Guy Geldworth, here. I'm back, undercover of the blogosphere, courtesy of Jack Sands.
Yes, I'm still employed in the financial industry, clearly not one of the thriving sectors these days, except for people like me, redirecting assets in accounts with a minimum $2 million. (We're looking for good, largely American companies in any sector with sound fundamentals and are advising our clients to keep 10% cash, 10% gold and hope for the best. It might take a year or two or three...).
"Oh for the deregulated past." You hear words to this effect from under the breath of a few still-misguided colleagues. They don't understand, do they.
Anyway, I took a note way back in September of a facile remark made by CNBC host Dylan Ratigan on his appropriately named "Fast Money" program. I should like to comment on that remark because it bears on the subculture of corruption and demented ethics of "market players" that has currently brought so much pain and confusion to so many of us.
Back then, September 10th, 2008 to be exact, Ratigan on CNBC, the prevailing financial channel on cable television said: "Do we invest in Financials now, or do we wait for the Fanny Mae, Freddie Mac bailout?"
The remark stunned me in its eerie pragmatism, its cynicism. It was delivered to some 300,000 viewers, very select viewers.
No one could quibble with the pragmatism of the thought. It referred to an investment decision, probably a reasonable one, thanks to the American people, who would be subsidizing the bailout. (Technically, we refer to them as the "backstop" in these scenarios. When we totally screw things up, they become the bank. It embarrasses some of us. Not Ratigan, apparently. His version of patrimony: The American people subsidizing a market broken by corruption fostered by a deregulated shadow cast over the land these past twenty years. Bad things occur in the dark.
Very few Americans watch nor can advantage themselves of the advice found on "Fast Money." I therefore feel justified in calling Ratigan's remark cynical.
Most of my colleagues are honest, hard-working fiduciaries. They are as innocent as most, but also just as quiet. That's the state of affairs, folks. Good people these days are just too quiet. Not good for a democracy. There, I said it, and I'm in good company: The Irish poet William Butler Yeats said as much in the aftermath of World War I, a war that killed 8.5 million people and wounded another 21 million. His words described political and social rot that still may apply today, if on a less tragic level than war:
The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity
Mr. Ratigan and his like seem to be filled with "passionate intensity" and may certainly not be characterized as innocent.
Billy MacDonald, a genial local television sportscaster in Los Angeles, recently interviewed University of Southern California football line coach Pat Ruel. The focus of MacDonald's questioning hinged on Ruel's charges playing at high levels of efficiency: How is it they perform so well, asked MacDonald, also known as Billy Mac. "Our guys push each other each day for starting positions," responded Ruel.
Billy Mac's followup question: "Who's pushing who?"
No, Billy Mac. The big fellows push each other each day in practice to gain a starting position for Saturday's game. When you push someone, you need to represent that someone as an object; otherwise, you'd be pushing yourself, which is possible to express if you mean "self-motivated."
Billy Mac meant to say: "Who's pushing whom."
Thus: I push him, not I push I. He pushes him or them, not He pushes he or they and, Who's pushing whom, not Who's pushing who?
Gary Klein, beat writer for the University of Southern California Trojan football team, said of Willie Tuitama, an opposing quarterback for the University of Arizona Wildcats, a team USC would soon face:
"Arizona's Wilie Tuitama qualifies as the most experienced passer the Trojans will face during the conference schedule."
Klein meant to say: "...qualifies as the most experienced passer the Trojans will have faced during the conference schedule."
Because the Trojans will face other quarterbacks after facing Tuitama, the future perfect tense* is required. That is, first they will square off against Tuitama, then other quarterbacks, even though they may be less competitive than Tuitama. Because Klein is projecting all of the football matches, not just that against Tuitama and his team, he needs to use the future perfect tense: will + have (helping verb) + faced (past participle) to accomplish his intentions:
First Tuitama, then other quarterbacks in actions that will be completed in the future.
For the record: The USC defense stifled Tuitama making him significantly less than perfect in the second half and went on to win the game.
*The Future Perfect Tense is one of the three verb tenses in the Perfect Aspect of verb tenses. The three perfect tenses refer to an action or state that precedes some other action of state (of being).
Chris Foster, a Los Angeles Times beat writer covering the UCLA Bruins football team, described the emotions of the team as they looked at the scoreboard minutes before being roundly defeated by their upstate rival the California Golden Bears in Berkeley, California. He said, "Another loss was eminent, a rock-bottom moment..."
Foster meant, "Another loss was imminent..." Indeed a loss was imminent. A minute later the final score was secured: Cal 41, UCLA 20.
Eminent means "famous, renowned, prominent, outstanding." Imminent means soon to happen or take place, associated with the thought of something evil or dangerous about to occur.
Former Oakland Raiders receiver Tim Brown recently commented on Raiders' owner Al Davis firing youthful coach Lane Kiffin in mid season with much hullabaloo (ruckus, uproar).
"It's Al's ball, and he can play with whoever he wants to play with. And, if he chooses not to play with Lane anymore, that's just the way it's going to be."
Tim meant to say whomever. Both whoever and whomever are personal pronouns. With respect to case, how they work in sentences as subject or object, whomever is used in the objective case. In this instance, it would serve as the object of the preposition "with."
Observation on the idiomatic expression "play with..." Yes, Davis seems to play with his coaches more than his players seem to play for him.
Sadly, Vince Young of the NFL Tennessee Titans is on a leave of absence. The former University of Texas star quarterback has not fit in well thus far with the Titan offense and NFL defenses. He has also regrettably sustained an injury. Young is experiencing emotional duress.
Steve Young (no relation), former star quarterback for the San Francisco Forty-Niners, recently commented on Vince Young's relationship with his teammates. The question put to Steve Young: Will he (Vince Young) and they (Young's Titan team mates) be able to trust each other when he returns?
Steve Young's response: "Like I said...it takes a few weeks before you can hit the ground running."
Presumably, Steve Young meant by "hit the ground running" the ability of Vince Young and his team mates to immediately trust each other. However, "hit the ground running" implies no preparation is required for taking up some endeavor immediately.* If Vince were to hit the ground running, he'd be back on the field right now in his position of starting quarterback. There would be no need to propagate mutual trust between Vince and his team mates, no need for them to learn how to trust.
As it is, trust has been damaged, and Vince Young and his team mates will require mutual work together to regenerate the trust that leads to points on the board, which we are not putting above Young's emotional equilibrium.
*hit the ground running (mainly American) to immediately work very hard and successfully at a new activity (The Free Dictionary, Farlex, online)
Is Senator John McCain angry? We respond "Yes," and will use his semantics (semantics: n. study of the meaning and use of words and phrases) to prove the point. In the penultimate debate
(penultimate: adj. next to last, second to last) McCain referred to his opponent, Senator Barak Obama as "that one." No title, no proper name. And yet, the two debate opponents stood a few feet apart from one another.
"One" is an indefinite pronoun. Indefinite pronouns are used to refer generally and indeterminately to objects and living things" (Harper's English Grammar, John B. Opdycke). A "general," "indeterminate" reference to someone you know quite well and who is standing adjacent indicates a deliberate attempt to marginalize that individual, to minimize his stature, to indicate that he is something less than. Worse, the deliberate placing of the demonstrative pronoun "that" before "one" serves to emphasize the indeterminacy of the person standing beside you.
Political television host Chris Matthews, to his credit, pointed out McCain's odd semantic choice of words:
Said Matthews in analyzing the debate: "That one, it's not even a personal pronoun." That's right, Chris, nothing personal about it, very impersonal, very angry.
McCain followed up in the ultimate debate with another curious bit of semantics as he compared himself and his wife to Obama and his wife.
He said: "Cindy and I and you and your wife" McCain might as well have said: Cindy and I and you and "that one."
For many other reasons, we suggest that John McCain is perhaps not the one.
From Babylon online dictionary: one: pron. any person; any person or thing in a particular group
adj. being 1 in number; single; same, unified; only; happening at a particular unspecified time in the past (or future)
It's true and alarming that the bee population of the United States is diminishing. Bees remain an indispensable component of stable agriculture systems.
It's also a fact that the value of an average American's estate--mostly the equity of his or her home--has diminished precipitously in the last forty years. Now the Federal government will bail out publicly traded firms (privately held) whose toxic debts average Americans will ultimately pay off in a deflationary economy over the coming years. It appears that market players have not been discouraged from gaming the system because they understand 1) they will not be seriously monitored or regulated, and 2) when they ultimately break the bank after taking their gains, the government will step in and help put the game back together.
Remember Savings and Loan "S & L bailout" nearly twenty years ago? According to Timothy Curry and Lynn Shibut, "the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s produced the greatest collapse of U.S. financial institutions since the Great Depression. Over the 1986–1995 period, 1,043 thrifts with total assets of over $500 billion failed. The large number of failures overwhelmed the resources of the FSLIC, so U.S. taxpayers were required to back up the commitment extended to insured depositors of the failed institutions. As of December 31, 1999, the thrift crisis had cost taxpayers approximately $124 billion and the thrift industry another $29 billion, for an estimated total loss of approximately $153 billion." It appears that Americans have a lethal case of political amnesia. Either that, or they are very forgiving, particularly to those who have great wealth and power and who use them as "back stops" (see below) when the casino runs out of money.
It is presently clear that socialism funds capitalism, non market spectators fund the speculators. Great game.
This past September 15th, 2008, the Dow Jones Average lost "only" 500 points. Some remain sanguine. After all, the U.S. economy is a $15 trillion economy. The United States can even absorb a $2 trillion bill for war in Iraq not to mention bailing out the two federally instituted and publicly traded investment Goliaths Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac.
Larry Summers, who together with Robert Rubin (a principal architect of the present Russian economy) helped deregulate the market in the Bill Clinton years. Presently, they feel chastened. "We need regulators regulating risk, transparency not opaqueness. The buyer and seller need equal views of the real price of an asset. Real disclosure, not opacity" they now say. A little late. These insights would have been put to better use when they enjoyed political power.
Prognosticators are saying that we are at the beginning of an economic recession in Europe and Japan with the risk of global recession. Market won't return to equilibrium until 2010, economy in 2011. They might wish to blame "toxic CDO's." Toxic CDO's(Collateralized Debt Obligations from Derivatives) sold by Goldman Sachs and other investment banks in a deregulated market environment(See Glass-Steagall Act) have reached other parts of the globe like viral birds. Politicians and journalists have termed any "bailouts" by tax payers a moral hazard issue. Translation: Deregulated market gamblers who have disrupted the market will be salvaged by the very people they hurt most, average citizens. That is, the people are bailing out capitalists who are gaming the market taking big wins up front until the bubble market collapses. Warren Buffet and others saw this coming. Few listened.
Capitalism is supposed to be a system in which players have the freedom to succeed as well fail according Tom Petruno, market beat writer for the Los Angeles Times. We may ask: Is it also a "moral hazard" to take away one of those "freedoms" from the rich and powerful?
An important bit of history: The Glass-Steagall Act Provisions of the 1930s in the wake of market corruption and the Great Depression prohibited a bank holding company from owning other financial companies. The reason, conflict of interest, too easy to cheat. However, these measures were repealed on November 12, 1999, by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which ultimately passed in the Senate by a 90-8-1 vote, and in the House by a 362-57-15 vote. The bill was signed by President Bill Clinton, but could have been signed by Ronald Reagen or any of the Bush's. Warning: Phil Gramm now counsels "reformer" John McCain on economic matters.
More on the term "back stop": According to Andrew Sorkin of the New York Times, Lehman wanted the the FED (read tax payers) to "back stop" the losses of Bear Stearns, Lehman, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sacks, which were never depository banks serving common people. Yet common people will "back stop" the failures of these giants whose executives made deca millions and who, with their witty share holders will walk away with many billions of dollars. Bernie Sanders, Independent Senator from Vermont, thinks they ought to help pay for the bail out. What fair-minded person will disagree?
Nevertheless, Morgan Stanley and Goldman are the only two large firms left standing, "back stopped" by the people, uh, government. So...the people do subsidize capitalism--capitalism is socialized. is that be right?! If this is so, how many Americans really understand capitalism as it plays out in America?
Capitalism generally refers to an economic system in which the means of production are all or mostly privately owned and operated for profit. Why not private equity bailing out private players? Clearly, that's not the American way.
Unless the House of Representatives turns down the bill sent to it by the Senate, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson and his boys have the rest of us by the throats. That's a great game they've got going. The plutocrats use ordinary people to save their bacon. Paulson and his cronies got us into this mess, and now, for our own good, we must pay the ransom to salvaging the credit market they helped destroy while getting rich. (Paulson is worth roughly $500 million. It's scandalous, but the bewildered and quietly angry populous does nothing, having forgotten how to participate in a democracy. The capitalists take all the benefits in the form of profits (except for the shareholders who didn't sell in time) and the people get to socialize the losses: public money is put at stake to bail out private gambles in the market largely in the form of exotically packaged derivatives, mortgages placed in the world market as a speculative asset class. When it fails, the lenders get bailed out, not the distressed borrowers who "deserve" to take the hit because they should have "done their due diligence."
Bees don't "do due diligence." They generally work hard and trust that everyone is pulling for the common good. Huh. Silly bees. More truly, silly bee keepers. They're going to lose the hive eventually. As the song goes: "If you're after getting the honey, hey, then don't go killing all the bees."
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