"A Financial Fable" is a Donald Duck comic book story written and illustrated by Carl Barks in September 1950.

[1] Outside of the United States, the story has been published in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Spain, Sweden, and probably other countries.

While Huey, Dewey and Louie enjoy working, Donald Duck is tired of labour and quits the job, joining his lucky cousin Gladstone Gander in searching for luck and money.

The two cousins decide to spend the money on traveling, and drive to the local village to buy gas, while Huey, Dewey and Louie elect to stay on the farm out of moral obligation to care for the animals and tend crops.

These positions stake out contradictions in the tenets of the American dream and the way in which alienation in the workplace and a consumer ethos of immediate gratification were undermining the Protestant ethic, which demanded hard work, thrift, and the sacrifice of present pleasures for future gains.

[4] Gunnar Bårdsen, a Norwegian professor of economics, has pointed out the similarities between the story and Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman's 1969 theories of "helicopter money".