A recent post, Columbia Days, noticed that Barack Obama’s own account of his arrival in New York so perfectly juxtaposed his roommate Sadik’s abandonment to the temptations of New York City to his own high-minded sense of mission that it seemed too good to be true. In Obama’s account he arrived in NYC without a place to stay, sans money for lodging and only one name in his address book. After spending a night looking for his friend and washing up at a hydrant, BHO eventually finds his friend, in the company of a somewhat dubious woman and given over to worldly ambition. His friend Sadik introduces the new arrival in the doorway to the scantily clad woman as “Barry” — the name he knew Obama by – and is sharply corrected. I wrote:
The scene is a masterful piece of writing which contrasts a man fired with idealism to the cynical, world-weary Siddiqi. The images of the white hen pecking at garbage, and the scratch ablutions conducted in company with a vagrant at a fire hydrant are juxtaposed with a sudden transition to a scene with woman in underwear seated beside a suspicious razor as disposable as Sadik’s relationship with her. Two worlds met on that doorstep. And in case the reader missed the point the whole is driven home by a conversational exchange as dramatic as the “Call me Mister” moment in the Virginian. When Sadik introduces the new arrival to the woman in underwear, saying “this is Barry” Obama retorts “‘Barack,’ I corrected, dropping my bags on the floor.”
Later, I remarked in comments that “No one can hide the facts in an autobiography better than a good writer. TE Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom … is long, descriptive and beautiful. And yet in the end Lawrence remains a mystery within his own account.” Reality is less tidy than fiction. Whenever you are confronted with a narrative that works just like fiction, you proceed with caution. It is not that you suspect dishonesty; you suspect memory. One of the temptations of autobiography is to rewrite events the way they should have happened rather than how they actually happened. And maybe the caution is justified. Analyze This compares Obama’s account of his days at a “consulting firm” with his own recollection of events which contrasts markedly with Obama’s witching narrative.
I have to say that Barack engages in some serious exaggeration when he describes a job that he held in the mid-1980s. I know because I sat down the hall from him, in the same department, and worked closely with his boss. … First, it wasn’t a consulting house; it was a small company that published newsletters on international business. … It’s also not true that Barack was the only black man in the company. He was the only black professional man. Fred was an African-American who worked in the mailroom with his son. My boss and I used to join them on Friday afternoons to drink beer behind the stacks of office supplies. That’s not the kind of thing that Barack would do. Like I said, he was somewhat aloof. … If Barack was promoted, his new job responsibilities were more of the same – rewriting other people’s copy. As far as I know, he always had a small office, and the idea that he had a secretary is laughable. …
All of Barack’s embellishment serves a larger narrative purpose: to retell the story of the Christ’s temptation. The young, idealistic, would-be community organizer gets a nice suit, joins a consulting house, starts hanging out with investment bankers, and barely escapes moving into the big mansion with the white folks. Luckily, an angel calls, awakens his conscience, and helps him choose instead to fight for the people.
Like I said, I’m a fan. His famous keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention moved me to tears. The Democrats – not to mention America – need a mixed-race spokesperson who can connect to both urban blacks and rural whites, who has the credibility to challenge the status quo on issues ranging from misogynistic rap to unfair school funding.
“No one can hide the facts in an autobiography better than a good writer.” Seven Pillars is full of unforgettable word-pictures, including a remarkable scene which helps round out Lawrence’s romantic picture of the nomad. It is so wonderful that even though I cannot persuaded that it happened as it did, I am half-happy to credit the fiction. Here is Lawrence’s account of a ride into the desert and his encounter with emptiness of the desert, his destiny and himself.
The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly. A first knowledge of their sense of the purity of rarefaction was given me in early years, when we had ridden far out over the rolling plains of North Syria to a ruin of the Roman period which the Arabs believed was made by a prince of the border as a desert-palace for his queen. The clay of its building was said to have been kneaded for greater richness, not with water, but with the precious essential oils of flowers. My guides, sniffing the air like dogs, led me from crumbling room to room, saying, ‘This is jessamine, this violet, this rose’. But at last Dahoum drew me: ‘Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all’, and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past. That slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates and had dragged its way across many days and nights of dead grass, to its first obstacle, the man-made walls of our broken palace. About them it seemed to fret and linger, murmuring in baby-speech. ‘This,’ they told me, ‘is the best: it has no taste.’ My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries to choose the things in which mankind had had no share or part.
The ruined palace, the lonely spaces, the invitation to ‘come and smell the very sweetest scent of all’ — is beautiful in an otherwordly sense. Yet sometimes I wonder whether on some other scale, ordinariness is not better; whether sitting down to gnaw on dates in the sand instead of visiting haunted ruins or having a beer Friday afternoons in place of aloofness isn’t somehow the greater thing. John Buchan in his classic novel Witch Wood describes a minister who helps a old shepherd bury his wife in a poor coffin, and as he rides away from the shack, the strong, young well-educated minister realizes that maybe the simple things in life, and not the proud and unbending, are likely to be remembered in the mind of God.
It seemed to David as he turned from the door, where the shepherd stood with uplifted arm, that a benediction had been given, but not by him.
The moon had risen and the glen lay in a yellow light, with the high hills between Rood and Aller shrunk to mild ridges. The stream caught the glow, and its shallows were like silver chased in amber. The young man’s heart was full with the scene which he had left. Death was very near to men, jostling them at every corner, whispering in their ear at kirk and market, creeping between them and their firesides. Soon the shepherd of the Greenshiel would lie beside his wife; in a little, too, his own stout limbs would be a heap of dust. How small and frail seemed the life in that cottage, as contrasted with the rich pulsing world of the woods and hills and their serene continuance. But it was they that were the shadows in God’s sight. The immortal thing was the broken human heart that could say in its frailty that its Redeemer liveth.
When Barack Obama visited the Western Wall in Jerusalem during his recent world tour, he is said to have inserted a prayer into the stones which the LA Times reports as saying: “Lord—Protect my family and me. Forgive me my sins, and help me guard against pride and despair. Give me the wisdom to do what is right and just. And make me an instrument of your will.” And not you alone, Barack. Not you alone.
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61 Comments
1. ridgerunner:No one can disagree with the requests in the prayer. But it would be naive to find in it any assurance of BHO’s humility. This was not a private prayer. Its disclosure to the public was a virtual certainty.
Sep 15, 2008 - 1:58 am 2. Charles:I started this poem 20 years ago in my Columbia Days. I would write a couple lines a year. I’m at Dulles Airport this morning on my way out to Santa Barbara for an internet marketing related conference.
/////////////////
Listen friends, and mark my words in this moment and this hour–
God is jealous for his name for his name is jealous.
Nor is this a charming flower to set before a man
nor one of his commands.
Yet, without Jesus, this is more than we can love as we desire peace,
and less than we can know as we desire joy.
For the sacred fire
that makes us liars–
I mean, that separates speech from dreams,
and separates our flesh from the future–
is God’s power manifested.
So, in the year and the hour– for his sake, invest your desire in Jesus.
Follow his holy fire for right now. Right now he intercedes for us in heaven!
Some will say we are people of the way.
We are people of the way.
We praise his holy name Yahweh.
I am who I am.
I cause all things to be.
I am the first cause of creation.
We praise his holy name Elohym.
And say “Thank you Jesus for your precious blood–
better, so much better than the blood of Abel.
How then shall we pray?
Sep 15, 2008 - 3:54 am 3. Mike Sylwester:I pray bless me a lot oh God.
Show me your kingdom and righteousness
in such a way that my thoughts words and deeds
reflect your wisdom and power
and that for the sake of your honor and glory
so that I will live in your presence in this life and the next
restore to me the days the locust took
for your name sake
let me hear my children praise your name.
And their children too.
I pray this in Jesus name.
If Obama traveled around the world in 1981 and then arrived in New York City with enough money to rent an apartment by himself, then where did he get the money?
Obama arranged to move into an apartment by himself in Spanish Harlem, but after a while, the landlord turned off the heat. Instead of taking some measures to compel the landlord to turn the heat back on, Obama mekely moved out of that apartment, indicating to me that Obama had stopped paying the rent or else was being evicted.
Then Obama moved in with his Pakistani friend Sadik, and for a while they have lots of money to visit bars, pick up women and generally party. Then Obama moved out and lived like a monk by himself, and Sadik descended disasterously into drug addiction.
I wonder if Obama barely saved himself from a heroin addiction or had a scare from some really bad guys. Maybe he spent much of the following time in a 12-step anonymous group, which is why none of his associates from that period, except Sadik, can be identified. These circumstances might also explain his conversion to Christianity. He might have converted to Islam, but maybe he needed to stay away from former associates who were Moslems.
Who knows, maybe Obama met Ayers in a 12-step program near Columbia University.
This is just my reckless speculation, and I might be totally wrong. Obama has admitted he had a drug problem for a while. I am speculating only that his problem lasted longer, into his Columbia University period, and was much more serious.
Anybody who turns his life around and rises from an addiction has my admiration, especially if he succeeds to an extraordinary extent, as Obama has succeeded.
Sep 15, 2008 - 5:38 am 4. maineman:Except, Mike, that BHO never converted to Christianity — black liberation theology being nothing if not Marxism dressed up in sheep’s clothing.
There is nothing in his history to suggest the kind of self-awareness of someone who has used a 12-step program like AA to come to grips with underlying imperfections. What we have instead is a false self, one that is characterized by grandiosity and the repeated self-destructive acts that always accompany it — the “clinging” comment, failure to at least try to get Hillary on the ticket, referring to “my Muslim faith” on camera, and the self-inflated rhetoric and stagecraft that brought ridicule last month. Unfortunately, the MSM and American populous seem so wedded to this fantasy solution to our problems that they won’t let his weekly self-inflicted wounds do any damage.
Sep 15, 2008 - 5:59 am 5. Martin McPhillips:“Except, Mike, that BHO never converted to Christianity — black liberation theology being nothing if not Marxism dressed up in sheep’s clothing.”
That’s a point that needed making. Although, Obama/Wright’s church is harbored by the United Church of Christ, its “black theology” is nothing more than a racialist heresy that borrows its social metaphysics from the attempt in Latin America to steer the Church into Marxist headwaters.
And I think that “Marxism dressed up in sheep’s clothing” would more precisely read as “Marxism dressed up in the Lamb’s clothing.”
See Michael Burleigh’s Sacred Causes for a full account of how the 20th Century’s political religions attempted to either wipe out or take over Christianity.
Sep 15, 2008 - 7:03 am 6. Lifeofthemind:Obama appears to be a serial fantasist. Now there is evidence about his resume inflation. (HT Malkin) http://sweetness-light.com/archive/did-obama-turn-down-a-wall-street-career
By inserting himself as a private citizen into the negotiating process Obama may be responsible for the deaths of American soldiers. This may have been a criminal act.
Wretchard, may we have a thread about the Lehman collapse? If every politician who is not clearly in the tank for Obama does not step forward today to make clear the responsibility lies with Andrew Cuomo, Jamie Gorelick, Rezco and the Community Reinvestment Trust Act then this election is over. We face a seriously crippled America facing a new Soviet power that orchestrated this taking advantage to absorb Europe. What I am waiting for is evidence of Soros’ fingerprints.
Wretchard, did you remove the thread? I am getting confused here. The day is stressful enough.
Sep 15, 2008 - 7:09 am 7. njartist:A set of questions:
1. Who wrote the account? This reads as though it was done by someone who was a practiced writer with a feel for the language and vocabulary. This author would have no problem writing for the Harvard Law Review- Obama didn’t do so.
2. Does or did Obama have the language skills to write it.
3. White chicken, vagrant, washing in from a hydrant, half naked woman with razor and mirror, Sadik the Pakistani – not Indonesian? To whom do these images speak? Within what ideology of religion would they resonate. Out of what tradition would the writer have had to come in order to use these metaphors?
4. To whom would it appeal?
5. Call me Barack; Call me Ishmael: to what ethnic group and history are you sent? To what god do you then relate? Not to Yahweh. Not the God of the Jews. Not the same God who is the God of the Christians. Not of the hated white man.
The out of place white chicken and the vagrant are outsiders and castoffs; the gospel of Barack makes The Obama establish a unity in identity: that unity is established in what rite? Ablution. The rite of washing. And what religion has raised the importance of the ablution: Islam.
Obama is a Muslim. He is a Trojan horse. Period.
Sep 15, 2008 - 7:15 am 8. Mark:Analyze This writes:
“The Democrats – not to mention America – need a mixed-race spokesperson who can connect to both urban blacks and rural whites, who has the credibility to challenge the status quo on issues ranging from misogynistic rap to unfair school funding.”
This is, to borrow a phrase from C. S. Lewis, the politics of the stable, i.e., bloodlines.
Cf. John Buchan, via Wrichard:
“How small and frail seemed the life in that cottage, as contrasted with the rich pulsing world of the woods and hills and their serene continuance. But it was they that were the shadows in God’s sight. The immortal thing was the broken human heart that could say in its frailty that its Redeemer liveth.”
Sen. Obama and the UCC are basically post-Christian, moving beyond and improving upon the historically outmoded Jesus. (Jody Bottum in last month’s ‘First Things’ has a good essay on the death of mainline protestantism.) The message of the post-Christians is always the same: “We’re here with the government, and we’re going to help you. You need not have a broken heart, and your Redeemer liveth in the assistance that all of us will give to those in need.”
Sep 15, 2008 - 7:19 am 9. njartist:I ask again: “Sadik the Pakistani – not Indonesian…”
If you or I go traveling, whose name or of what nationality would we most likely have as a back up. Barack has a Pakistani, not an Indonesian. Before he was a “Citizen of the World”, he was citizen of the Umma.
Sep 15, 2008 - 7:21 am 10. Mark:and, also, Charles writes, above:
A very good poem! Thanks for sharing that. Something good started at Columbia.
Sep 15, 2008 - 7:27 am 11. Mike Sylwester:mainman:
“There is nothing in his history to suggest the kind of self-awareness of someone who has used a 12-step program like AA to come to grips with underlying imperfections. ”
———-
He is the Democratic Party’s candidate to become the President of the United States of America, and the odds are pretty good that he might win.
How much “self awareness” does it take to impress you, mainman?
Sep 15, 2008 - 7:31 am 12. slade:LOTM – RE Financial Crisis – two posts
Here
and
Here.
You may or may not get some traction. This kind of thing endures despite persistence of the sex-deficit liability – over-leveraged data streams. Best I can tell, half the people think “as it was, as it ever will be, forever and all amen”, half the people think it’s Bush’s fault; half the people think it’s Soros’ fault; and half the people are too obsessed with AGW to see bank failures as anything but an inevitable consequence of off-shore drilling. And the math speaks for itself.
To my mind the last three elections, including this one, should have been about economics and the threat to national security presented by Islamic terrorism and its evolutionary counterparts, in equal parts. That didn’t happen in the wake of chads and swift-boating and pompadours. And it looks like this election might boil down to Obama’s psychological profile as evidence of his fitness to serve or not. As a thought experiment, try adding Bob Rubin and Zbigniew Brzezinski and see if that policy picture is one you want to support – sans any halos symbolizing anointed insight leading to national salvation and a properly leveraged mortgage for every family. Rubin has good rep from Clinton administration (one of few) but Brzezinski is pure red meat in foreign policy.
The pending bank failures are a complicated brew of (1) policy demanding fill-in-the-blank for everybody at government expense; (2) the proliferation of new (and not-so-new) securities vehicles that were hard value (CDO’s and derivatives) and even if they could be valued, represented nothing more than gaming the markets, not growing a business or industry; and (3) the arrogant and hubristic failure of bank officers to manage the leveraged assets of their institutions. Capital is now not available to any of the severely troubled institutions because their books are so bad. How did that happen? Can’t blame it all on the policy makers or the vehicles.
The big question is how Congress will fix it. That is just frightening to contemplate.
This so-called up-tick rule that guarded against short-selling for so long and was repealed on the basis of some academics who wrote a paper – it now appears that academic paper well bought and paid for.
This stuff happens because nobody, I mean nobody, gives a rat’s eyeshade.
Sep 15, 2008 - 8:16 am 13. Benj:Wretch’s invocation of Lawrence reminds me that there might be some Clubbers who missed “The Mint” – Lawrence’s account of his re-enlistment (as a relatively Old Soldier) in the RAF – melds together two stretches in the Service in the 20s – Been 25 years since I read it, but certain passages live in my head…Lawrence is real good on drill – “The Mint” is basically a case for a certain version of community. It’s anti-modern, anti-arty…by a very artful writer. Not sure if it’s all verifiable. But it reads true. Facts of feeling…The whole book is available on line here –
http://www.telawrence.net/telawrencenet/works/the_mint/mint_3_01.htm
I’ll cut and paste Lawrence’s ender…
Service life in this way teaches a man to live largely on little. We belong to a big thing, which will exist for ever and ever in unnumbered generations of standard airmen, like ourselves. Our outward samenesses of dress and type remind us of that. Also our segregation and concentration. The clusters of us widen out beyond Cadet College, beyond Whitewash Villas, beyond Depot, over hundreds of camps, over half the world. The habit of ‘belonging to something or other’ induces in us a sense of being one part of many things.
As we gain attachment, so we strip ourselves of personality. Mark the spiritual importance of such trifles as these overalls in which we shroud ourselves for work, like robots: to become drab shapes without comeliness or particularity, and careless, careless. The clothes for which a fellow has to pay are fetters to him, unless he is very rich and spendthrifty. This working dress provided us by the R.A.F. is not the least of our freedoms. When we put it on, oil, water, mud, paint, all such hazardous things, are instantly our friends.
A spell of warm weather has come back to us, as if summer feared to quit this bleak north. The wind keeps its bite; but our hangar shelters a calm crescent of tarmac and grass, and its open mouth is a veritable sun-trap. Through the afternoon eight of us lay there waiting for a kite which had gone away south, across country, and was overdue. Wonderful, to have it for our duty to do nothing but wait hour after hour in the warm sunshine, looking out southward.
We were too utterly content to speak, drugged with an absorption fathoms deeper than physical contentment. Just we lay there spread-eagled in a mesh of bodies, pillowed on one another and sighing in happy excess of relaxation. The sunlight poured from the sky and melted into our tissues. From the turf below our moist backs there came up a sister-heat which joined us to it. Our bones dissolved to become a part of this underlying indulgent earth, whose mysterious pulse throbbed in every tremor of our bodies. The scents of the thousand-acre drome mixed with the familiar oil-breath of our hangar, nature with art: while the pale sea of the grass bobbed in little waves before the wind raising a green surf which hissed and flowed by the slats of our heat-lidded eyes.
Such moments of absorption resolve the mail and plate of our personality back into the carbo-hydrate elements of being. They come to service men very often, because of our light surrender to the good or evil of the moment.
Airmen have no possessions, few ties, little daily care. For me, duty now orders only the brightness of these five buttons down my front.
And airmen are cared for as little as they care. Their simple eyes, out-turned; their natural living; the penurious imaginations which neither harrow nor reap their lowlands of mind: all these expose them, like fallows, to the processes of air. In the summer we are easily the sun’s. In winter we struggle undefended along the roadway, and the rain and wind chivy us, till soon we are wind and rain. We race over in the first dawn to the College’s translucent swimming pool, and dive into the elastic water which fits our bodies closely as a skin: – and we belong to that too. Every-where a relationship: no loneliness any more.
I can’t write ‘Finis’ to this book, while I am
still serving. I hope, sometimes,
that I will never write it.
…When I re-read Lawrence, reminded why I once thought Obama and Mac were made for each other – a fight between two believers in service and Community. Neither is an heir of Ayn Rand or Buckley as…(of all people) Pat Buchanan noted after the Columbia Service forum last Friday – Said PAt – “We’re definitely past the Age of Reagan.” PS Seem to recall a poster on the last thread noting that Mac had rolled Colum’s pres by advocating the resumption of ROTC. The poster seemed to missed the fact that OBama came out for ROTC on IVY campuses too. Given O’s base, maybe the poster should’ve given more to O than Mac for that.
Sep 15, 2008 - 8:26 am 14. slade:LOTM – RE Financial Crisis – two posts
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=21297199&postID=1271054697738388155
and the following post.
You may or may not get some traction. This kind of thing endures despite the persistence of the sex-deficit liability – over-leveraged data streams. Best I can tell, half the people think “as it was, as it ever will be, forever and all amen”, half the people think it’s Bush’s fault; half the people think it’s Soros’ fault; and half the people are too obsessed with AGW to see bank failures as anything but an inevitable consequence of off-shore drilling. And the math speaks for itself.
To my mind the last three elections, including this one, should have been about economics and the threat to national security presented by Islamic terrorism and its evolutionary counterparts, in equal parts. That didn’t happen in the wake of chads and swift-boating and pompadours. And it looks like this election might boil down to Obama’s psychological profile as evidence of his fitness to serve or not. As a thought experiment, try adding Bob Rubin and Zbigniew Brzezinski and see if that policy picture is one you want to support – sans any halos symbolizing anointed insight leading to national salvation and a properly leveraged mortgage for every family. Rubin has good rep from Clinton administration (one of few) but Brzezinski is pure red meat in foreign policy.
The pending bank failures are a complicated brew of (1) policy demanding fill-in-the-blank for everybody at government expense; (2) the proliferation of new (and not-so-new) securities vehicles that were hard value (CDO’s and derivatives) and even if they could be valued, represented nothing more than gaming the markets, not growing a business or industry; and (3) the arrogant and hubristic failure of bank officers to manage the leveraged assets of their institutions. Capital is now not available to any of the severely troubled institutions because their books are so bad. How did that happen? Can’t blame it all on the policy makers or the vehicles.
The big question is how Congress will fix it. That is just frightening to contemplate.
This so-called up-tick rule that guarded against short-selling for so long and was repealed on the basis of some academics who wrote a paper – it now appears that academic paper well bought and paid for.
This stuff happens because nobody, I mean nobody, gives a rat’s eyeshade.
Sep 15, 2008 - 9:10 am 15. Konyok:If Barack Obama is “Post Christian,” it follows that he is “Post Muslim,” as well.
There has been so much speculation as to whether he is a crypto-muslim with secret jihadi sympathies. Coming as it generally does from a christian context and is countered by the senator’s claim to have *found Jesus* with the assistance of Reverend Wright, this line of reasoning founders on the rocks of Western self determinism. The argument ends because we all agree that nobody can truly judge the soul of another.
What rarely enters the discussion is any inquiry as to the muslim context of the question. It seems likely that many muslim clerics would conclude that Senator Obama must needs be muslim, given that his father, who recognized his paternity, was muslim and that young Barack received koranic instruction in Indonesia. Thus, there is a high probability that the presidential candidate will be denounced as an apostate. (To American ears this sounds preposterous, but the ruling precept in Islam is submission, not personal autonomy.)
Just as I would not argue that European attitudes should not determine who Americans select as their next president, neither would I suggest that muslim attitudes drive our decision. I do think that Obama supporters will likely be disappointed to learn that their good intentions might not necessarily result in reduced animus for the US, but might actually introduce a new dimension of anger at the Great Satan.
Sep 15, 2008 - 9:32 am 16. slade:And I forgot to add to my list above, (4) repeal of the Glass-Steagall Chinese Wall between investment banking and commercial banking leading to what Buddy and other economists call “fractionated” banking, which is new term to me, but it is descriptive of the new financial jungle of securities and investment way stations.
Chipping away at regulatory code that worked pretty d@mn well for over 70 years.
But watch the turn of the screw as the political spin finds traction in – what else – populist appeal.
And there’s a lot there to feed the Mean Machine.
An entire industry – not just an Enron and a WorldCom – but an entire industry sector at risk.
The ripple effects will be correspondingly large – down under where populism resonates.
Sep 15, 2008 - 9:32 am 17. slade:a new dimension of anger
There ya go – a new phrase for the post-modern world.
Sep 15, 2008 - 9:35 am 18. maineman:Mike, I guess I’d have to say that I see no short-term positive correlation between success and self-awareness, at least in the political arena.
Sep 15, 2008 - 9:45 am 19. David M:The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the – Web Reconnaissance for 09/15/2008 A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day…so check back often.
Sep 15, 2008 - 9:55 am 20. steveaz:Slade,
I’m wondering whether the SE Asian nations won’t return our favor and bail the US out this time.
Down the memory hole: our bailout (through the World Bank) of the so-called Asian Tiger economies under Clinton seems to have been entirely forgotten to our political class.
That’s too bad because I’d say Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, et al owe us big time.
And just why is the nineties Asian bailout getting the memory-hole treatment? Is it possible Bill Clinton sold-out the U.S.’s financial sector to assist our Asian economic competitors – with out a promise from them to repay our favor in kind?
Time will tell. While we’re waiting, though, it’d be a welcome gesture if China and Japan stepped up at the WB and made a joint, initial proposal of the kind.
Sep 15, 2008 - 10:27 am 21. NahnCee:SteveAZ – geez, I hope that if China or any of those other Muslim-breeding Tiger Economies *do* offer us money, DC has the gonads to turn them down. We do *not* need help from China, nor from Saudi Arabia, nor from Russia, any more than Rudy Guiliani and the City of New York needed that $10 million from a lecturing Saudi prince.
Nor do we need to prostrate ourselves in front of the rest of the world, crying that “we are weak and need your assistance”. I’d rather see Masters of the Universe jumping out of their windows on Wall Street again than that.
These latest two or three add up to at least five big major Wall Street firms that have gone belly-up and bankrupt in the last year. Was there *really* that much money tied up in bad loans to poor white trash that it could affect America’s financial base like this, or are costs and shares being manipulated? It would require a huge economy to manage such manipulation but there have been hints of it before when stocks start being traded and there’s a sudden run on the bank with no overt reason for it happening.
It’s almost like watching oil prices creep up and up and up for no obvious reason that anyone will admit to.
Sep 15, 2008 - 11:06 am 22. slade:steveaz: And just why is the nineties Asian bailout getting the memory-hole treatment? Is it possible Bill Clinton sold-out the U.S.’s financial sector to assist our Asian economic competitors – with out a promise from them to repay our favor in kind?
My take – and it’s just an opinion – is that the Stiglitz critique of IMF monetary policies provides the most rational and comprehensive explanation for the 1997 Asian Crisis that devalued currencies, stock markets, and assets in places like Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand. My take is furthermore, that staff, at the level of international institutions, such as UN and its many agencies, World Bank, and IMF, was (is?) – not to put too fine a point on it – technically substandard and too often corrupt – all business suit and no business, to paraphrase the cowboy version. The inadequate level of technical performance coupled with what appears to be a thriving commerce in corrupt dispersal of humanitarian and other aide monies feeds directly into my suspicions that international organizations have neither the intellectual capital not the institutional framework to function as anything other than black market conduits for huge transfers of money into numbered bank accounts.
Human nature being what it is and always has been since written history.
I don’t think the current issues can be correlated with political ideology or particular presidents, but I am convinced that Congress is the primary culprit, regardless of party control. Vote against your local incumbent.
I also have (some) faith in (some of the) world’s financial institutions and the people who run them. It is to nobody’s advantage that the USA economy tank. I don’t care what outlier scenario emerges from the highly imaginative. That’s lose-lose. As to “obligation”, I would expect that negotiators play that as a card but not the whole hand.
News runs on hype, but I have heard this series of busts and failures described as a once in a lifetime occurrence, which, given an adult lifetime, makes it a 50-yr event or so in terms of risk analysis. That’s not peanuts.
Sep 15, 2008 - 11:18 am 23. slade:Was there *really* that much money tied up in bad loans to poor white trash that it could affect America’s financial base like this, or are costs and shares being manipulated?
Not just that, but the unregulated and explosive growth of derivatives and hedge funds which did nothing but game the system without producing any value that would grow a business or industry, indicative of a systemic failure of *management* within an entire industry sector, that being financial services. That is the astonishing part – not a single Enron but an entire industry sector was over-leveraged – and nobody saw the end game.
Which some are blaming on the Ivy Leagues.
Sep 15, 2008 - 11:28 am 24. Charles:‘This,’ they told me, ‘is the best: it has no taste.’ My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries to choose the things in which mankind had had no share or part.
////////////
Well I’m at the LAX. Over the rockies this morning it occured to me that the theme above is the fade to black of a number of American westerns from the 30’s-50’s. The hero rejects civilization and goes off into the wilderness.
I also do not think that men basically like civilization. But lets make a distinction here between home/family and civilization. Every great civilization running back x thousand years always had tribesmen on the boundaries. They had their own home life.
There is something more to be gleaned from the arab comments. civilization is transient but the wild world lasts. It is a comment that I have read from time to time that account of Muhhammed’s writing of the Koran in which he’s shaken by fits– reads like the account of demon posession.
The old testatment prophets even mentioned the arabs in this context:
Isaiah 13
19 Babylon, the jewel of kingdoms,
the glory of the Babylonians’ [b] pride,
will be overthrown by God
like Sodom and Gomorrah.
20 She will never be inhabited
or lived in through all generations;
no Arab will pitch his tent there,
no shepherd will rest his flocks there.
21 But desert creatures will lie there,
jackals will fill her houses;
there the owls will dwell,
and there the wild goats will leap about.
22 Hyenas will howl in her strongholds,
jackals in her luxurious palaces.
Her time is at hand,
and her days will not be prolonged.
Having said all that its important to say that there is another great age of exploration when the wanderers among us will be let go to journey to uh “boldly go where no man has gone before”
Sep 15, 2008 - 12:50 pm 25. Robert Speirs:Obama and Hillary are Gramscian Marxists, like their God Saul Alinsky. Any trappings of religion are simply disguise. They want a communist republic, with them at the helm. If they can’t get that, they’ll take power anyway, but their dreams are not of Heaven, but of Hell.
Sep 15, 2008 - 1:16 pm 26. Kent Gatewood:Senator Obama wants the Ivy League to have ROTC to provide commissars for his New Model Army.
Sep 15, 2008 - 2:26 pm 27. ridgerunner:“It’s almost like watching oil prices creep up and up and up for no obvious reason that anyone will admit to.”
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3720
Sep 15, 2008 - 3:57 pm 28. peterike:Here’s more of that new style of politics from the (same old) One, imbued no doubt with those depths of “imagination” Benj keeps lauding.
http://www.nypost.com/seven/09152008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/obama_tried_to_stall_gis_iraq_withdrawal_129150.htm?page=0
WHILE campaigning in public for a speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Sen. Barack Obama has tried in private to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay an agreement on a draw-down of the American military presence.
According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Obama made his demand for delay a key theme of his discussions with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad in July.
“He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington,” Zebari said in an interview.
HT Powerline.
Sep 15, 2008 - 4:08 pm 29. programmer:Thinking about NahnCee’s observations:
Is there a war going on that we (mostly me) don’t know anything about? Who is really winning and who is really losing? Where is Soro’s money in all of this? I will admit right up front that I can’t even spell ecohnahmics(?). It would be really, really cool if Soro’s was a big loser in this. Just a dream, I know. Can someone put this in perspective with respect to the Gross National Product, for example? Or is that wayyyyyyy off track?
Sep 15, 2008 - 6:04 pm 30. Charles:I also do not think that men basically like civilization.
Sep 15, 2008 - 6:09 pm 31. programmer:………..
Let me be a little more explicit about this. The great cities like New York, Paris, London, Berlin–tend to be female oriented.
Charles:
I believe that men like civilization. But they like the thought of it as a place to return and rest up between “voyages up the river”. I have always liked the stories of the voyageurs or fur traders who every year faced hardships and dangers to meet at rendevouz, then returned to sell their furs, make their profits, and spend the winters in luxurious surroundings provided by their wealth and maintained by their women folk, only to sally forth once again come spring.
Sep 15, 2008 - 6:20 pm 32. NahnCee:programmer – I’m thinking bigger than Soros. I’m thinking China and/or Saudi Arabia — another country attempting to overthrow America by using our financial systems against us with repeated massive running of the banks which no one seems to be able to track back to who’s doing the sudden buying and selling. I don’t know that Russia is wealthy enough to pull it off, and I would be surprised if Soros could. Maybe Bill Gates.
///
Wretchard – re: the thread discussing what sort of weapon America’s military might have developed that Woodward was hinting at, you might want to look at this article:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1841108,00.html?xid=rss-topstories
Seems to me that if these electrodes could read the “distinctive neural fingerprints” of a fellow American soldier to read his mind, why couldn’t it also read the “distinctive neural footprints” of — oh, say, Osama bin Laden to overhear and understand what HE is saying when he’s talking to himself?
Sep 15, 2008 - 6:28 pm 33. NahnCee:[my comment is awaiting moderation, so I'll post it again without the link - apologies in advance if it becomes a dupe]
programmer – I’m thinking bigger than Soros. I’m thinking China and/or Saudi Arabia — another country attempting to overthrow America by using our financial systems against us with repeated massive running of the banks which no one seems to be able to track back to who’s doing the sudden buying and selling. I don’t know that Russia is wealthy enough to pull it off, and I would be surprised if Soros could. Maybe Bill Gates.
///
Wretchard – re: the thread discussing what sort of weapon America’s military might have developed that Woodward was hinting at, you might want to look at this article:
At Times.com, titled “The Army’s Totally Serious Mind-Control Project”, author Mark Thompson
Seems to me that if these electrodes could read the “distinctive neural fingerprints” of a fellow American soldier to read his mind, why couldn’t it also read the “distinctive neural footprints” of — oh, say, Osama bin Laden to overhear and understand what HE is saying when he’s talking to himself?
Sep 15, 2008 - 6:35 pm 34. slade:Can someone put this in perspective with respect to the Gross National Product, for example?
Some numbers for context:
DJIA at lowest point since 2005 – down 19% YTD and 24% from high of Oct 2007
S&L Bailout $160B to $200B (750 or so S&L’s)
The credit crisis has caused the financial industry to write down the value of its assets by more than $300 billion, and lose hundreds of billions of dollars more in actual credit losses.
Fannie/Freddie bailout $25B
Bank of America purchases Merrill Lynch for $50B.
That’s a Big Number.
Maybe Bill Gates.
Or Carlos Slim of Mexico, if the suppositions have merit. I tend to think not but that’s just a guess. From what I can tell, there is nothing mysterious about the “suddenness” that can’t be explained by gross managerial incompetence (the “over leveraged balance sheets”) within a broad swath of the top tier financial services industry where good risk management practice and prudent judgment should have prevented this from happening. But the near uniform response to the direct question is some quick shoulder shrugging – either peers are unwilling to condemn their own or something else.
I also heard today that the 9,000 or so banks in this country will consolidate to about half that number by the time the dust settles.
Sep 15, 2008 - 8:23 pm 35. Charles:I also do not think that men basically like civilization.
Sep 15, 2008 - 8:50 pm 36. NahnCee:………..
Let me be a little more explicit about this. The great cities like New York, Paris, London, Berlin–tend to be female oriented.
……………….
The great cities also tend to have more in common with each other than with small cities and towns surrounding them.
slade – how much money would it take to affect the American economy? To buy enough stock in a company like Bear Stearns or Lehman or Merrill Lynch, so that you could control its pricing on the market, and then suddenly dump, so a cascade effect would take place bringing all the rest of the stock prices down and into bankruptcy?
My understanding is there is some fairly hinky stuff going on with the pricing of these stocks over and above decades of bad management. The article(s) I have read seem to think that no one really knows who owns how much of what stocks so that when massive amounts of them suddenly start being sold at bottom-level prices, no one is sure who started the avalanche.
So … if there *were* a plot to take down Lehman Brothers, for example, how much would that cost? Surely these companies that are going belly-up are not *all* populated with Enron-type people gaming the system.
Sep 15, 2008 - 9:43 pm 37. Eggplant:NahnCee,
It’s reasonable to assume that the Federal Reserve is trying everything it can to stablize the American economy. Also the Federal Reserve would have access to the world’s best economic models and computing resources. Finally, the Federal Reserve controls the US money supply and can produce as much fiat currency as it needs to combat any sort of imaginable economic warfare.
We are in an economic mess but I’m convinced this is a mess of our our own making and not due to some sinister foreign entity.
Sep 15, 2008 - 10:14 pm 38. Dave:Franklin Delano Dave here; I see it is time to welcome you all to my little fireside chat and say: “We have nothing to fear but corporate welfare itself”.
Check out Larry Kudlow over at nationalreview.com. The Man of the Hour is
Secretary Paulson who has called a halt to
bailouts.
So a big brokerage firm, Lehman, is going out of business. Big deal. Whatever stocks and cash that their customers have will simply be moved to another firm, or sent directly to the customers themselves.
And Dear Old Merrill Lynch will be bought by Bank of America at fire sale prices. Then continue to operate, probably under a different name. If you were hoping to sell Meriill shares at $129 a share, you will not have to settle for $29. Other than that, no change for customers.
And insurer AIG will have to pay a lot of people a lot of money and will not have a lot left over afterwards. It will have to wait until it collects more premiums from lower-risk customers before it gets rich again.
Freddie and Fannie? Well, the mortages they passed on to others will have to be made good. There is that little matter of a statutory government guarantee. However, Freddie and Fannie still have lots of income. They can get an amortitized loan from Federal Reserve Member Banks and pay it all back in 10 years or even five. (A form of that fiat currency Eggplant mentioned, but not the kind that causes generalized currency debasement.)
This will settle their obligations. As far as the defaults they still hold, they will simply have to dine upon them. The need for these two is to yank their ability to put the taxpayer in hock for their misdeeds.
Most of the tremendous losses being bandied
about were “funny money”. They represent not only intangibles, but theoretical intangibles,
wealth only on paper.
Now me, I am one of the people who has taken genuine losses. Were I to sell my house now,
I would net over $100G LESS than I put into it. And that loss represents almost two decades of painstaking accumulation. HOWEVER: I still have the house and, thus far, am still able to keep up with the payments. (Thanks to the Good Lord for small favors.)
Therefore I am not suffering deprivation. Very few people are.
A true financial crisis would be one in which people could not use their bank accounts to pay their bills, could not keep their other assets, and lacked adequate shelter. That ain’t about to happen.
If the government will do nothing and just sit there, we will be over this current problem in short order. The one real danger that I can see is the temptation to keep insolvent/improvident firms in business instead of clearing the decks and letting new firms take over. DOING THAT WAS WHY THE GREAT DEPRESSION LASTED SO DAMNED LONG AND WAS SO DAMNED SEVERE. Let us resolve to keep our wits about us and not repeat past mistakes.
It has been such a pleasure chatting with you this evening. Tune in next week for another inspirational message from Rednecks for Social Responsibility, the paleoneoconconspiracydotcom.
Sep 15, 2008 - 10:55 pm 39. bobal:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anieuWFWe8s
Really power ad, woman born alive after botched abortion speaks out against Obama’s votes against the Born Alive Protectin Act in Illinois.
Sep 15, 2008 - 10:58 pm 40. Dave:Buddy Larsen: Where the heck are you?
Sep 15, 2008 - 11:00 pm 41. Dave:I would like to know what the chartists are saying about resistance levels on the popular averages. Got any answers.
Oops. Forgot to sound off about “inflation”.
For the past few months it has been fashionable in certain quarters to tout the return of inflation because of (pick your villains).
I was the Austrian with the contrary opinion. I said that those price increases were the result of various and sundry contrived shortages reinforcing each other. Some shortages were inadverdent, others deliberate. But I doubted they could last.
With wholesale prices taking a plunge for two months in a row and deeper plunges than expected at that, indicates that I may have gotten lucky and called things right.
Hope so, anyway, Don’t you?
Sep 15, 2008 - 11:07 pm 42. biggie:I second the call for Buddy Larsen. I recommend an Internet search party be formed and set off no later than sunrise.
On a more serious note: between the media messages and the financial transactions of late, I have to wonder if my confusion stems from my lack of education or if indeed the Singularity has arrived. What’s to keep us from buying all the lovely myths that make so much more money than the messy incomplete truths and uncertainty that define and limit a reasonable estimation of how the world works? Why, only our ability to reason, which is a gift either political party would love to convince you they’re pleased to have given you.
Have we even begun to see the horrible doom begotten of corrupt civil servants and leaders, all heralded by media firms whose mercenary aims are now adorned with manufactured fear and/or cultural prestige?
I can only hope that the humiliation consequent the routing of these bums is of proper historical proportions.
Sep 15, 2008 - 11:26 pm 43. slade:Franklin Delano Dave here;
Beware gifts coming from Franklin Delano ::))
The GSE mess remains well within my concept of reality – as much as reality can be used in the same sentence with huge revenue streams, which makes normally sane people take extended junkets to Jupiter. Semi-private entities backed by government – bad idea, bad implementation, badly abused. Ship-of-State wreck waiting to happen.
On the financial services mess, my personal opinion is halfway between the “what me worry” (FD Dave) and “the Lemurians got loose again” (NahnCee). The 1929 comparisons make everyone nervous (although proper in my opinion based on magnitude). The Main Street depositors have to be “calmed” else the comparison leads to – what? – Main Street running the banks? Care to put money on that? I would submit it is well past time to stop worrying about the “unpredictable” and “excitable” behavior of Main Street and devote a little care and feeding to the institutional Wall Street investors who have done absolutely everything the little guy was expected to do if not properly monitored and/or secured.
My personal view includes explicit manipulation to the extent that regulatory control of the markets has been *systematically* dismantled starting with Reagan. In my mind, it is a pattern – one that resulted in the current financial services consolidation that is costing me real money – loss of principle in a market now down 25%. I didn’t even have time to accumulate paper profit. Soon as the ink was dry, the ride started.
NahnCee: Surely these companies that are going belly-up are not *all* populated with Enron-type people gaming the system.
That’s exactly what I’m saying. The breadth and depth of risk mismanagement and piss-poor judgment throughout an entire industry sector leaves me white with rage, especially when I am reminded of the pretentious frou-frou concern about the ability of the “Main Street” investor to properly engage in market-generated wealth as a reliable substitute for government-sponsored social security programs – as Wall Street was actively and aggressively betting against the House, which always has the edge. In my view, Dave is right that corrections are good so I am not seeing complicity by billionaires. I am d@amn sick of paying through the nose for them.
Bottom line: manipulated or not, we’re in for another round of Congressionally-mandated regulatory control. History would dictate a 50-50 chance that it won’t be good for the markets – here or abroad. That is the cost of these large adjustments that nobody seems to factor in.
Sep 16, 2008 - 6:54 am 44. slade:NahnCee: The article(s) I have read seem to think that no one really knows who owns how much of what stocks so that when massive amounts of them suddenly start being sold at bottom-level prices, no one is sure who started the avalanche.
My macroscopic view – is that market deregulation introduced new vehicles for bundling securities (derivatives) and the “fractionated” banking as it is called by Buddy, which increased the number and kind of institutional management houses (by removing the wall between investment and commercial banking – a wall that rather successfully guarded against conflict of interest for 70 years) that for whatever reason were poorly regulated or not at all. Add to the mix some old vehicles invented by Milken (CDO’s which were used for most of the sub-prime mortgages) and you have securities that cannot be properly valued or risk assessed. Conspiracy would have to start there. Transparency was reduced by these new vehicles. Risk and uncertainty increased. Capital vanishes in that environment. (I would also add that nearly all the resistance levels that I have read or heard about have been broken which further explains the palpable tension coming out of the news and Wall Street – ain’t your father’s market anymore.)
When the avalanche settles, I would not be surprised to learn that *expediters* participated – the opportunistic factor that always hitches a ride on runaway markets. But I am not calling their role as primary.
I could be wrong. Buddy doesn’t know. Nobody does right now. Except of course, the ones responsible.
Sep 16, 2008 - 7:14 am 45. slade:Sitting behind McCain was former Gov. Jeb Bush, who was hired a year ago by Lehman Brothers as a financial consultant. As governor, Bush served on the three-member State Board of Administration that agreed to let the state’s retirement fund buy a series of mortgage-backed securities from Lehman Brothers that turned out to be troubled. The subsequent steep drop in value prompted a $9 billion run on the fund last December by local governments who had invested their money in the SBA managed fund. Lehman also manages two funds for the SBA, which is also heavily invested in some Lehman securities. – Miami Herald
I will say this about conspirators versus expediters, it seems not completely illogical to conclude that over that last year to 18 months, the securities became *hot-tagged* and were aggressively dumped via the *network.*
Sep 16, 2008 - 7:48 am 46. slade:How the Masters of the Universe ran amok and cost us the earth
h/t Elephant Bar
No, this drink had all the ingredients – no stirring or shaking required.
Sep 16, 2008 - 8:09 am 47. Dave:biggie: I rather imagine Buddy is up to his posterior in amphibious carnosaurians.
There is a lot of instability in the stock market and he will be very busy monitoring what is happening and adjusting his orders constantly.
Remember a couple of weeks ago, somebody rehashed a 2003 announcement that United Airlines had declared Chapter 11. This caused an immediate but temporary crash of UAL stock.
Problem out there right now is those folks that have leveraged the leveraged leverage on top of a lot of leverage that leveraged the prior leveraged leverage. Minor declines in portfolio value and/or otherwise absorbable
declines in cash flow are disastrous for them.
Not so for those with sensible positions.
The real problems are long term and generally involve public employees voting themselves excessive transfer-of-income payments.
Your phrase, “manufactured fear” is appropriate. Misery loves company and how dare you and I remain solvent when our feudal overlords are so troubled.
Slade: We will see whatever regulatory proposals that the proposers think will help them get re-elected.
In the meantime, things like my local headline
“Financial Crisis Shakes Economy” are equestrian excrement. A genuine crisis announced yesterday would hardly shake the real economy in 24 hours. Remember that the people who write those headlines and the underlying stories are a bunch of go-fers who could not understand what you and I are disagreeing about. Or agreeing about. Or talking about.
Gotta go to work. Check in again this PM.
Sep 16, 2008 - 9:22 am 48. NahnCee:Try using the heliograph to locate Buddy.
But … how much would it cost to buy enough of Bear Stearns to manufacture an avalanche buy-off disaster leading to bankruptcy? Multiplied by however many other Wall Street companies you might want to bring down?
BofA just bought Merrill Lynch for $50 billion. Surely you could infiltrate Merrill Lynch for less than that amount and then sicken it by selling off to force the overall price down.
So, maybe, if China (for example) wanted to mess with America’s culture, what could they accomplish for $300 billion give or take a major Wall Street company?
Sep 16, 2008 - 9:56 am 49. slade:Try using the heliograph to locate Buddy.
Even if you find him, it won’t do any good because you can’t trade in this market, not even if you’re Buddy – the shorts lose as much as the long trades because the swings are too wild (another reason why I am cool to conspiracy – just not smart enough to pull off something this complicated).
Franklin Delano “Raines” on the parade and copy cats follow suit and bet red. What’s black and white and read all over? A news rag headlining a financial crisis.
Sep 16, 2008 - 9:58 am 50. slade:What’s black and white and *red* all over?
There’s a reason I have no second career at comedy central where blowing punchlines is an moral hazard.
Sep 16, 2008 - 10:03 am 51. slade:NahnCee: So, maybe, if China (for example) wanted to mess with America’s culture, what could they accomplish for $300 billion give or take a major Wall Street company?
It’s a case of conspiracy without a cause. The financials going down were, as Dave points out, over leveraged to an embarrassing degree (I would say criminal). Market viability required correction with long term benefit to this country – and abroad. No conspiracy required – except if you think Adam Smith’s “moving hand” has gone international, or god forbid, transnational.
I won’t beat this dead house much longer, but I see (criminal) incompetence looking for an out, once the end game became clear, unlike their securities.
And, unlike others, I think it’s a big deal. I don’t see bank runs in the future, but I see the wink-wink, nudge-nudge arrogance of managerial incompetence sustained by a sense of anointed entitlement.
Coming to a richly deserved end. And I wish that pun were not so offensive.
Sep 16, 2008 - 10:20 am 52. slade:There’s a reason I have no second career at comedy central where blowing punchlines is an morale hazard.
I meant to say.
Sep 16, 2008 - 10:26 am 53. slade:NahnCee: So, maybe, if China (for example) wanted to mess with America’s culture…
I missed the subtle change in your argument. How very Gramscian of “them”.
I have taken this so far into left off-topic field that I will not develop this thought too much other than to say that I encourage them to continue along the path of cultural mitigation, if that is the Agenda. This country has homes and various multi-step programs for recovering delusionals (them not you). Penetrating American culture is a Herculean task that would require more than a few bank failures. It is my opinion that the enormous flexibility of American society and institutions is a causative factor in the sanguine attitude that allowed this situation to develop. Can’t happen Here. Or Today.
Sep 16, 2008 - 10:42 am 54. NahnCee:Muy bueno. We’ll just chalk it up to greed and stupidity and hunker down then until it all blows over.
Sep 16, 2008 - 1:47 pm 55. programmer:Great discussion.
Sep 16, 2008 - 2:41 pm 56. weSwinger:To respond on the financial sub-thread: In technical terms, the problem with Wall Street is that they have been hypnotized by powerful mathematical tools. (Financial engineering.) These tools made managers believe that they could inoculate bundles of similar securities from risk by aggregating enough of them. They assumed that the default risk on each mortgage was independent of the other, and that that risk assumed the profile of the “normal” curve. And because this bundling was so effective, you could use leverage (more debt) to magnify the earnings to reach a desired target. This is where Nasim Taleb’s Black Swan swims in. . .we find that the default risks were actually highly correlated, the diversification only worked during a stable or better, a rising market, and the financial contagion spreads. . .
In less technical terms you have the ivy league elite in the highest reaches of business and government sitting on each others’ boards, paying each other princely sums for each others’ good opinions. “Similarly situated actors would have behaved the same”, and instead of going to jail they keep the princely bonuses and go on to ruin some other business.
Because the owners of bank deposits are not panicking and because not all people are selling into a panicking stock market, the US economy may not crash at this time. There is no long term fix in more regulation, the ivy leaguers and financial engineers will find a way around regulations. This country needs a shareholder revolution to effect a change in corporate governance.
Sep 16, 2008 - 3:15 pm 57. slade:This country needs a shareholder revolution to effect a change in corporate governance.
Compliance is missing the long tooth of the warrior spirit.
Or something to that effect.
Sep 16, 2008 - 10:21 pm 58. gbnyc:an apartment in ‘81: maybe 4-500 dollars, two months rent up front and the first month- let’s say $350/month to argue, that’s 1050 dollars- maybe one month up front and first month, that’s 700 dollars, when hotshot bartenders were doing 400 a week.
landlords can’t really turn off the heat in one apartment, they have to kill it in the whole building because it’s steam heat off a boiler in the basement.
it’s really, really, really against the law to turn off the heat in rental buildings in nyc- there’s a number to call if it happens, and the city sends a guy down who doesn’t have to take a half ounce of s*** off anybody. the heat can’t even be lowered, on a timer, etc. there are definite laws, simple and direct, concerning heat. I lived in a building where every fall someone slipped the number of the city “heat police” under everyone’s door in case the landlord got cute with the heat.
and this guy was/wanted to be a lawyer?
Sep 17, 2008 - 6:50 pm 59. WebElf Report Blogroll News « The WebElf Report:[...] TELLING SPIRITUAL TALES: “Beer in the mail room” …. [...]
Sep 22, 2008 - 10:41 am 60. Jacob Orslup:Regardless of anything else. He is also a nigger.
Oct 6, 2008 - 9:49 pm 61. Jacob Orslup:The previous post was not posted by Jacob but by a drunk room mate. All post are good points and respected by me. Sincerly, Jacob
Oct 6, 2008 - 9:59 pmSorry, comments for this entry are closed at this time.