A musical interlude

This from our West Coast correspondent and one time drummer of the famed Unity Rockers, a certain John Fox. Personally, I don't quite get why the band is so quiet.

Radiohead with the USC Marching Band

Radiohead - 15 Step
by Alisvideo

Just got off the phone with Guy Whitten, erstwhile lead singer of the same band and now member of the ruling class at the massive Political Science school at Texas A&M, an ecosystem of some 1200 souls with its own IT department. That's no joke. Guy's going to be learning some lessons about life soon with the impending arrival of a first child. So lets all give Guy a rousing ChewYourGrouse welcome into the land of parenting.

One last thing. Isn't it funny how spellcheck in Microsoft Office -- including PowerPoint -- insists that the sequence of letter "Powerpoint" does not indicate a proper English word? Oh, Redmond, how you humor us.

An end of innocence?

At Daylife this evening for a presentation by Jeff Jarvis, author of the book "What Would Google Do?" Basically, he carries on about principles for living derived from the omnipresent transparency facilitated by Google, Craigslist, and the rest. Not much revelation there, and then he opened the floor for some idea generation on the topic of a Google restaurant. A bunch of chipper ideas for cool applications of transparency and networking in the food service context gushed forth. "Drill down into menu items to show ingredients and where they come from," "provide data on popularity of dishes," etc.

Everyone was rather pleased with.themselves. But were they way out of touch with reality? Are we entering into an era of fewer gadgets and slower progress. Can we clever our way out of it? Maybe we can, to some extent. The Obama campaign is a good example of technology used well. I talked to one guy who was working on.a framework to help massive amounts of unemployed people connect. He was only just getting started, but maybe he can do some good. At the very least, he was tuned in.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Foul on Duke

There is a meme flowing around the internet today that the officials in tonight's battle between light blue good and dark blue evil tonight at Cameron Indoor (like they've got an outdoor one) Stadium will call a foul on the Blue Devils of Duke University. I must insist this is only an apocrypal rumor. There have been no confirmations issued, except by John Wofford, President of the ACC.

Some are speculating that the space-time continuum might implode. In any case, it could be more devastating that Lehman's collapse.

A few things

For starters, thanks and praise to Jonathan Moore AKA JMo, whose blog is touted at right.  After I had complained about Blogger/Google being too slack to offer a way to extract a blog to something one could hold locally, he noted that Google did “expose the metadata” in its RSS feed, and he quickly cooked up a Python script to let me expropriate the means of production.  Full on righteous.

 

In other news, after months of luxuriating in the slack traffic of people visiting the blog via Google images to the post where I mocked Joe Biden’s ridiculous hair.  I have since removed that post to force my traffic numbers back down so as to infuse me with the desire to earn my unique visitors the old fashioned way:  by writing something interesting.  So I’ll be trying to do that again.

 

But not today.  Instead, I’ll tell you about my reading of the testimony before Congress of one Harry Markopolos, the Boston-based finance guy whose been trying to make Bernard Madoff’s life a living hell for years, but failing, but is now having his 15 minutes of fame.  And then some.

 

So Markopolos offered up some ideas for reforming the SEC, most important amongst which are

·         SEC staff are desparately underqualified, undertrained, underequipped with print and technology resources and underpaid

·         The SEC doesn’t even let its staff go to conferences to keep up with things

·         The SEC should be made entrepreneurial, with good base pay and bonuses for collars they make

 

All told it’s pretty damning and cogent, but he goes overboard I think in advocating that SEC people should be paid like bank employees, with a lot of pay in bonuses.  They should undoubtedly be paid better, but the idea of entrepreneurial agencies rubs me to wrong way.  People should elect to work for regulators like they elect to non-profits or police departments, for other reasons.

Winner takes all no longer

The ARod scandal, coming as it does on the heels of the bonus scandal and so many other doping scandal, will mark a new phase in the vilification of the overpaid. ARod famously brought Goldman Sachs in to negotiate his handsome deal with the Bronx bombers.

It was already clear where we were headed when people started objecting to Citi getting its logo on the Mets Stadium. If not Citi, who? Berkshire Hathaway? Walmart? Google? The lists of the deep-pocketed are short. That's $400 million that's not going into the Mets coffers, and it will be reflected in pay cuts to players. And we're gonna see more and more sponsorships get pulled, and athletes will earn less, and maybe, if we're lucky, they'll do fewer steroids.

Nobody's going to object, except the players, but they're not going to be in a situation where they have much leverage. If your Kobes and Lebrons stamp out and bitch, they'll lose the adulation that makes them marketable. I look forward to it.

Dreams of My Father

I've been making my way through the book, and continue to be impressed. Obama is at times a little reductive and corny, but he continue to convey legitimate and earnest questing, and openmindedness. All in all, I'm immensely proud to have as president the guy who wrote this book.

He's gonna make booboos. In the end he will probably rue the salary constraint on the banks, and not vetting people for tax issues will sting. But I really don't see him hauling off alienating the whole world a few weeks after we had everybody's sympathy and starting a completely idiotic and adventurist war because the Vaderesque cronies just promised him it was a good idea. And he'll probably have the good sense not to get blow jobs in the Oval Office. I think we're good.

Reborn

The restaurant where my firm meets monthly, which I reported closed a couple of months back, has reopened under a new name: "Williams", after the street it's on. The food is not better, it is in many ways worse. Tonight they kept trying to serve us these little cherry tomato things with tuna inside, which nobody ate. Why?, you may ask. Because they sucked, you could tell just looking at them. The calamari was fried, at least, but they brought us chicken sliders instead of beef. The nerve.

Paying for 2.0

More and more media outlets are starting to think seriously about the disappearance of new media forms with shaky business models. The blogging network Pajamas Media shut down, there's no saying others won't too.

So we have to ask ourselves: how much would you pay for a given 2.0 form for a year? I already donated money to Wikipedia. I pay monthly for LinkedIn already (should probably try to expense it). Would I pay a hundred bucks a year for Facebook? Without blinking. $250? I'd pay it. Compare with the three grand a year I pay Verizon now for the three cell phones and the Triple Play.* Or the $200 I pay for Netflix.

But without Blogger/Blogspot I'd be toast. I've got 1500 posts up on this bitch, and there's no hint that they'll let me export it to a *.csv or something. There's no way Google could figure out how to load balance the millions of people who might try to extract at peak times. It's just too much of a technical challenge for such a frail company of technical and business bleating morons. Way over Google's head.


*I'd ditch cable if it weren't for the Fox Soccer Channel, truth be told

Around the fire, again

Mary and I were out to dinner a couple of years ago with some people, and a woman began holding forth on how nice it would be if we all lived in villages and grew and ate organic produce and had deep and authentic relationships with one another and so on and so forth. And I've had those reveries before, now and again, but that evening something clicked and I oh so very gently remonstrated her that, were we all to revert to these romantic communal ways, it wouldn't be all that simple.

We derive immeasurable benefits from the massive degree of specialization and division of labor in our economy, and the way technology annihilates space and offers up economies of scale. If we went back to village ways, basic stuff we take for granted like low infant mortality would quickly suffer. Just as importantly, outsiders -- homosexuals, black people, Asians, Mexicans -- could quickly be ostracized. That's how clans work.

In recent weeks, as the stark seriousness of our economic situation has become ever clearer, the neo-communal or nuclear familial idyll has reared its head in a variety of places, with commentators from Tyler Owen and Douglas Coupland on down the pike alluding to the return of simple pleasures, being with family and suffering together by the hearth. Back on Walton's Mountain. We can't let ourselves get caught up in this nonsense.

I don't want to go overboard in my negativity. I think between the PWA and the WPA and the CCC and Woody Guthrie and the rest of it left a positive trace in American culture, which we felt when Pete Seeger and Springsteen channeled Woody a couple of weeks back. I looked up the history of the Klan in the Depression, expecting it would be bad, and in fact the sheet wearing goons weren't that active in the 30s. So maybe America will come together in a positive way in the face of difficulty. But there's a real risk that we won't, that contention for scarce resources will bring out the less good, and we must guard against that by not turning in upon ourselves.

Observations

On route 22 -- which near Plainfield was America's first divided highway -- saw two rotting and moribund gas stations, a rarity in Central NJ. Doesn't make sense.

On the platform for the outbound PATH train, there were big heat lamps there in the open air. That shit don't play in today's economy. The Port Authority should not be paying for that.

Dinosaur Jr. "Forget the Swan". Still my guitar hero.

Superclasico!

Had a moment free and thought I'd tune in for a momement of the Superbowl. Instead, my set, semi-permanently fixed to the Fox Soccer Channel, found something much much better: Superclassico! The game between Buenos Aires clubs Boca Juniors and River Plate. This is a real sporting event, not some marketing fest.

Destructive creation

Ripping copper pipes and other useful materials out of new houses has apparently become endemic throughout this great nation of ours, though the process has likely decreased since commodity prices collapsed in the fall, along with everything else.

This is actually all good, as it reduces housing stock by driving up the value of existing homes, or at the very least, creates demand for police services. With commodities prices down, we'll have to rely on shooting galleries and squats to rein in housing supply through destruction. The low cost of energy should encourage the development of hydroponic farming of the proverbial "killah" in unoccupied homes, which would help improve our balance of trade by making it less necessary to import reefer from Columbia etc. So we're headed in the right direction!

A word about the bonuses

All the rancor over the Wall Street compensation system misses some crucial points. If we injected capital into the banks in the fall, it was because we believe that the banks are worth keeping. And what are the banks? Commercial banks have branches, real estate, ATMs, a bunch of stuff, but investment banks have people, culture, and a little technology here and there. That's it.

Cap the comp of the banks at $400k, as some wizard Senator from Missouri has suggested, and the legal entities we know as the former investment banks will disappear, poof... like Kaiser Tsoze. And the Evercores and Greenhills and Wasserstein Perellas will rise up to take their place. And then all those TARP injections would really, literally, have gone to waste.

And it will take time for new firms to form, and the ecosystems that made the things work, knowing you could call up Wendy in munis and get an answer or whatever, will be gone. So nobody will be able to raise money to get new ideas funded.

That's a key value of a corporation, knowing who's where and what they can do. Same deal in Detroit. Blow up GM and a lot of valuable relationships are gone.

Not that I know the answer, but posturing punitive is not it.

Shopping day

The other day the raincoat I bought to go to Moscow to work on my dissertation in 1997 and which I have since then thought of as my "new raincoat" sprung a new rip, so I decided to throw it away. I would run right out to Eastern Mountain Sports and buy myself a new Goretex thingie, if only I had the time.

I always say I hate shopping, but the fact is, I don't. I just don't like taking the time to do it, when I could be taking care of kids or working or doing sports or something more pressing.

But I'm an example of pent up demand. I'm 30-year fixed and I have cash on the side that I know could be allocated well right now to "durable" goods like Goretex. If I had more time, I'd go out and avail myself of the bargains that are out there, right now. A few of them, at least. And I doubt that I'm alone. So maybe, as a form of stimulus, the government should through soem tax code tweak encourage employers to give employees "shopping days", or half shopping days, on top of vacation benefits. Maybe stipulate that employees have to go out and spend n dollars and return receipts.

I'm sure it would be a trivial way to stimulate sales, but every basis point counts.

Bedtime update

After fighting each step of being put to bed with a range of delaying tactics, Graham like clockwork gets out of bed 10-15 minutes after lights out, goes to the top of the stairs (while I'm in reading with Natalie) and shouts down at 3/4 voice "Mom. I gotta go to the bathroom #2 really really badly." And then waits for a response, which inevitably comes only from me. And finally he goes and does it, and then calls out when he wants his royal butt wiped. We need to work on that latter part.

Snow day

Another day of dust bunnies and conference calls, punctuated with Y Thai (from the Thai restaurant at the Princeton Y, which rules) at Ted and Kirsten's.

Of late have been posting lots of old photos on Facebook in the evenings, rather than blogging. The rather louche one shown at left was taken of a lad who shall go unnamed on Flatbush Ave in Brooklyn, cerca 1987. You gotta love the archives.

Music in lieue of thought

At my desk all day sparring with clever admin people ("what do you want to talk to him about?"), reviewing ambitious plans for software to take imploding markets by storm, and admiring my ambitious collection of dust bunnies under the desk. Towards the end, at least, Pandora Radio (try it if you haven't) delivers up some lovely -- if pretentios -- music.

Michael Cashmore with Antony

Synapse loss?

I will confess I got nothing going on in the old skull these days. Coping with reality. Work. Cold. New York City.

Today it was much like being back in the 70s. The morning train lurched and crept into Penn Station. In the evening, the 3 train was so full that people had their game face on pushing in, taking pride in being in New York because, it's New York, goddammit.

Talked to a guy from Booz Allen who's been shipped out to frickin Abu Dhabi for six months and then will come home and get transferred to DC, where all the action is at.

Fun with geeks

This guy's pretty wonky, but he has a neat toy.

Run Fatboy Run

This should be a stupid and formulaic movie, but Simon Pegg is really some kind of comic genius. Just technically. Great timing, great physical comedy. And Dylan Moran is equally good. And Thandi Newton is OK but does look plenty good. So all in all it's a fine rent, much mirth to be had.

Parsons at Citi

There have been persistent if unconfirmed rumors that Richard Parsons has been installed as Chairman of Citigroup in an effort to try to provoke a raid from Carl Icahn. I will keep you posted as more details emerge.

Day one

The first day of the Obama administration... I actually worked. And here I am, bleary from HTML, of all things, pleased by UNC's crushing of Clemson, equally excited to learn that the freakish lump in my shoulder is a mere cebaceous cyst or lipoma, am going to bed.

More on South Korea and Treasuries

Went back and checked into the earlier story about the South Korean pension fund getting out of Treasuries. It is, to be sure, not a joke, and as the world's 5th largest pension fund ($166 bln recently), to be taken seriously. But the fund's manager has been a Treasury hawk throughout 2008, so it's not really news that he might want to sell. What doesn't make sense is why he'd want to talk it up if he's gonna sell.

And maybe, if we have to work harder to sell our debt, it will be a good thing. It will pressure the government to actually cut fat and become a more effective steward of it's debtholders' borrowed assets.

He had me back at "skinny kid with a funny name"

Amidst all the attention paid to the fact that Barack Obama is black, I think people at times lose sight of the fact that he flat out rocks. There's never been another politician in our lifetimes worth being excited about, and now there both is one and he's President to boot. Which means we all (substantially) agree on something. So I'm in a good mood, despite the fact that I have to go back to work.

An uncommon day

Today is a day like few others, with the inauguration reminding us how fortunate we are in the long term, and the South Korea pension fund manager getting bearish on Treasuries letting us know how utterly fucked we are in the short term. Stimulus package? Could be Obama will need to get Viagra on the internet.

Maybe Bush and Cheney will get some hunting in down in Crawford.

Concert on the mall

Obama's concert on the mall had high points and low points too. But there were notable omissions in the programming.

First off, Bob Dylan. There was a meme afloat back in '07 that he was supporting Ron Paul, but I haven't seen it confirmed anywhere. Most likely they were afraid he would flake out and so mangle one of his songs so badly as to make it unrecognizable. But, after all, he did open for Reverend King back at the March on Washington.



Secondly, P-Funk. "One Nation Under a Groove" should have been the theme song for the campaign, really.

The abstract child

At RDU, waiting for flight. An Asian dad in his 30s bounces his 3-year old girl in a very pink outfit on his knee. She giggles and gurgles uncontrollably, all the more so as her bounces her higher.

In some ways I feel like we skipped or truncated this stage with Graham, but not with Natalie, which raises the question: is it a first child thing? Does the first child evoke in the parent an urge for the abstraction of childhood that is to some extent slaked by the time the second comes along?

Could this be reflected in the slew of research on birth order issues? (Larry Sullivan et al) Only the shadow knows.

Artisans

Have been belatedly (as is oft my wont) reading the November 24^th  New Yorker, the food issue, and have particularly enjoyed the articles on the best barbeque in Texas and also the one on this Seattle knifemaker named Kramer, who is on a quest to make knifes that cut through bolts and floating silk and lamb bones.  On rare occasions, the old New Yorker shines through, the New Yorker from the days before Tina, when a journalist heads off into some weird realm of human experience and rides shotgun for a while.  This is the secret recipe of what’s his name on This American Life and the best of the blogosphere too:  capture the exotic individual down the block.

 

And it is also, in some ways, the hope of the American economy down the road.  Obama/Keynes can stimulate all he wants to, but if there aren’t reasons to hit the road, go to the mall, etc, people won’t bother.   There have to be ideas worth pursuing both as producer and consumer.

 

Niklaus was speculating the other night about the thing that supercedes Facebook, and, though I resisted the idea, he may be right.  After all, 2.0 blossomed from the dot com crash, and I’m speculating now that a big chunk of 2.0 (Facebook, Linkedin, Gmail/Yahoomail/Hotmail, MySpace, YouTube) won’t prove economical through 2010.  A new form may arise, and we may hope that it will grow from the great American garage and not from some faceless Hyderabad or Shenzen apartment complex.  In this regard, our surfeit of cheap real estate (once more, “wide open spaces”) may be our salvation, as entrepreneurial activity is much easier when one has A Room of One’s Own.

Another day, another desk

After working Thursday afternoon at the Carrboro Coworking space, which was pleasant if somehow sedater than I expected, today I sat in my mom's house and worked. Very quiet, the kind of quiet we rarely get in the north. Then went to Niklaus's house and ate barbeque, again.

Other than that, nothing happened, and did not think.

A coronation

Today in the historic North Carolina State Capital the Grouse's very own Josh Stein was sworn in. In an old-school chamber filled with people in both dresses and suits, depending on their gender, Josh was introduced by father Adam, preceded by this guy Basnight who is the head poobah of the Senate, and then sworn in by this woman who called him "Joshua H. Stein," which meant that he went almost a full electoral cycle without anyone noting that his middle name was Harold. Josh then grabbed the mike and spoke truth to power. Sadly, there was no open-mike portion to the ceremony.

Afterwards, lunch was served over in the State Legislature office building, which I totally remembered going to on elementary school field trips, and which hearkens back to the days of Jody, Biffy, Uncle Bill and Mr. French on Family Affair.

Niklaus, my mom showed up, but Adam had to go to Vegas, sending wife and child in his stead.

In transit

Forgot to post. All I can say is that the Jet Blue terminal at JFK rocks. Good food service, delivery to the gate if you like, free internet, it's all good. And I'm coming more and more to love the JFK train to the plane.

The Replacements

These guys might have been great live if they weren't always so fucking drunk.

Mercer County Park Ice Rink, 1/11/09, 2pm

Graham surprised me by wanting to go skating, and even more by putting on those uncomfortable skates. But he made it around the rink with me twice, holding my hand and leaning on me seriously.

Natalie -- with Margaret -- hung by the sides of the rink for a while but eventually found her feet and started skating around quite reasonably. During the apres hot chocolate, she declared that this was precisely her 5th time skating, which I do not doubt.

The rink quite the place, right out of Robert Moses with its rough-hewn concrete clubhouse and fireplace. I'm not used to hearing country radio blasted in fairly urban New Jersey areas, and the the only break from white people was a small handful of Asians, right next to where they have the Indian fair in summer. I guess it's a cracker pastime.

But it was plenty fun, with numerous pairs of "substantially identical" (as the wash sale rule says) teenage girls skating around arm and arm, and the skating guard nerds, and the kids clustered round to watch the Zamboni during the break, it was all good.

Dispatches from the new frontiers of finance

A series of stunning developments

• Bear/Lehman Joint Venture for Private Wealth Management
  In response to growing aggregation in the brokerage space, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers today announced a joint venture which will combine and house the two firms' private wealth management units. A Bear Stearns spokesperson said: "Due to Lehman's well-established brand and robust network of proven producers, we see great and synergistic opportunities to realize economies of scale and leverage a best of breed solution to return value to our clients and shareholders."
  
  
• Federal League Tables
  To encourage competition and entrepreneurship amongst government agencies, Rahm Emanuel, Chief-of-Staff-Select for the President-Elect announced the established of League Tables for M & A deals, equity transactions, and debt underwriting by federal agencies. An informal poll of 2008:
  
  
• M & A -- The Fed, for it's role in Bear/JP Morgan and Wamu/JPMorgan. Honorable Mention to the FDIC for Wells Fargo/Wachovia and the very profitable Indy Mac flip.
• Debt Issuance -- The Treasury, honorable mention to Fannie and Freddy
• Equity Transactions -- The Treasury, for the TARP injections that so warmed hearts from coast to coast

• New "F-bills" to be issued
  Tiring of watching its cousins over at the Treasury have all the auctioning fun with its "T-bills", and mindful of the outsized gains in Treasuries in 2008, the Fed will issue it's own bonds starting in 2009, to be known as "F-bills." To simultaneously maximize principle protection, total return, and yield, F-bills will be continuously inverted variable products arbitraging variances in the ratios between a synthetic non-capitalization weighted versions of the preliminary and month-end Michigan Consumer Sentiment Indices. Chairman Bernanke stated that: "We really want a product that's transparent and robust and returns value to key stakeholders."
  

Ohh, it's late

Once more it's gotten late and I haven't posted. In some ways that's good. It means I'm busy, and I'm not overly fixated on anything.

I will say this. After getting Mary Linda Thompson's recent Versatile Heart, which is quite a good record, I got her more, older Linda Thompson records for Christmas. And I've discovered that she, while a good singer, really is at a disadvantage without a good guitarist beside her, which means her ex-husband Richard back in the day and her son Teddy more recently. And I think it's a pretty observable trend that folksy singer chicks really need a good guitarist accompanying them, whether it's Gillian Welch with David Rawlings or Joni Mitchell with... Joni Mitchell. You listen to Carol King now and it's all flat, lame strumming and simple finger-picking, not in the same frickin ballpark with Joni.

That's all I've got to say.

Dreams of my Father

So I've been reading Obama's book, after Beth was cooing about it, and find it to be good. By no means great, but plenty good. The guy's earnestly trying to think through his evolution, and that's cool enough. Mostly I'm excited that I want to read a book by the President-Elect, something that would have been inconceivable ever before in my lifetime.

And you gotta love the fact that he's upfront about his drug use: pot, cocaine, cigarettes, booze, it's all there. Not because any of that is particularly cool, but it is real and honest and it does make him a regular guy. Mostly, I'm proud to live in a country that can elect as it's President somebody who can come clean in print about having had a normal adolescence. Not so long ago we were splitting hairs about inhaling, which led to splitting hairs over the definition of "is". This is a better way.

What's going on?

Forgive me if I'm a little confused. A significant plurality of Wall Street prognosticators are falling all over themselves to issue more and more bullish pronouncements for the first and more so the second half of the year, excluding your permabears, naturally.

Meanwhile, economists, pliers of the dismal science, after all, are competing too be more and more pessimistic, and not just gloom-n-doomers like Nouriel Roubini (just back from a lovely vacation in St. Barth's with leggy socialites, to judge by Facebook), are fighting to be the most pessimistic, witness Paul Krugman's frightfest on the Time op-ed page yesterday trying to bully Republicans into supporting Obama's aggressive government spending plan.*

So who's a girl to believe? Hard to say. But I can say that, anecdotally, I'm hearing about people getting jobs without looking for them. I see people I know looking to hire. I see some vendors being too busy to get a meeting with them.

Mark Hulbert's Wednesday piece on the bearishness of too much bullishness feels right, incidentally.

*Earth to Krugman, Nobel or no, the Right has been reading your op-ed work for years and are pointedly not listening. Get a co-signer from Chicago next time

Cut out

Was at the Duane Reade (that’s a drug store, for you non New Yorkers) at William and Pine a few minutes back. Near the door was a cut out of the buff and dream James Blake, swinging that racket of his, advertising some bottled water (turns out Evian). Next to him were the words “James Blake, American tennis star.” Now, I ask you, if you need to write the guys name and description, is he really a star? And if he’s not, why do you have a nearly life-size cut out of him advertising your product. What benefit do you derive?

Just Like Heaven

Dinosaur Jr.

To the mall

Took a carload of kids stuff to the thrift store, then went to, thinking to replace perhaps my half rotten manclogs, perhaps the "sack jacket" I got from J Crew in 1991 and then gotten tooth marks on from a Moscow escalator in 1996. No luck. I'll never replace that jacket.

But I got to see the mall. A scene in desolation. In Lord & Taylor's, the men's shoe section had three whole racks with nothing on 'em. The suit section was distinctly underpopulated. It was like they weren't bothering to restock. There was plenty of foot traffic, but I know I for one didn't by shit (and it wasn't just because I had forgotten to bring coupons). The bathroom in JC Penney stank and there was garbage on the floors at Macy's. They weren't stocking, and they weren't staffing.

If, as some are predicting, as many as 25% of retailers file for bankrupcy in 2009-10, and gas prices creep back up, there's going to be a lot of fallow real estate out there. Lets hope it reverts to greenspace and the now fully borne costs of getting to the store result in a whole new mode of retail, a return to main street and a new generation of convenience stores serving better foodstuffs, and a defetishization of cost control by buying in bulk.

L'Iceberg

I didn't expect much from this movie, and it wallowed in the drawer where the Netflix go for a month and change, but when we did watch it, it was a pleasant surprise.  The Tilda Swinton-looking woman, who turns out to be one of the directors, locks herself in a freezer overnight, and her borg-like family fails to notice.  She becomes obsessed -- like Richard Dreyfus with mashed potatoes -- with icebergs and cold stuff, so she strikes out for the north.  Hilarious hijinx ensue. 

The sensibility is equal parts Jacques Tati and Aki Kaurismaki.  Great physical comedy, spare settings and dialogue.  It's well worth renting.  I may check out more of the flicks this Fiona Gordon has made with with Dominique Abel, who plays her husband.  From the looks of it, they are a rare pare of talents.

Winner takes all, or the Mouse Folk

Through the 90s and the first decade of the century, it has become common to explain the vast and growing gap between the top decile of the populace and everybody else in terms of a "Winner takes all" economy, in which globalization and the scale of media and distribution networks make it possible to drive network effects and sales volume. Not just survival, but dominance of the "fittest", from Stephen Cohen to Lebron James to Julia Roberts.

But, as the list of Madoff victims grows from Spielberg to Wiesel to (I love this one) Marketwatch's very own Irwin Kellner to Kevin Bacon to any number of banking nitwits, the bottom falls out of this winner takes all thing. There appears to be only one "winner," and he's under house arrest. The rest take not, but rather get took.

So we're back to the Kafka scenario, where Josephine, the winner, attracts adulation from the other mice for her scarcely differentiable piping, until she's weak. Then she does not.

Lonely nights in Redmondland

Freud and his ilk have long delighted in the identity of primordial opposites. The good doctor's unpacking of how heimlich and unheimlich came to mean roughly the same thing is perhaps the most famous instance of this parlor game.

But one that slipped past him is the likening of blessing and curse, which springs most readily to mind in relation to our faithful and constant companion, Microsoft Office. There are few things which we have seen flourish and blossom in the last two decades, sprouting new features like so much pubic hair, but much more useful. And yet, there are equally few things that make us cuss so often, almost daily, which frustrate us to the verge of pathology. Especially Office 2007.

But somehow we soldier through together because, after all, Microsoft has a lock on proprietary file formats that everybody uses. Really that's all there is to it. We do it because we have to.

Whatchamacallit

Here's my brother-in-law Rob in a candy ad from the 70s. He's the smartassed one with a candy bar.

Starbucks, Mamaroneck, Boston Post Road, 4:21

The same crazy hyper-social guy is in here as last time I was here, asking everybody how their holiday was, making jokes. Even tapped me on the shoulder. Much like my dad, but closer to having a diagnosis.

Master DJ Starbux spinning milquetoast pop same as ever, in this case crooner John Legend, who has lifted a well-known Mark Knofler lick and sings like Sting on top of it, and acts like he should be given a biscuit for it.

Meanwhile, on Facebook, I trailed Michael Morand through what looks to be a cool Gilbert and George show at the Brooklyn Museum.Gotta love 2.0.

Speaking of, I was moved by the personal appeal from Jimmy Wales to donote money to Wikipedia. They've been slow to raise $6 mln Obama style, and if anybody deserves a little donation, Wikipedia does. Where would we be if we had to go back to Googling things to do basic queries? That's a donation that will pay for itself lickety split.

Yule love it

After a calm day of work with no one
else in the office, Metro North
almost has me to my holiday home,
where I will not need to feign
surprise when my children open their
presents: I have absolutely no idea
what Santa has gotten them, though I
can make certain predictions:

* There will be plastic
* Some will be made in China
* I will have to assemble and

figure our packaging
Let's check back on Friday.

Tunnel Vision

Despite the holiday coming up, am living in MS World, from Word to Powerpoint to Excel to freakin Outlook, bullets, tables, bold, italics.... the whole nine. Boring as hell.

And our little document keeps right on growing. Soon it will be marked up with the blood of unsuspecting holiday readers, and then we will compile the bitch, print it, bind it, and send it on its merry way. The great cycle of nature will continue... for another paycheck, at least.

Out on the Turnpike today nothing of note. Traffic, but what do you expect?

In the markets, I'm encouraged by the continued progress of the Ted spread (the spread between 3-month Libor and 3-month T-bills), which everybody was treating like something to take seriously back in October and now only a few bloggers seem to care. Banks are getting more and more willing to lend to each other, it's just that the generalized arm-waving and hair-rending of every freakin talking head in the world has got it to where nobody will buy anything, not even a shake to go with that burger and fries.

Suburban man lost

I went downstairs at 12:05 to get a sandwich and the crabby guy who works the sandwich line in the deli next to Deutsche Bank was like: "Sorry, man, we're not open for lunch yet." Did I mention it was 12:05? So I went outside to the schwarma cart and the guy is hard at work grilling up a batch of instalamb. Finally a guy down the street had some schwarma going on, but I had to walk around and it was cold as the dickens, I tell you.

Is this what they mean when they say Wall St scorns the retail investor? Seems like it might be.

NJ Transit, NE Corridor, 5:43 outbound

Today on this rush hour train I was in a car that was maybe 20% full. Now, lots of people stayed out because of snow (and the scarcity of transactions) and I had to walk back a car to get to the one I was in, but all that notwithstanding, that's an empty car. In general, the trains are hauling fewer people. Today on the 7:43 inbound I had the seat next to me free for my bag and papers. On the 6:46 inbound earlier in the week, same deal. For either of those trains in 2004-2007, you woulda had to have been queued up precisely and asserted your way into the boarding passenger flow to get a seat at all.

No doubt about it, macroeconomic shit is fucked up here in the metro area.

At the Olive Mays market on Nassau St, shelves are freakishly bare. OK, the store kind of sucks, but they've got a buit in walkable customer base, it shouldn't be hard to make money there, and here they are unable to fund inventory. That's just not good.

Back to East Setauket

My luxuriously speculative post on Renaissance Technologies, the meat of which is below, got some attention quick. In fact, about an hour after I posted it, it got its first hit from a server in East Setauket, Long Island belonging to a certain... Renaissance Technologies. Which means that RenTech is running a proprietary bot to scan the web or just the blogosphere. It found my blog long before a Google bot from Mountain View trolled by. Most corporations -- for example our old friends TIAA-CREF -- outsource this kind of brand vigilance to other firms, but quant funds like to develop and manage their own technology.

So who's next? Who's another big fund that's opaque, has an incredible mystique and is hard to get into, and gets unbelievably consistent results. How about Renaissance Technologies? What, everyone will say, Jim Simons is a genius and he hires only quant nerds (a syllogism if ever there was one), who are incapable of guile, right? Where Madoff acted smooth by appearing to charge no fees, only collecting commissions on the brokerage side, Simons' fees -- an incredible 5 and 44 -- could just be another way of projecting specialness and uniqueness.

Felix Salmon points out that Fairfield Greenwich is a feeder fund for RenTech as well as Madoff, which certainly doesn’t convey a rigorous stamp of household approval, given the laxity of Fairfield Greenwich’s "due diligence."

As to the other affinities between quant funds and Madoff, consider this. Quant funds, while not necessarily inclined to criminality, are intensely secretive (IP, indeed). I remember talking to a guy from one quant fund who said that the place was so tight lipped that two guys worked on a desk together, developed strategies together, yet one of them got married and didn't tell the other one until he let it slip eight months after the fact because his partner "had no need to know".

The actual probability of RenTech being fake, despite my fanciful conjurings, is negligible. But the probability is less low that there will be fraud turned up at a seemingly pure black box quant shop. Unless there’s already been one that I missed because I was too busy working.

Crowdsourcing Obama security

Reading about preparations for the inauguration and how hard it is to do interagency coordination, makes me think about how blogs and wikis could be used to enhance awareness of threats.

There could also be a risk of spreading disinformation, but presumably a wiki could mitigate that.


In other news, got an Alaska quarter today and put it in Natalie's quarter map. Now all we need is Hawaii and we'll have the nifty fifty. Which is huge.

Who's next?

I don't know why I'm surprised that Bernard Madoff lacked the decency and integrity it would have taken to kill himself. Clearly he's not Japanese.

So who's next? Who's another big fund that's opaque, has an incredible mystique and is hard to get into, and gets unbelievably consistent results. How about Renaissance Technologies? What, everyone will say, Jim Simons is a genius and he hires only quant nerds (a syllogism if ever there was one), who are incapable of guile, right? Where Madoff acted smooth by appearing to charge no fees, only collecting commissions on the brokerage side, Simons' fees -- an incredible 5 and 44 -- could just be another way of projecting specialness and uniqueness.

OK. RenTech files 13fs. Could they not be faked? I dunno.

Dance revolution

What can I say. This came to my attention via the New York Times Magazine, somebody remarking on having found it on their 14-year old's desktop or bookmark list. The song is cool, you can tell immediately the band, Tomboyfriend, is Canadian because they're so beholden to The Arcade Fire. But then, on Myspace, they don't cite their Montreal predecessors as influences. And their other songs suck. So how did the editor find this gem?

In any case, all these clips of teenagers frolicking around takes you back pretty good. It's rather unartificed and heartening.

Gaps in the big fabric

Just when you think the internet and YouTube have everything you'd ever want to see, you find gaps. This evening, I found myself wanting to sample Bill Russell hosting SNL back in what turns out to be 1979, where he did a skit called "The Black Shadow" parodying Ken Howard's The White Shadow. Howard plays a liberal white coach who comes to an inner-city (pre hip-hop) high school and coaches a team to an understanding of discipline, manners, and not getting chicks pregnant. He bails them out and plays the father figure.

In the Bill Russell segment, Russell plays a black coach who comes to a suburban high school, where his players teach him the value of discipline, manners, and not getting drunk on cheap ripple. Russell will hear none of it and blames it all on racism. In the classic climactic scene, he turns to his mom -- also black -- and says that she doesn't love him because he's black. It verges on being Chappelle-like.

Hanging the lights

Graham and I have just put the lights on the tree.  As I always have, from days growing up in NC, I hung them counterclockwise.  This year, I noticed a suspicious tendency of the lights to bend inwards and the clips of these strands (from some Arkansas-based retailer whose name I can't recall), to be on the outside.  I recalled this phenomenon from years past, as we've had these strands since we've been in NJ.  And it occurred to me that they were, in fact, designed to be hung clockwise.  Too frickin late for this year, I'll tell you that, as Graham and Natalie are all revved up to do ornaments.

Tales of Moscow

Reading the Economist's survey of Russia on the country's demographic troubles -- high alcoholism and low life expectancy and birth rates -- reminded me of Katya, friend of my roommate Oleg on Ulitsa Vavilova back in the day of my dissertation. Katya was rail thin, maybe 26, a student at a theological seminary (like they would ever let her be a priest), mother of four with a junkie rock and roller husband. In the afternoons she would often come by the apartment just to sit around and smoke. It was kind of a pain in the ass, but I understood -- it was the only place she got any rest in that smoky, dusty, chaotic capital that was not so long ago likened to a big village.

One day Oleg and I went out to the "suburb" where she lived to get something, maybe an old TV they needed to get rid of because it was taking up too much space in the "one room" apartment. That is, one room plus kitchen and bathroom, for a family of six. So we took the subway to the end of the line, got on a rickety old bus, walked half a mile to a typical Brezhnev era building, wrapped a television in some stout wine, drank tea with Katya and her mother and maybe bought her husband some cigarettes or something, and reversed those steps to get the TV back home. Good livin.

Wall Street acrumblin down

So we were low on paper at the office the other day, and Alan headed out to the nearby Staples on to buy paper. Then he calls back up to the office, confused about the location. Turns out, it's gone. Staples axed the branch for whatever reason, same store sales are down, it's got another location 8-10 blocks away. Point is, Wall St can't support two Staples stores. Chew on that.

Take him out back and shoot him

That's what needs to be done with Blagoevich.

As time drags on the threat of armed insurrection in the United States feels less and less distant. People have been buying a lot of guns, theoretically at least to outrun changes in gun law under Obama. From what I see out in the comment boards of news sites, that's not what a certain portion of the populace has its mind on.

Ill tidings

My firm has a meeting monthly where we wow one another with our powerpoint skills and witty repartee, and it's always held in the same place, a conference center and restaurant right nearby, the Bull Run. Imagine our dismay to learn that, on minimal notice, we weren't meeting there because the place had filed for bankrupcy. Gives a whole new meaning to "breaking the glass".

Which is actually fine because I was pretty much sick of their food, though the sliders were OK and the chicken quesadillas perfectly edible, and last month they even broke out crab cakes, by gum! And the french fries were, by repute at least, quite tasty. Alright, I suppose it could have been worse. It could yet prove to be.

The Rabbit of Seville

Pulling that martian Bugs bunny footage the other day inspired me to dig into the YouTube archives for Looney Tunes and show it to the kids. The cartoon below, whose title is above, is far and away the favorite for them, particularly for Graham, who can scarcely sit still when he watches, running instead across the room and banging into the wall. Admittedly, he does that for lots of videos.

You heard it here first

So NBC wants to move Jay Leno to a 10pm slot, we're told. There are lots of reasons to do this, including, importantly, that it's cheaper to do live TV than to do dramatic serieses. But just as much of a driver has got to be that the population is aging. The baby boomers are starting to retire, and why should they have to stay up till 11:30 or whenever he's on to watch his rapier-like zingers? I think they should move him till 9.

What if Blogger goes down?

A good day in the markets, I'll take it. But still, these days I find myself looking around at aspects of my life and thinking: is it bubble, or is it not?

It is disquieting at times to think how the contours of my for-profit career conform with those of the bubble: starting in April, 2000, weeks before the first big down day of that correction (last one in the door), ending... well, hopefully not soon.

Through the housing bubble we all looked at house prices and said "this doesn't seem right." It was standard dinner party fair, giddy with disbelief over how paper rich we all were. So we knew it had to end, we just didn't want to be right.

And now, when I think of the things that seem bubblelicious, the first thing I think of is social networking: Blogger, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, YouTube all this great stuff we get for free and take for granted. Where are the business models? We have to look at 2.0, with its largely unfounded business models, and say it also doesn't seem right, though it feels so right. Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook wanted to let employees cash out a little stock at a valuation of a quarter of what Microsoft bought a stake for last year, but he had to cancel it because even at that level he couldn't find buyers. Facebook offers Twitter $500 million but Twitter says no because it has a secret business model? Please. LinkedIn stands on its own, and maybe blog engines cost nothing. Wikipedia has been slowly trying to crowdsource $6 mln for weeks, and it's coming together step by step.

Seriously, where would we be without this stuff? I'd be hurtin.

What else could go?
Municipal yard waste pick-up?
Address stickers from charities?

Seriously, we get a lot of free stuff now.

Very angry

So this is my first post using Mary's sleek new Mac, which replaces the piece of shit Dell that we bought 2-3 years ago and then froze up and died for no good reason whatsoever, save for the fact that it was a piece of shit Dell.  This thing is nice.  It looks nice.  It sounds nice.  I even think they might have injected it with new car smell.

But I am quite angry with how ornery it's being about hooking up the native email client to Verizon.  It made me angry, very angry.  When I found the instructions at Verizon (placement was not intuitive), they were pretty simple and straightforward.  Servers should be incoming.verizon.net and outgoing.verizon.net.   Not rocket science.  But the program doesn't want to talk to the server.

I mean, I've got a connection, right?  I'm typing over it right now.  It should work.  What do I have to do, go out and snag a freeware email client right off the bat?

For an explanation of what I mean when I say that I'm "very angry," watch the classic bugs piece below starting at about 6:15, if you can't watch the whole thing.

Things fall apart

Deferred maintenance, that one time bugaboo of university campuses, has set in in the office hotels of Wall St. At least ours, that is. As 2008 has dragged on, the place has been slowly depopulated, dropping from maybe 85% occupancy to perhaps 55. So revenue is scarce, and the 2nd law of thermodynamics has kicked into gear.

For some time now, the sensor that you walk under when exiting the secure area into the elevator and rest room lobby has been broken. You have to press the button on the wall. And you have to really press it right.

The carpet by the leatherette sofa is worn and rent in one spot.

But what beats all get out is the bathroom stall enclosure on the floor below ours that was ripped from the wall up by its upper hinge and leaning precariously. The nice young lady at the front desk was not aware of this, but she smiled and dialed when I told her it was a lawsuit waiting to happen.

And yet, there are signs of life in the old hotel. This afternoon a happy lot of polycultural folk took occupancy of a couple of vacant offices near us, and I saw other prospective tenants being given the tour. Have they had to dramatically reprice? Not unlikely. But it's good to see new faces in there, even if they're going to compete for space with us. I may just make them a casserole.

In the trenches of the credit wars

My cell phone rang this afternoon and I picked it up, surprised to see a 202 area code. Imagine my surprise when -- after hearing a few beard follicles brush roughly against the mouthpiece at the other end -- a distinguish male voice introduced its owner: "Hi Graham, this is Ben Bernanke, do you have a minute?"

"Why... sure," I said, not really knowing what was next.
He continued "I just wanted to reach out to you this afternoon to see if you had any credit needs that I or the Federal Reserve might be of service with. Is everything OK with your mortgage?"
"Um.. yeah"
"How about your Home Equity Line of Credit, your car financing, your student loans, your credit cards, is everything ship shape?"
"Pretty much, considering"
"Spot on! Glad to hear it. Let us know if we can in any way facilitate any uncrunching, you know, any tools you need to leverage to deleverage, alright?"
"You know I will, yes sirree"

A Profession of Faith

The other day it was snowing lightly early in the morning and Natalie stood by the window bursting with energy and excitement: "It's snowing for the second time and it's only November, and this time it's real snow, unlike the snow in October."
Perplexed, I asked "What do you mean?"
"Well," she says, "In October the flakes were to big and wet, but these are small and snowy." As she bounced along in seventh heaven, it occurred to me that she had absolutely no idea that the financial world was imploding around her, and that this was entirely as it should be and it meant I was doing my job right.

Nor did I understand much, when I was her age and even much older. I remember lines along Airport Road to get gas back during the gas crisis in '74, but I thought that was normal. I remember in 1979-1980 reading about how American competitiveness was suffering next to Japanese and German industry, but it was all very abstract and didn't really concern me. I vaguely remember Son of Sam, but I fully remember Fernwood Tonight and David Letterman's daytime show.

It is only now that the economics of the late 70s and early 80s have come into focus for me. And so, in 1981, in the midst of a recession, after her business was destroyed by the Reagan election, with a husband who'd sooner pull into the driveway in a surprise sports car than contribute to paying the bills, it seemed entirely natural to me that my mom should send both her kids to England, then Switzerland, including the Diana-Charles wedding. And only now do I understand what it took to pull the trigger and assume the cost of sending us over there, and what it meant from an "asset allocation" perspective.

Chew Your Grouse

Eat your pineapples, Chew your grouse, Your last day is coming, You bourgeois louse. -Mayakovsky, 1913

I wrote my senior essay in college on Mayakovsky (with Esenin thrown in on the side). At that time -- rattled by my parents' divorce, disillusioned with Reaganism and the absence of a good path of resistance, threatened by AIDS, terrified of the prospect of getting a job, entranced by the ladies -- the boisterous eschatological vision of Russia's most energetic, all-embracing and snazzy avant-garde poet held a lot of appeal. And much of his early work, like the "chew your grouse" poem, focused on arresting the cycles of bourgeois being, on bucking against continuity. Another famous line was "I love watching children die." I thought that was a little strong, but that's what he was like.

And when, after the Revolution, Mayakovsky channeled his dynamism into an inferior body of work that nonetheless captured the real excitement of the era, that was cool too. Here's a passage from his 1928 poem "The Story of the Pipe-Fitter Ivan Kozyrev, Upon Moving into his New Apartment"

Vse khorosho. No bol'she vsego mne ponravilos' -- eto: eto belee lunnogo sveta, udobnej, chem zemlia obetovannaia, eto -- da chto govorit' ob etom, eto -- vannaia.

It's all good. But what pleased me most of all is -- that: that whiter then the light of the moon, cozier, than the promised land that -- and what more is there to say about it, that -- bathroom

The bolded parts of the Russian text show that, with a characteristic virtuoso turn, Mayakovsky had rhymed "bathroom" with "promised land" because that was really the deal: for Russian peasants who had lived in huts with outhouses for all too long, indoor plumbing and heating was huge, it was in fact the promise of the Revolution. And so, Mayakovsky came back around to touting the virtues of certain basic bourgeois comforts, and recognized there was almost transcendent value in them.


However, the Revolution was not going all that well on all fronts and, on April 14, 1930, Mayakovsky blew his brains out.
2008

At the other end of the spectrum, America came over the course of recent decades to believe that Granite countertops and manifest destiny were in their own way interchangeable. The chicken in every pot had to be free-range and the pot Williams Sonoma.

And yet, if I look back to 1981 and compare how we live now to how we lived then, in every way we live better, and no matter what the indices do in coming weeks and months, all of that's unlikely to evaporate. We will still have the internet, and netflix, and extra virgin olive oil, and sriracha, and cars that hardly ever break down, and better math instruction, and so on. With good leadership in the White House, there's hope for progress of some sort, if not immediate economic solutions.

And so I find myself at peace in the land of Cheever, and find that the perpetuation of the middle class -- what was called "reproduction of the social means of production" during my Marxist phase -- is as high a calling as you'll find.

But it's also a pain in the ass.

Breakin tha law, Westchester style

For some reason the Village of Larchmont sees fit to lock up its tennis courts in winter, vexing Rob and me to no end. Yesterday, we got even. We arrived at the courts "across the tracks" by Murray Ave at 3 or so, and found them locked, but another pair of bold lads, dressed in black, one with a full red beard, had scaled the 12 foot fence and were playing. Enboldened, we chucked out racquets over and followed suit. I sustained a light gash in my calf from one of the sharp fence ends at the top, but reasoned that any rust had not penetrated deep enough to warrant a tetanus shot.

At some point in time a cop came by and checked us out. Security was probably extra tight, since we were within a few blocks of Timothy Geithner's crib up on Maple Hill Drive. But once they had cased us, and despite my New Jersey plates and ancient Outback wagon, they left us in peace. Whereupon I let loose a display of deft, well-angled shots.

Big weekend

With a four days of weekend to work with coming up -- and spared any routine FDIC Friday related tasks -- doesn't it seem like maybe Paulson and his team should be able to roll up their sleeves and come up with some even bigger bailouts?

Grey day

An almost grizzly day of boredom in New Jersey, with faint flickers of life only in the budget sushi I found on my plate at lunch.

Also, come to think of it, I must say that I'm pleasantly surprised by the first bit of Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory. I saw Schama on the BBC commenting on the credit crunch in October and he was all handwaving freneticism, and though you sometimes have to bushwack through the virtuosity of his dense prose, the dude is clearly loaded with deep and broad thinkings.



This is a guy, mind you, that Columbia recruited from Harvard and gave a University Professorship, meaning he could teach whatever the hell he wanted (Edward Said was another), as a deal-sweetener to bring his wife to Columbia's medical school! It's rather mind-boggling. Apparently she's astoundingly good at splicing mice genes or some such.

So I'll keep reading, heavy though it is.

Back to the Motor City

A commenter a couple of days back asked why I was advocating a package for Detroit, why not just split $25 billion dollars over 500,000 workers and call it a day? I think many of the neo-Schumpeterians out there discount the value of organizations. There's real economic value in being able to pick up the phone and call Jimmy in Finance or Xia-Li in the Shanghai office. Just think how hard people work to develop a strong rolodex, and then multiply it by whatever. Policies, procedures, physical infrastructure, culture... there are values in corporations which shouldn't be tossed aside lightly.

This is not to say that Detroit doesn't suck and suck mightily. It should be allowed to die a sorry death in its own due time, but it shouldn't be forced into the arms of the grim reaper because of greivous bullshit on the part of Wall St, Washington, and, yes Virginia, Main Street, and not right now.

Ira & Abbey

At first it seemed as if this movie wasn't gonna get going, but after a while it found its gear and became a delightful little farce, really the best Woody Allen movie in years, despite the fact that Woody wasn't involved.

The trouble with Detroit

So our house was broken into and my car keys were stolen, and we don't have another spare for the Volvo. So I called up the Volvo dealer figuring he ought to be able to take my VIN number and make a key and clicker and mail it to me (and he should be able to!).

But no. Not only do I have to go to the dealer and have them make a physical dupe of the key, they have to download and install software so the key will talk to my ignition. And it takes an hour to install @ $125. So for the key and the clicker together the total bill is around $350. And for what? Protection against somebody stealing my key and making a copy? If they have my key for long enough to make a copy, they're gonna take my car.

This is a great example of the Detroit (Ford, in this case) business model, which is largely shared with the world. Push merch out the door at low margins and make money on financing and parts and service. Which is why I'll never buy a car that has a warranty on it.

This needs to be fixed. But not this year. I dunno why the Republicans are busting Detroit's balls over $25 billion. It costs that much for AIG to fart. They're just in a bad mood. $25 billion to Detroit is a good and cheap stimulus package. It's like administering an epipen to someone in anaphylactic shock while waiting for the ambulance to get there. It carries the patient through to when real medical care can be provided.

The Year of Magical Thinking

This book had been staring at me for a while. I knew what it was about, and I knew who had written it, so I knew what I was in for. In fact, I was looking for it, another mile along the road towards coming to grips with my lamentable mortality, a follow-up to Eugene O'Neil's Chasing Daylight, which I see that I read almost exactly two years ago.

And so, the book, in which Joan Didion watches her husband John Gregory Dunne keel over and die at the dinner table, even as their daughter Quintana Roo is in the hospital in a coma from some freakish illness. No fun.

Didion, true to form, and like a good WASP, chronicles her disbelief at and distancing from the events in her trademarked neo-Hemingway style. She tells us more of quasi-catatonia than of thrashing and gnashing, which, it would seem, she skipped. She gives us a pretty solid survey of the available literature on grief.

The book succeeds as a portrait of a marriage. She loved him, their lives were deeply intertwined, this she pulls off. She also does a good job telling about waiting not once but twice at the bedside of her gravely ill only child. This is some heavy shit. But I have no idea why she leaves us hanging about the final disposition of her daughter, after telling us earlier that there was like an 8% chance of her recuperating and being mentally all there. I, for one, thought that was important and was hoping for a little closure.

But Didion was too busy reminiscing about going to Paris or some sandwich they ate in Honolulu or room service at the Beverly Wilshire. In the end, there's a little too much name-dropping and display of privilege for me to really care much. I would rather have heard about her daughter.

Next T Sec

Intrade points to Tim Geithner as the preemptive favorite for the post, which is kinda sad. Cramer is full on hopping mad about the idea, but then again what isn't he hopping mad about? That's his shtick. Larry Summers would piss too many people off. My sentimental favorite would be Paul Volcker, but if you watch a bit of the video below with "I hit my face when I fell to protect my new Iphone"-vintage Charlie Rose, you see he's probably not got the vigor to stand in front of the mike that much and do battle with Henry Waxman. But, hey, Robert Rubin may be fully unemployed after this week, if Citi continues its current trend.

Paulson futures

Hank Paulson is nothing if not amusing. Think of how far he's come in recent months:

• Lets fire up some covered bonds, like the Europeans do. Keep risk on banks' books.
• (Chaos ensues)
  
• Lets buy up those toxic assets! I'll have my friend shiny Neel figure it out.
• No wait. Lets inject liquidity directly into banks. Like the Brits did, except with no preconditions.
• OK. I've done enough of that, lets concentrate on consumers: mortgage relief, student loans, auto loans, etc.
• Uhh, actually, lets leave some money for Obama, he's the man with the plan
• We'll fart out 85, 37.8, even 25 more on better terms for AIG, but 25 is much too much for Detroit
  

Intrade should open futures markets day to day on what he's going to suggest. I'll bet tomorrow he'll change his mind about Detroit. Or maybe he'll take money back from the banks, since capitalism is working just fine, thank you.

Deflation in the Fall, again

Deflation is one of the big words of the month. It's freaky, but lets recall that the deflation trumpets were sounded vigorously as recently as the Fall of 2002. The Economist wrote, at that time:

"America's recovery is stalling, as consumers tighten their belts. In the euro area, consumer and business confidence are both on the wane. Although euro-area inflation is above the 2% ceiling set by the ECB, weak demand will push inflation down next year. The case for interest-rate cuts in both America and the euro area was strong, even though the ECB has not yet moved. But will rate cuts work?

Most policymakers in America and Europe blame Japan's slump on mistakes—which they can avoid. An alternative view is that much of Japan's economic sickness is the inevitable after-effect of its bubble in the 1980s. Asset-price bubbles tend to be followed by periods of weak growth, as financial excesses are unwound. The table attempts, in unscientific fashion, to assess the risks of America and Germany catching the Japanese disease."

The big difference is today, much more ammo has been expended, and fears are much larger. Indeed, the tech bubble seems relatively quaint by now. In the Fall of 2002 housing prices were plugging along quite nicely, shielding the body blow of equity markets, and we were doing battle with the Axis of Evil*, affording us a rare moral certitude.

*A name inexplicably unclaimed by an enterprising metal band.

Precinct House, Northeast Philly, 5 pm

Northeast Philly is a place all its own, straight out of Archie Bunker. One of those rare places where you can still find a substantial population of urban working class white people, Irish, Italian, Polish. Long blocks of forlorn brick and stone row houses, with lone retail establishments at the end of the block. Lots of haircutting place ("Cuts for $7") with the odd deli or lawyer thrown in.

We went there today to claim the property stolen from our house last week, what little of it had not been hocked. The precinct house, as you can imagine, had lots of character. At once down at the heels and institutional, dating perhaps to the immediate post-war period, it was straight from central casting for some verite movie no one would ever fund or shoot. We were let in through a Maxwell Smart-like series of doors to the realm of the detectives, including out detective Crum. In the antechamber to detective land, three disgusting chairs with stained light fabric seats.

Detective Crum sat in a claustrophic cubical across the hall from ancient lockers and had an old desktop machine that I had the feeling wasn't even connected to the internet. Like many of his colleagues, he had a severe buzzcut -- in his case tapering up to a Vanilla Ice like flourish, and went laboriously through all the loot he had snagged from the car of the malefactor (Oleg Namur). He took pride in his work, telling us that the perp had known Crum was on his tale in Philly and therefore had set out to bag some loot in Jersey, but in doing so had made a fatal mistake: "See, Philly here is the home of the Declaration of Independence and all that, so crooks and everybody got rights in the court. New Jersey ain't like that, they wrote laws of their own." Indeed we have.

Traffic Report

I used to have to work for every hit I got, either by writing something insightful, amusing or (yetter bet) degrading, or by trying to convey market-related wit and then sidle up to Felix Salmon for traffic (see the big spikes at left). Of late, however, my numbers have been elevated due to some insight I offered into Joe Biden's hair back in September, which many readers have happened upon via Google images. Other popular paths in include Google searches on "ACC Football Rankings", for which searchers are surely sadly disappointed by my grumpy laconicity.

I must say that all this cheap traffic, while driving my numbers up, really does nothing for me, and probably I should just yank these two posts. But I don't, because somehow I suspect that the one or a few of the random perusers brought in so cheaply might be converted in time into a real reader. But it's hard to tell. Ain't seeing it yet.

From the Annals of Crime

My wife's family has lived in Larchmont, New York, for forty years or so, and during this time they have contracted to have the New York Times delivered to their home by a certain Manor News Service, which has invoiced them regularly. As has the Times itself. If you're not suspicious already, may I suggest that you become so: the New York Times certainly employs external contractors to deliver its papers, but they don't present two invoices. This was a classic rip-off.

When my father-in-law discovered this dastardly scheme, he called up the New York Times, which had no record of him as a subscriber, despite the fact that it was billing him. The Times is, however, launching an investigation. He then called up Manor News Service, which lists its address as a Yonkers PO Box, where he questioned the bills and suggested litigation might be appropriate, the guy cursed him for being a lawyer and hung up on him. The paper came no more from them, with delivery ceasing, ironically, on the day of Obama's election.

We will be monitoring this situation as it develops and will keep our readers apprised of developments.

SAT words in motion

Here on the train home, a woman gives the conductor a used ticket: "Maam, I cannot accept a defiled ticket from New York.". She argued a bit, and he kept repeating the word "defiled," as if he were quite pleased to know it.

Ah youth! Ah consumption!

This afternoon I went in to get a haircut to get away from the drab curriculum stuff I'm dragging myself through. When I got there, I heard news from the market (which I had successfully ignored all day). And then I heard this young lady barber telling her buddy (who was sweeping the floor) that an Uggzz (sp?) outlet had opened near her sister's house: "But I can't go because I have no money! So I say, lets go Monday after I get paid!"

That's the spirit. This after I read this morning in the New York Times article about food banks and soup kitchens that "tax data show that 55 percent of Americans have no interest-bearing savings accounts to draw on during hard times. Among the bottom half of taxpayers, who make less than $30,000, two-thirds have no interest income." On the one hand, a little outlet shopping shows consumer confidence and is perfectly in line with the old "Stimulus" rationale. On the other hand, a person who has "no money" is part of the at risk portion of the populus. Hair cuts may be a cyclical commodity, but they are eminently discretionary.

"Bettering" RAM

I've been doing a little work helping a company coordinate its learning objectives for its employees with a shrink-wrapped curriculum from a vendor. I can assure you it's fun. At least I don't have to commute. Here's a highlight: "Though geared toward bettering communication and listening in a business setting, the seminar environment is casual, offering a safe and stress-free forum for self-evaluation and interaction."

So, you can imagine my delight when, at around four, I walked out of my house into a crisp, cool fall day, the leaves just right, and walked up to the corner for a cup of joe.

It was almost enough to offset the fact that our house was broken into while we were out of town. The guy took this:

• One Dell Inspiron 1000 laptop, a piece of crap I couldn't even install Windows after some guy put in a new hard drive
• One Sharp 17" flat panel TV/Monitor, which we got free from Verizon for signing up for the FIOS triple play. Unfortunately, my Dell Inspiron 710m has a hardware limitation which won't let me use an external monitor to extend my desktop, so this monitor is useless to me.
• One Skagen watch, for which I paid $100, which was so broke the watch guy at the shopping center declared it unfixable
• One Russian army (Raketa) watch, for which I paid $10 in 1998, the date mechanism of which is broken. He was undoubtedly pissed when he saw what he had (see below)
  
• A bunch of credit cards we never use (cancelled before he could use them)
• Some costume jewelry
• Keys to both our cars and the house (this sucks, but luckily my car was at the train station)

The Philly cops snagged the guy, 22 year old Russian junky, with all the credit cards on him, but no electronics. If I'm lucky, insurance will pay to replace a bunch of worthless junk.

Eddy Murphy, White Like Me

Perhaps the first historic instance of the "no doc" loan.

Saturday Night Live - White Like Me

My picks

Inaugural ball
Aretha Franklin
Pfunk
Bob Dylan
Dave Chappelle

Cabinet
David Gergen, somewhere

Back in the saddle

I had been on the verge of tears in the weeks leading up the election, knowing full well what it meant. But I was not really prepared to see that everybody would be crying. The polls told us what was going to happen, but it was hard to accept it. In my mind's eye I saw a thousand Karl Roves somewhere sneaking around in a minivans picking up some forgotten exurban demographic. As the evening progressed and the numbers played out, we knew what was going to happen, and yet...

When it did, it was still quite a moment. And there was Roland Martin on CNN, adding a little soft commentary as he battled with his tears. And there was the reverend Jesse Jackson, and Oprah, and Steven Colbert, and (it turns out) Condoleeza, and Colin Powell, and seas of people at Grant Park, bawling in shock and trying to comprehend it. And us on our couch with a box of tissues, keeping pace.

He's not just the first black President, in fact, unless I've missed something, he is the first post-colonial subject to take the helm of an imperial power, and our ability to elect him arguably puts America back in the driver's seat of history, even as China finds itself in position to depose us economically. And yes, the grassrootsness and crowdsourcing of the campaign sweeten the deal, and are what make this so special. He didn't just get elected, people really went out of their way to get him elected.

Anyhow, inspiration really peters out here. The Dow dropped almost 500 today and that bounces right off, for now. It's a special day.

The North Carolina Red State Myth

As national focus has turned to North Carolina, I've grown increasingly sick of people describing it as a red state. Yes, the dominant political figure on the national scene has been Jesse Helms, a figure once both odious and quixotic, who brought tobacco and Pentagon money to the rural areas of our state in a way that foreshadowed Krugman's analysis of the Red-Blue state divide in terms of per capita federal subsidies. Which is to say that Helms blazed a path in combining incendiary and hateful racist rhetoric with federal "earmarks", if you will, to keep a rural populace in his pocket.

I didn't grow up in that North Carolina. For us the epochal political figure was the Democrat Terry Sanford, a contemporary and peer of JFK, who as governor in the early sixties laid the groundwork for North Carolina to become a state of knowledge work by greenfielding Research Triangle Park, and driving the development of our highly regarded system of community colleges and the University of North Carolina. Later, as President of Duke University, he did fine work to raise that institution into the ranks of national leaders and, more importantly, allowed them to develop into an almost worthy rival for UNC's Tar Heels on the basketball court. He also served in the Senate for a term late in his career, but he was unable to fully emerge from the shadow of our state's bespectacled bete noire.

When people ask me why I'm not a Republican if I'm from North Carolina, I tell I'm not from that North Carolina. I'm from the other one.

The gold coast

Big article in the Wall Street Journal today over the guru who designed the risk management framework around AIG's book of CDS swaps, for which we've now extended $123 billion in credit, of which $83 bln has taken drawn. The guy's name is Gary Gorton, and he now teaches at Yale.

One big lesson is that the keys to the castle shouldn't be entrusted to academic quants who have not historically shown that they really care about earning money. The article tells us about his Gorton's collection of jazz records and other eccentricities, and how he fell into earning a million a year. Someone who's not concerned about earning money really doesn't have the instinct to be realistic about protecting it.

Certainly you shouldn't combine this type of guy with a couple of sharks from Drexel and stick them in a cozy Connecticut suburb. We have seen the havoc that region may wreak.

On the campaign trail in Pennsylvania

Steve and I rode out today to canvas for Obama in PA, since we've been effectively disenfranchised by consensus here in NJ. At the Montgomery County HQ in Lansdale, things were kicking when we got there: maybe 70-80 people either sitting at tables dialing on cellphones, organizing, or getting maps and lists and getting trained to get the hell out the door and spread the word.

On my first walkabout tour of the day, in a 90s subdivision, I caught a few people in, including a Thai guy who said he was down with Obama and a Nigerian guy who promised he was gonna call his whole family and thanked me for my good work. Five minutes later I'm walking past the yard of this big brawny guy with a porno mustache and a handyman sign in his yard, who was out on his riding mower taking care of an already clinically neat yard, which contained lots of McCain/Palin and other Republican stuff. As I walked past his yard (btw, 2100 Rittenhouse Road, on the corner of Old Forty Yard Road), he pulled over and asked me: "Can I ask you a question?" I took a couple of steps towards him, onto his lawn, and he said: "Don't step on my property." So I retreated to the sidewalk, and he asks angrily: "Let me ask you this. How can you support that scumbag?" He then spews invective for a while and then says "You need to get your car (parked 100 feet away) off of my street or I'm not going to be responsible for anything that happens to it."

By now -- heart racing a bit, for sure, palms a touch sweaty -- have calculated that he doesn't really want me to call the cops and get him arrested, so I continue around the corner to the two last houses I have on my beat. As I walk around the guy's lawn he hops back on his lawn mower (to intimidate with its manly noise?) and yells at me as I walk, but I can't hear him because his mower is too loud.

After I was done with my rounds, I came back by the guy's house. He came stomping across the lawn with me with a rake, and then set to raking an area which looked well raked while spewing expletives and insults at me some more. As I drove off he was moving his lawn signs closer to the street demonstratively. I should have taken a picture of him with my cell phone, but didn't.

Whitepages.com lists the owner of the property as one Joseph Isabella.

Fundrace.org does not list any contributions to political candidates by this name or from this address, which would seem to imply that the occupant's political expressions might be limited to lawn signs and verbal intimidation.

Zillow estimates its current value to be $369,500, down about 8% from its peak, but somewhat lower than the newer homes in adjacent subdivision, including those occupied by the Thai and Nigerian immigrant families who were enthusiastic Obama supporters. The house was last sold in late 1996 for $180,000, implying an annualized appreciation in excess of 6%. Not bad, considering. Hard to track whether equity was taken out, though.

Later in the day I had a great conversation with a young pharma exec who was leaning 51/49 for McCain. I don't know if I changed his mind, but I do know that that's how the process is supposed to work.