winning novel A Confederacy Of Dunces by John Kennedy
Toole. In recent years, its most vociferous proponent has been Al Sharpton, most notably in his 1996 smash Top 17 hit "I'm Al Sharpton, Oh Yes I Am
(Baby)". The basic premise behind Fortuna's Wheel (and later TV spin-offs) is that shit happens; the wheel marked good luck and bad luck spins round,
speed dependant on how much Fortuna hates you and your elk. Ain't not no goddamn thing you can do about it.
Similarly money exists. We have as much control over it as it has over us. It happens, it exists, it's out of our hands. Wealth or poverty are rarely deserved; on the occasions when they are deserved - birthdays, christenings, bar mitzvahs - they owe more to chance, fate, luck, kismet, that foxy babe Fortuna with the big tits. To claim that wealth and poverty take their place on Cashtuna's Wheel, or some hideously convoluted fish pun, would be dull and unoriginal in extremis. Borrowing from the flawed arguments of Al Sharpton et al (two Latin phrases in two sentences and still I have no idea who Al Sharpton is. Gosh) we can come up with a far more believable theorem: The Squiggle Of Money.
We're jumping ahead of ourselves a little here, and I suppose you're gonna try and pin all the blame on me. Mea culpa (don't worry; apart from the darkness and light one I'm all Latined out). This has got to be followed through step by step to avoid making sense. The variable speed of a wheel is rejected simply for being a cheap and unproveable answer. People's variable (monetary) fortunes need some form of ellipse to include all the numerous ways people make and lose money. Perhaps a sharp hairpin bend at one end, and a more gradual gradient at the other; still it doesn't really cover every eventuality so get out your rubber, and add a bell curve along one of the sides. Flatten out the other side to allow for the stagnation which, in an ideal world, we'd all embrace like an unsuitable, yet attractive, dog.
As we continue to adapt the wheel to allow for every single person who has ever lived, our pieces of paper become messier and messier. Screw it up, burn it, eat it. In that order. We're entering three dimensions. We can create a theoretical shape which covers the wealth of each and every one of us. Each of our lives makes up a tiny proportion (a 6 billionth, plus whoever claims to have existed before we did) of the total loop. We don't even really need to visualise it, we can just say it's there, and dashed complicated it is too. It's a proper geometric shape, it's not just a random squiggle although it looks like it; the nomenclature exists just so I don't have to think up a name for it that is either deep or funny (like an colon). Oh. I'm a natural. Squiggle c'est mort, et Mort c'est un griboullis.
[Three hours later after I finally got bored of dancing around celebrating how clever I am to come up with The Colon Of Money, I return to tie this all of as off as quickly as possible]: We enter this three-dimensional looped colon floating in our collective minds' eye at random. All of our economic lives exist along it, they're mapped out, free will is just a scam to keep students and poets pacified, we may be apathetic with no ostensible repercussions. Were we all to live longer, every one of us would experience the highs and lows of wealth and poverty. If we could live forever we'd all see how cyclical our lives are, and how we're all exactly the same as everyone else, with as much individuality as 6 billion identical things. Proof to follow when ready.