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CIT and a new crisis

To what extent did early 90s chaos facilitate the rise to preeminence of the Big Boxes? Having started to pay attention to the economy only this decade, I never really thought about it, but the Journal today kindled thoughts in your correspondent.

"CIT isn't providing loans to all of those companies (a million-odd small businesses -- grouse), of course. But companies like MetFin are indirectly dependent on the future of CIT. If CIT fails and its loans are sold, to rivals, the marketplace would lose a source of credit and the disruption could force many companies searching for financing into a marketplace where credit is tight.

That was the environment in the early 1990s when a rash of bank failures created havoc for small commercial borrowers, said Charles Ou, senior economist for the SBA. He added that the SBA has no comment on the subject of CIT Group and that he was only offering his personal opinion."

Generally speaking, Rahm Emanuel pert crack about "not wasting a crisis" is one of the key soundbites of our day. But why should he be taking a page from the Naomi Klein "Shock Doctrine" playbook? Isn't that supposed to be the domain of uber capitalists? Who will be the big beneficiaries of a CIT collapse? More than GE Capital and Wells Fargo etc., will it be the lords of Bentonville who cash in?

Boxing books

I am, at long last, boxing some books, moving forward with moving. The truck gets here in a month. With effort I am culling books that I have not read, and/or will never read again.

Prominent cullees at this point in time include:

• Gary Shteyngart
• Rory Stewart
• Patrick Leigh Farmer
• Heloise and Abelard
• Sigmund Freud
• Nikolai Dobroliubov
• and others

I should chuck more, but it's hard, you know.

Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone piece on GS

I tried to read Taibbi's article, but found it too sophisticated. I'm waiting till he dumbs it down to the level of People.


No but seriously. I like squid.

Northern Invasion

I am, at present, exiled to New Jersey, unable to get back up to Gotham because of primary caregiving constraints. While I, in fact, have tired greatly of commuting up there all the time, and have recently turned back interesting opportunities there because I'm going home, right now I really want to get up there because...

...Tim Horton's is coming! Or, rather, it's already here. Certain Dunkin Donuts stores were rebadged and branded for Monday morning and are now serving the donut stylings of the legendary Canadian donutery, including some in Penn Station.

Now, as we all know by now, Kristy Kremes -- while delicious in their own right -- have proven for their combination of lightness, fluffiness, and accounting trickery to be the quintessential donuts of the Greenspan / bubble era. Dunkin Donuts, while having fought back and maintained good quality coffee in the face of the Starbucks onslaught, has uneven donuts and suffers from strategic distraction with little pizzas, crappy bagels, and other whatnot. Tim Horton's, on the other hand, has, in my limited sampling, produced good stuff. Once, in 2003, flying back from Toronto, I snuck a dozen back into the country, and ate a shameful if nondisclosed quantity of fritters and sour-cream donuts on the plane and on the way to the office.

CIT, so pity us

Time was, in summer time CIT stood for "Counsellors in Training," and it was all in good fun.

I'm of a mixed mind about CIT the commercial lender now tottering on the brink of demise, now about to hoover up more tax dollars. On the one hand, I think it does sound like a systemically important institution, and the fact that it supports a lot of franchisees and other small businesses makes it seem worth saving. On the other hand, the time must come when we stop stepping in and propping things up.

This would be a good time -- perhaps -- for messrs Buffett, Blankfein, Dimon, Kovacevich, Fink, Gross and other bad asses to saddle up some white horses and ride in. Or perhaps they could be corralled, a la Long Term Capital Management. The etiology isn't as direct as it was back then, but the risks are still somewhat pooled.

Suspicious men with laptops

My friend Craig, a somewhat eccentric looking balding guy with a grey beard, had his laptop propped up on the chest height stone wall of Maggie's Playground in Princeton the other day, with its screen facing out. He had a wireless connection from his house across the street, and his 8-year old daughter was running around nearby.

Nearby, a group of Stepford wives grew suspicious. One of them snuck aroind behind Craig and snooked a peak at his screen, muttering something about men and computers.

Now, I ask you, would they have made a fuss if he had been a corporate guy in khaki shorts? Would they bug me right now if they saw me in the same park with my Blackberry? I doubt it.

It's this fearful, Megan's Law, corporatist mentality that makes it easier for me to leave Princeton, this would-be, somewhat wannabe somewhat not college town.

Tell No One

This is a very serviceable French thriller, interspersed with typical continental PCness and postcardness (i.e. full of scenes that shout out "look how nice Paris is.") Given that the movie came out in 2006, it's unlikely that many of you will see it, so I'll spoil the plot and say that the evil looking "State Senator Neuville" is the root of all evil here. This guy is rich beyond all means and able to retain a crew of crack spies and torturers to maintain surveillance over our Dustin Hoffman look a like hero for eight years, but we have no idea where he gets his money.

Which makes the movie a love story about a couple of good looking and noble working class kids (sired of a cop and a stable manager -- both of whom worked for the rich guy), who fight back against power and wealth and bring him down. So it is a parable of the opacity of Europe's wealth and power structure, which flies in the face of Eurogovernments' rule of law.

My trip to Greece and hanging with an adoptive member of the Euroaristocracy this year gave me some insight into how this works in Greece at least -- lots of tax evasion and a clear delineation of public and private space, with the spoils going to the latter.

Throwback

Today, in an accidental throwback to the 70s, I lathered, then rinsed. Then repeated. I scarcely recognize myself.

Money pit?

A good friend of mine, a developer of fine homes and regular reader of the blog, counseled me when I bought our current abode in 2003: "Those old houses can become money pits," quoth he. We put some money into it, but it never really got bad.

Until now, when we're trying to get out of the durned thing. Having been built in 1913, it had knob and tube wiring. Most of that stuff got taken out, but there's still some up on the third floor and going to the 2nd. On our disclosure form I dutifully checked the box "Has knob and tube."

Now, back when we bought, I was concerned about insuring the house with this wiring, but it turned out I had to pay something like $300-400 more because of it. In the interim, turns out, many, if not all, insurance companies have decided they don't want to write coverage on it at all.

So the ground shifted beneath our feet, just as it did in 2001 when we found that Princeton Boro, which had granted us an onstreet parking permit at our prior home, had revoked it, claiming it had been "issued in error" years before. This cut the value of our home. The moral to this story is that there is regulatory risk inherent in house transactions, particularly in densely populated areas where the involvement of pooled interests (govts, insurance companies) in markets is high. These factors may move against you, but they are unlikely to move for you.

How will this all turn out? Stay tuned, fair reader, and remind me if I don't get back to it. There should be more chapters to this tale.

Selling the house

I have somewhat neglected to mention just how much fun we've been selling our house. Over two-odd months, 50ish viewings, two open houses, all told hundreds and hundreds of feet a pitter pattering through the place we call home. Keeping it clean, I tell you, no fun. Mowing the lawn, similarly gleeful.

But, at long last, things are looking up with an acceptable bid, with another bidder coming up behind them just to keep them honest and ram us through the inspection process (entirely negotiated here in Princeton) nicely.

Inspection requests came in today. Largely reasonable, with mild overreaching.

Slumdog milliionaire

This was a fine movie, not sure it should have swept the Oscars. The lead kid should have gotten the Oscar for his performance at the Oscars, not for his performance in the film. And not for his acting, just for his infectious energy and attitude. In general the overwhelming optimism of the movie is a breath of fresh air in the current context, one feels India rising. Admittedly it is optimistic in a way that would be easily dismissible as Hollywood dreck in a mainstream domestic production (Pay It Forward, for example).

And of course, educated viewers will note that the tension between good (idealism) and evil (pragmatism, cynicism "the way of the world") paths manifested in the struggle of the two brothers in relation to the heroine is a direct allusion to my particularly-well received dissertation on the allegorical uses of love narrative in Russia and novelistic traditions which rose to prominence later. All five readers loved it!

Scratches on Netflix DVDs

Over time, one of the Achilles Heels in the Netflix business model is the fact that it traffics in delicate physical artefacts. Time and again, we're getting scratched DVDs in the mail. They really need to start moving over to a piped delivery model for more of their titles, before somebody else really nails it.

Google, for instance. Why shouldn't it leverage its YouTube infrastructure to push out licensed fare eventually?

Glenn Heights rules!

For those of you who missed it, here's a link to a recent story in Raleigh's News & Observer about former Glenn Heights denizen Eric Stein and his appointment to a senior position spearheading the development of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency in DC.

Our near 40-year master plan to establish world domination from one small wooded North Carolina residential neighborhood continues apace. Stay tuned for further developments.

Oxo for the workplace

Oxo made a bunch of money coming up with kitchen appliances with handle sizes and other ergonomics designed for an aging population. Who is doing the same in the workplace? Who is thinking through tool and workflow design to allow boomers to work longer into their lives to fund their otherwise hosed retirements? Just think about managing passwords, information security, ang going from one program to another for one thing. It's hard enough for me at 43, but it will be much harder for older people, who often can't figure out how to work the DVD player.

This will be a real challenge, particularly for not highly compensated back office work. How to decrease error rates and maintain productivity in the face of aging.

Neko and Morrissey

I don't recall exactly what tipped me off that Neko Case must be a Morrissey fan, something about the trilling and yodelling from the heart. But the clincher, which Sasha Frere-Jones unwittiingly called out in her New Yorker article on Case, was her citation in "Vengeance in Sleeping": "I'm not the man you think I am," which echoes the Smiths "Pretty Girls Make Graves."

Compare:

Neko and her Boyfriends

I'm not the man you thought I was
My love has never lived indoors
I had to drag it home by force
Hired hounds at both my wrists
Damp and bruised by
stranger's kisses on my lips
But you're the one that I still miss
you're the one that I still miss
And the truth is that it comes as no surprise

I'm not the man you think I am
I'm not the man you think I am

The Smiths

Upon the sand, upon the bay
"There is a quick and easy way" you say
Before you illustrate
I'd rather state :
"I'm not the man you think I am
I'm not the man you think I am"

Hurray for grammar! Huzzah for innovation!

Check out the new Saturn slogan: "Wonder where the car business is headed? It's here.", as reported in the Wall Street Journal but, oddly enough, not yet reflected on the Saturn web site. This just doesn't make grammatical sense at all. You could say "it's headed here," and that would be OK. But it wouldn't be a good slogan. Not that this one is catchy either.

North, South, and Entropy

I've been shuttling from North to South and back again recently, a process which will slow when I retransplant to my native kudzu-choked climes later in the summer. In doing so, a number of things jump out at me.

• The breeze. A little-appreciated virtue of the NorthEast, even as far inland as Princeton, which is largely lacking in the South, where stasis hangs languidly over the land as we stare out at it from within our air-conditioned homes. Rob confirms that the renewable energy community has measured the South in aggregate as being low on wind and (surprisingly) solar resources.
  
  
• Decay. I love my compost pile as much as the next guy. Probably more so. But the heat and humidity of the south mean that outdoor wood furniture turns disturbingly quickly into breeding ground for lichens and moss. Hence the plastic lawnwear.
  
  Cold preserves things better. This at least partially explains why the South seems to have more of a tear-down culture than the North, where structures abide for longer and people pile cash into o.
  
  
• Place. The South therefore renews its physical infrastructure more rapidly than the North does. The social infrastructure of the south, however, sticks around longer than that of the north. Because they can, people don't move, and people's sense of home is rooted in an absolute sense of place which tolerates physical change rather than a relative sense of place which roots itself in simulacra of the past (Martha Stewart, the apple cider donut industry, etc.)
  

Todd Snider

Meta-informatics

A common theme I've been encountering recently (The Numerati, Supercrunchers, recent Economist article on cellphone-generated data) focuses on the problem of having more data than we know how to use. There are ambitious initiatives to pull it all together (beyond Google, the crappy WolframAlpha and the semantic web, see Gapminder.org, Pachube.com). Everybody in the corporate world knows that MIS, Business Intelligence, etc, are evergreen and perennial questions.

But let's just say you've got terabytes of structured and unstructured data (as we do), how do you pose questions of it? The tabula rasa of the Google screen speaks volumes.

Where is the discipline and art of question formation taking shape, save for in the secretive halls of Madison Avenue and Langley?
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