ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- No bottom yet? No problem! Wall Street needs another bull, is already secretly blowing a newer, bigger bubble. How do we know? Simple. They're bubble-blowers by nature. It's locked in their DNA, controls their brain waves. It's the divine spark that guides their destiny and America's too.

Remember Aesop's Fable, "The Scorpion and Turtle:" The deadly scorpion can't swim, asks the turtle for a ride across the river. The turtle's skeptical, but gullible: "You'll sting me." Of course scorpions will say anything to get over to the promised land. He always wants one more shot. He crashed on this side. Over there he just knows he'll win big.

"That's irrational! If I sting you, we both sink, both drown." So the naïve turtle buys into the scam one more time. Then, halfway across the river, the scorpion's DNA suddenly triggers an irresistible urge in his brain. He stings the poor turtle. They sink amid the bubbles. "Why?" asks the naïve turtle. "Because I am a scorpion, it's in my nature."

Yes, the turtle's just a metaphor: For investors and taxpayers. The scorpion's also a metaphor: For Wall Street and the armies of lobbyists controlling Washington from the shadows. It's "in the nature" of all those scorpions to be greedy, to blow bubbles, to self-destruct.

So think metaphorically as you sift through the following 10 clues: Learn why the new bubble's already blowing, even before the economy and the market hit bottom -- clues masked by the press's relentless breaking-news hype about short-term solutions. Notice the desperate searching for new ways to "the other side."

1. Subprime wolves kept alive by Washington incompetence

A BusinessWeek cover story, "The Subprime Wolves are Back," warns: "Thousands of subprime mortgage lenders and brokers -- many of them the very sorts of firms that helped create the current financial crisis -- are going strong." Who are they? "The same people who propelled us toward the housing market calamity are now seeking to profit by exploiting billions in federally insured mortgages."

Worse yet, "FHA officials seem oblivious to what's happening -- or incapable of stopping it. They're giving mortgage firms licenses to dole out 100% insured loans despite lender records blotted by state sanctions, bankruptcy filings, civil lawsuits and even criminal convictions."

How bad? "Over the next five years fresh loans backed by the FHA that go sour will cost taxpayers $100 billion or more" -- on top of the $700 billion in bailouts.

2. Washington is an out-of-control money-printing machine

Neither party can control the economy and market. Capitalism is now a self-destructive scorpion. The Fed refuses to disclose trillions in loans. Congress has zero oversight. Now scorpions are destroying the $700 billion TARP from inside says a new government report.

The Wall Street Journal reports the Treasury Department "will eventually need as many as 200 full-time employees, the GAO said, but as of Nov. 21 has only 48 employees." Worse: Treasury has no reporting requirements. Zero accountability, repeating Washington's outsourcing the Iraq War to favorite no-bid contractors.

An old trick -- Washington's 42,000 lobbyists love it, they got 42,000 agendas to get all this money to the scorpions!

3. Greed is a virus always searching a new host

In Portfolio's "The End of Hubris," Leslie Bennetts says for "every highflier who is chastened, another would-be mogul pops up elsewhere, convinced he's smart enough to game the system ... When things are very good, people take ridiculous risks, and then things come crashing down and the risk just moves somewhere else ... We don't know where it's going next, but someone will be making money somewhere."

Then the perfect biological metaphor: "Like a lethal virus, it seems, hubris never really disappears -- it simply finds a new host." Get it? Scorpions never lose the toxic hubris in their DNA!

4. Wall Street lays another egg ... and another ...

In a Vanity Fair article, "Wall Street Lays Another Egg," Harvard financial historian Niall Ferguson teases his new book, "The Ascent of Money:" "When our "animal spirits flip from greed to fear, the bubble that [our] earlier euphoria inflated can burst with amazing suddenness ... markets are mirrors of the human psyche. Like Homo sapiens, they can become depressed. They can even suffer complete breakdowns. This is no new insight. In the 400 years since the first shares were bought and sold on the Amsterdam Beurs, there has been a long succession of financial bubbles. Time and again, asset prices have soared to unsustainable heights only to crash downward again."

Yes, scorpions sink. But guess what: They always, always come back. Blow new bubbles. It's in their nature.

5. Wall Street's kids love perpetual panic, it's a fun game

"Liar's Poker" and "Moneyball" author Michael Lewis perfectly captures the scorpion's killer instinct in a Portfolio discussion of his new book, "Panic, the Story of Modern Financial Insanity." He says: "The willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall ... I hadn't the first clue." Lewis says, "The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially, over."

What killed it? Investment partnerships going public. Partners made a quick killing but "transferred the ultimate financial risk from themselves to their shareholders" and taxpayers. "No investment bank owned by its employees would have levered itself 35 to 1 or ... sought to game the rating agencies .... The hoped-for short-term gain would not have justified the long-term hit."

Today, when they screw up, they become the problem of the government and taxpayers.

6. Politicians are the most deadly breed of scorpions

Nobel Economist Joseph Stiglitz, author of the "$3 Trillion War," worries that free-market economic dogma may be too deeply engrained in politics. In Vanity Fair: "The new populist rhetoric of the right -- persuading taxpayers that ordinary people always know how to spend money better than the government does, and promising a new world without budget constraints, where every tax cut generates more revenue -- hasn't helped matters. Special interests took advantage of this seductive mixture of populism and free-market ideology."

Meanwhile, politicians listened "to the same people on Wall Street and in the economic establishment who got us into it" writing "blank checks to bail out its friends on Wall Street" creating "clear losers -- including the country as a whole."

7. Disasters are bipartisan 'opportunities' to blow new bubbles

"Shock Doctrine" author Naomi Klein sees scorpions: "Free market ideology has always been a servant to the interests of capital... During boom times it's profitable to preach laissez faire, because an absentee government allows speculative bubbles ... When those bubbles burst, the ideology becomes a hindrance and goes dormant while big government rides to the rescue."

But free-market "ideology will come roaring back when the bailouts are done. The massive debts the public is accumulating to bail out the speculators will then become part of a global budget crisis."

And don't be fooled: This is not just the GOP. After the elections Rahm Emanuel, President-elect Barack Obama's chief of staff designate, said: "Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste. They are opportunities to do big things."

8. Lobbyists kill reforms, help blow the next new bubble

Nobel Economist Paul Krugman just published an updated version of his 1999 "The Return of Depression Economics." Writing in a recent New York Times column, he says "all eyes are on the immediate response to that crisis" so "it's hard to focus on the longer-term issues, on reining in our out-of-control financial system, so as to prevent or at least limit the next crisis."

Warning: "Once the economy is on the road to recovery, the wheeler-dealers will be making easy money again, and will lobby hard against anyone who tries to limit their bottom lines." We cannot afford to "put off financial reform. The time to start preventing the next crisis is now."

But his warnings didn't stop dot-com maniacs in 1999, and are no match for the 42,000 scorpion-lobbyists already fighting to limit reform today.

9. Economists are also blowing bubbles from secret facts

The National Bureau of Economic Research says we've been in a recession since December 2007. Bullish news since the average recession's only 10 months. But what were America's top economists hiding for a year? Isn't data just facts?

"No" said political historian Kevin Phillips in a Harper's article months ago: "Numbers Racket: Why the economy is worse than we know." Were economists politically motivated? Biased toward the GOP? Delaying till after the elections?

Phillips: "If Washington's harping on weapons of mass destruction was essential to buoy public support for the invasion of Iraq, the use of deceptive statistics played its own vital role in convincing many Americans that the U.S. economy is stronger, fairer, more productive, more dominant, and richer with opportunity than it really is. That corruption taints the very measures that most shape public perception of the economy."

Who "profits from the low-growth U.S. economy hidden under statistical camouflage?" Not Main Street but "Washington politicos and affluent elite, anxious to mislead voters, coddle the financial markets, and tamp down expensive cost-of-living increases for wages and pensions?"

10. 'Mad Money' is upbeat, betting on 'Obama Portfolio,' wants SEC chair!

Before the elections "Mad Money's" Jim Cramer was urging certain investors to cash out, sit on the sidelines. Does he smell a bottom now? Like when the Dow industrials dropped to about 7,500 last month? Maybe. He's even picking hot stocks based on Obama's likely agenda: infrastructure, alternative energy, retail banking, discounters. How bullish! Cramer even wants to be the new SEC chairman.

Powerful upbeat signs we're back into a new cycle of bubble-blowing that'll trigger a New Years '09 bull market. Yes, break out the bubbly!