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Fear not, faithful readers, the Grouse's plaintive song has not been silenced or even stunted, it has simply been stifled momentarily by transit. The family has now arrived safely in the bosom of the Great North State, but, for shame, I must wait till Friday for real internet service. But I'll make an effort to post here and there.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Lack

Apologies for the lack of posting to those few faithful of my regular readers. I've been packing to move this Thursday, which was interrupted by a need to inter my recently and sadly departed father-in-law George Berridge, whose eulogy needs to be adapted to fit the needs of the blogosphere. I'll climb back on the horse soon.

Aren't TIPS a type of derivative?

Are they not kissing cousins to interest rate swaps? You pay a fixed amount and then get yield plus the adjustment on an underlying instrument, in this case the CPI. There are, of course, a good number of arguments against the efficacy of CPI in reflecting inflation as it is actually experienced, and TIPS are relatively young (born in '97) and not that large an asset class in general, so they're sort of not quite battle hardened. So if China is going to bully us into using them as a primary means of debt issuance, we need to think long and hard about what that might mean for us down the road.

How bad does Verizon suck?

Let me count the ways. I've been on the phone an hour now trying to disconnect my FIOS service. I guess they don't staff anyone on that branch of the phone tree. That's not really a good client retention strategy.

For one, it just gives its customers time to mouth off on the blogosphere.

Lots of members of my former firm worked for Accenture in the 90s and they told horror stories of what a cesspool Verizon was and how they would spend many millions of dollars on projects that just failed outright. And for this I spend $250 or so a month for all of my home and mobile data services. I look forward to severing this relationship, if I'm ever able to do so.

Talking heads on CNBC

One of the benefits of working at home recently has been that I haven't been subjected to CNBC in public spaces, but I tuned in the other day while constructing boxes. And there before me was a familiar face, an attractive blonde Russian woman with her own "quant trading strategy" firm -- an energetic self-promoter, met with her in summer of 08, had a beverage in the basement of Grand Central, where she was all too happy to minimize expenses and jumped at the chance to advise on a simple FX transaction.

As of August '08 co-published an article (with her husband) on raising capital from high net worth customers (rich people but nonetheless retail clients) through structured products, which seems like a relic of a bygone era.

The other day she was talking about whether CITI is too big to fail, she talked too much and tripped over herself and got beat down by a more media-savvy guy from Connecticut AG's office.

Generally speaking, this is indicative of CNBC's status as a good source of analysis: this woman really didn't need to be commenting on Citi, nor was she particularly qualified to do so, but she fills the screen better than she does the air waves, and she'll do it, so hell, run with her.

The supply side is dead?

This afternoon I had the displeasure of getting my haircut in a place where the guy was watching Fox News. I should have had the backbone to tell him I wouldn't let him cut my hair and walk out, but I wanted it shorter.

So I was watching the Neil Cavuto show, and he was all bent out of shape -- among other things -- about Geithner and Summers getting on the talk shows yesterday morning and hinting at raising taxes on the middle class. And he brings on Governor George Allen, a Virginia Republican, who says: "the only way to pay down these big deficits is by raising taxes."

Hmmm. Since the age of the great Arthur Laffer, the Republicans have been the party of the supply side. He're a not so ancient quote from our buddy McCain: "Don’t listen to this siren song about cutting taxes. Every time in history we have raised taxes it has cut revenues." — McCain, [1/17/08]. So Allen should be arguing that raising taxes will make budget deficits worse. But somebody handed him the wrong script, I reckon.

CIT playing catch up

CIT is still working things out. Today it revised a tender offer to buy-out noteholders, and has left in place some outdated company profile boilerplate in its press releases.

CIT is a bank holding company with more than $60 billion blah blah blah... Founded in 1908 and headquartered in New York City, CIT is a member of the Fortune 500. www.cit.com

In fact, CIT was dumped from the S&P 500 a couple of weeks back and replaced by Raleigh, NC-based open source vendor Red Hat. I guess CIT has been cutting back on its flack expenditures.

CAPCO busted

Friday's NYTimes had a story on CAPCO, a captive excess insurer of deposits for brokerages. The long and short of it was that CAPCO, founded in 2003 by 12 major and minor brokerages, including Lehman, Goldman, Wachovia Securities, Morgans JP and Stanley, Credit Suisse, Fidelity, Edward Jones, Raymond James, and some smaller fish.

When I called my broker in October following the “breaking the buck” freak out, I was told that SIPC plus Capco coverage protected my shares if not their value (as if the latter were an issue at that point in time). As of February: poof goes CAPCO.

I’m not generally one for the general free for all pile on Goldman and Wall St in general thing, but it seems that, to the extent that the remaining big banks and other CAPCO participants may have $11 billion unfunded liabilities emerging from Lehman litigation, that some of the YTD profits could have been steered to a recapitalization. At the very least, we may hope that CAPCO participants are now reserving adequately against the possibility of future Lehman-related claims.

If anything, this should raise red flags for customers of Fidelity which, as a private company, is itself pretty opaque.

Humorously, there is a warning on the CAPCO site that some unscrupulous firm is misrepresenting itself as being covered by CAPCO. After Friday's article, that firm may regard its nonparticipation as a boon.

Diner envy

I was reminded by a Googling of my friend Levon Kazarian, now impresario of St Francis Fountain, a San Francisco landmark, of my intent to post about a piece of Central Jerseyana which I will miss.



The place is called Rose and Chubby's, in the middle of Hopewell, NJ (just across the street from the old railroad station where -- 9 years ago -- an upstanding realtor assured us that NJ Transit was going to reinstitute commuter service to NYC. You can guess the punchline there). Anyway, the exterior of the place is, as you can see, none too preposessing.


Once you get inside, however, it is somewhat less decrepit, but nonetheless furnished basically straight out of the Hardy Boys series.



The proprietors of the place are two septua/octagenarian lasses, perhaps they for whom the joint is named. When Ted and I visited recently and he took these pix, we were the only people in there not on a first name basis with them. The food is fine, basic, but the menu is noteworthy.



Most trips to Rose and Chubby's are low on drama, but I remember when I was in there one time and this 80ish couple was having a nice civilized lunch, he with jacket and sweater vest, she in a nice dress. When it came time to leave, he paid the bill, and his wife got up and walked to the door, he turned, watched her, making sure that she wasn't going to turn her head, and then pounced his teeth into the half of an egg-salad sandwich that she had left on her plate. Some marital dynamics die hard.

Lox n grits (note to Bill Smith)

Cleaning out cubbards, and with a celiac disease suffering child in the house during a heavy thunderstorm, I came across some grits. After making tha girls a traditional cheese grits (i.e. with cheddar), I set to thinking: "if grits combine so well with salt and fat in the form of country ham or sauteed shrimp with lots of butter, why not smoked salmon and cream cheese?"

So I tried it this morning. Works fine. To charge $12 for it in a restaurant all you need is some adjectives ("artisanal", "organic"), and substitute creme fraiche for the cream cheese and top with fresh dill.

Benjamin Button

is Forrest Gump. Then again, if you just Google it, you can see that that's no news to anyone. There's just less humor and action, and Brad Pitt is no Tom Hanks.

Then again, Tom Hanks is no Brad Pitt.

The movie drags on and on.

Waiting for the big man

Stuck here alone in Princeton as the family has gone to Larchmont to deal with sad events, of which there will be news in due time.

Right now I'm waiting for this big hispanic guy, John, husband of Kathy, who babysits here in the hood. John works in a garage, and in his spare time he drives around and collects scrap. And boy do we have that for him...

Flash back 3 years or so, when Anne and another John were moving from an 80s colonial to a more manageable 70s ranch over on the lake with an apartment for their special needs child, approaching his/her 20s. In their basement they had a treadmill, which Anne proferred to Mary on the cheap. Here's the post about moving the heavy thing into the house and disfiguring our lovely stairs.

So, a thousand days and nights on, how many times did we use the damned thing? 15? 20? Not much more. Global warming and the concomitant warm winters have helped, but so has general lassitude and the siren call of the Fox Soccer Channel, which calls my name all too often. And John will come with his F150 and, with the help of David across the street, we will haul this heavy bitch down from the 3rd floor to the street, without marring this house which will soon pass into the hands of others. My shoulders are pre-knotted in anticipation.

Oh, the thrill

I recently dropped a note on Facebook to someone somewhat famous in literary circles, telling him/her that I had gone and read his/her big book (winner of a big prize in its day) and found it very rewarding and instructive -- which was true. I won't delve into more detail.

Today I note that this same person has expressed -- again on Facebook -- considerable glee to have been said (in print) to have been on the bedside table of another Notable Author type. So I guess that shows that even when you're famous, your ego still particularly appreciates being stroked in public, rather than in private.

Humid

At long last we have given in and installed the air conditioners in all windows. I have spent the days going up and down stairs carrying heavy stuff from the third floor down, the basement up, stuff to the curb or to the shed, all over. Calves and quads showing signs of crampage.

This is what they call aging, I believe.

At least the grey hair means that, twice within recent weeks, tween or teen girls have said I look like George Clooney which -- while not true -- I can live with.

Natalie at Harry Potter

WARNING! POTENTIAL PLOT SPOILERS IN TEXT BELOW. DO NOT READ IF YOU CARE ABOUT PLOT OF MOVIE

Natalie and I took in the new Harry Potter movie, the 5th book, The Half-Blood Prince. In it, Harry and his crew are progressing well into puberty, making out ('mugging"?) and coupling up prodigiously. Natalie, in all her glorious tweendom at the age of 9 and 2 months, smiled sheepishly and blushed during the romance scenes.

And then, at the end, the untimely death of Dumbledore, and she turned her head away from me to conceal the fact that she was crying, she who has done her damnedest to conceal any emotion she might be feeling about the fact that her grandfather is in hospice care. I'm just getting to know this Harry Potter thing and I cried, and I knew exactly what it was about.

She was also indignant about places where the movie deviated from the plot of the book, which took me back.

Tim Collins on Citi Board

Tim Collins is an interesting choice for the Citigroup board. The swashbuckling story of Ripplewood, JC Flowers, Volcker and how they restructured LTCB into Shinsei was one of a big quick buck for our private equity guys and some dispersion of keiretsu murkiness. But now that Shinsei has stumbled into a proposed merger with Aozora, is it clear that they did unequivocably good work? Is he really the right guy for a long-term salvation of what is -- after all -- 35% ours? Or is he a value extractor first and foremost?

I read Gillian Tett's book on Shinsei and then I heard Collins speak once in 2005. Smart guy, but sort of self-involved and not someone who gave the appearance that he would be overly concerned with safeguarding shareholder (i.e. taxpayer) interests. Other than that I don't know.

Actual insurance text

BofA sent me an offer of free Accidental Dismemberment and Death Insurance with the option (imagine that!) of buying up more. Coverage is through the Hartford. For kicks, I read through it a little bit:

The Hartford will not pay more than the Principal Suim for all Losses due to the same accident. Loss means, with regard to hands and feet, actual severance through or above wrist or ankle joints; with regard to sight, speech, or hearing, entire and irrecoverable loss thereof; with regard to thumb and index finger, actual severance through or above the metacarpophalangeal joints.

You just gotta love lawyers for keeping it all straight for us.

Still throwing out books

Today, Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. But before I do that, lets transcribe the classic opening coda just for safekeeping.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

He may not have ended up redefining political economy, but the guy could bust a rhyme here and there.

Skip Gates behind bars, finally

The story of Henry Louis "Skip" Gates being arrested in his own home is all over the blogosphere, and rightly so. I normally don't pick this kind of thing up, but it is ridiculous. Some neighbor called in a report of "two black men forcing the door"? Like she had never noticed he was black before?

In truth, he ain't no Wesley Snipes or Charley "Midnight" Murphy in terms of depth of skin tone, but he is distinctly a black man, and a frickin world-famous one at that. If he were my neighbor, I would know.

Now, it's possible that -- like my actual neighbor, Toni Morrison -- he doesn't spend any time at this particular residence. But still, everybody would know he lived there. Even in Cambridge.

More on Taibbi and Goldman

It seems a lot of people are getting all lathered up about Goldman Sachs and Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone piece about it, specifically. There's more than a dollop of anti-semitism at work here, and since I did a little digging for some posts on a thread elsewhere on the internet, I might as well recirculate it here. The key bit is that Taibbi likens Goldman Sachs to a "blood-sucking squid."

The blood-sucking squid metaphor shows a little originality on Taibbi's part, but deviates only slightly from the image of the "Symbolic Snake of Judaism" promulgated in the apocryphal Protocols of the Elders of Zion which have served as one of the grounding texts of anti-semitism since their initial publication in turn of the century Russia. See this, for instance:

"These learned men decided by peaceful means to conquer the world for Zion with the slyness of the Symbolic Snake, whose head was to represent those who have been initiated into the plans of the Jewish administration, and the body of the Snake to represent the Jewish people - the administration was always kept secret, EVEN FROM THE JEWISH NATION ITSELF. As this Snake penetrated into the hearts of the nations which it encountered it undermined and devoured all the non-Jewish power of these States"

and also, further on:

"In all corners of the earth the words "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," brought to our ranks, thanks to our blind agents, whole legions who bore our banners with enthusiasm. And all the time these words were canker-worms at work boring into the well-being of the GOYIM, putting an end everywhere to peace, quiet, solidarity and destroying all the foundations of the GOY States."

And why does Taibbi situate himself in this tradition? Because he's ambitious and he's out to make a bigger name for himself as a journalist. Taibbi was one of the editors of The Exile in Moscow in the 90s, a zine run by frat boys on steroids that made its name mixing serious exposes of Yeltsin-era crime and politics with celebrating an emigre culture of abusing drugs and cheap street whores.

Taibbi is a classic bad boy run amok, but he hasn't done any real legwork on this one.