Irony

According to Judith Warner it’s not just the super-rich financial types who are going down, it’s also people like Judith Warner who’d proudly decided, in our twenties, to pursue edifying or creative, or “helping” professions. Schadenfreude? You may feel that way but I couldn’t possibly comment…

Ah, but schadenfreude for ABN is OK, they are used to it. They used to be the most ‘banky’ bank in the country, with the thickest pin stripes, an obnoxious CEO and a lot of talk about financial innovation and privatisation. Then some hedge fund came knocking about their weak earnings, and they were forced to sell themselves.

The original plan was to merge with ING, another Dutch bank, but its CEO didn’t like their CEO, something about the color of their golf outfits or whatever. So they begged with the government to broker the deal, but the Cabinet pointed, laughing, to ABN-Amro’s previous wisdom about markets and government interference.

So they wanted to be taken over by Barclays, on almost equal footing so that the upper echelons could keep their positions. They even performed some dubious transactions to make this more likely, it was a daily soap in the newspapers, but in they end they were split up Gordon Gekko style. And sold to Belgians, for whom we Dutch have a completely unjustified disdain.

Now the Belgian bank couldn’t afford its share, that was clear from the start, and ABN is now bought by the Dutch government at a fire-sale price. I hope the country hasn’t lost too much money in all these dealings, but if it is less then a billion, I think it was a good price for the show.

To expand: there’s something about the Judith Warner article, which I find in 90% of commentary in American newspapers like the New York Times which I just find incredibly creepy. It’s as if she is genuinely unaware of the existence of people of people who are not middle class.

A Wall Street Journal reporter on the effect of all this on investment bankers: “It’s going to be very hard psychologically for these people. I talked to one guy who had to give up his private jet recently. And he said of all the trials in his life, giving that up was the hardest thing he’s ever done.”

I think it’s OK to feel schadenfreude about this guy’s suffering.

I don’t know about schadenfreude, but I think a bit of fear around the place might be good. I certainly think we should encourage legislators to allow bankers to believe both (1) that their businesses might be allowed to fail, and (2) that there might be some serious rewriting of tax codes. Something has gotten out of whack in terms of perceptions.

Fear can leak out all over the place, of course. The only antidote I can think of is to remember that if you’re good at something, there’ll continue to be a role for you. Most people are good at something. The threat to accumulated pension funds, etc. is much harder to deal with, and I suspect it’ll require political engagement the like of which hasn’t been seen in a while.

“if you’re good at something, there’ll continue to be a role for you.”
Unless you’re retired, and old enough that things are starting to slow down, and you’re confronting the inevitable at the same time your financial nut turns into useless paper. Now you can just reconcile yourself to gruel and porridge three times a day at the refectory table down at the poor house, along with most of the rest of your contemporaries. Except there aren’t even poor houses anymore.
Possibly why cocaine and heroin use among the elderly is increasing.
There isn’t much qualitative difference between losing the private jet and losing the Escalade, is there? They’re both no more than status markers, both hanging like medallions around the necks of the ensorcelled, bling in a bad rap video.
Compassion for the despicable is a superior quality, it’s the active version of not thrilling with schadenfreude at the suffering of these wrong-living superdrones, as their card houses and Ponzi schemes come crashing back to earth.

if you’re good at something, there’ll continue to be a role for you.

Once I built a railroad, made it run… Brother, can you spare a dime?

Sorry, that was harsher than I might have wanted. But since I find it hard to imagine any form of society which doesn’t have instrumental knowledge as a fundamental – a way of life based on picking fruit from trees excepted, perhaps – I’m tending to believe that skills will always have value. And I think this is something people can take reassurance from; and also something useful to keep in mind when there’s other people out there saying that it’ll all go to shit unless we do exactly what they say.

I realise also that any talk along these lines will be coloured by the unpleasant political rhetoric of the last twenty years or so.

You can always go lower until the role for you is “corpse”.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

My set is largely composed of twenty somethings foot-draggin’ in a middling city with an enormous university, and the shitjobs we work and the shitbars we frequent will more than likely persist. Many of my peers are probably more concerned by the diminishing frequency of the affordability of an eightball than any notion of economic irony or karmic retribution.

We are willfully marginal, and we can survive so long as at least half of our friends can make rent. This is probably just the nail in the coffin of any thoughts of repayment on our student loans.

…well there has been one positive spin off of the crisis, John: we got to hear you on New Zealand National Radio this morning.

WSJ:
Wednesday op-ed:
“The GOP Peddles Economic Snake Oil” Thomas Frank, staff writer
Thurs op-eds:
1) “Good Financial Information Matters More Than Ever”, Robert Shiller (“From John Moody to Suze Orman, financial writers deserve our thanks”)
2) “News Flash: The Media Back Obama”, Dorothy Rabinowitz (WSJ ed board)

side note: dsquared from CT to FT: quoted in “Well-established banks best placed to reap rewards”: “daniel Davies, analyst at Credit Suisse, says: ‘[The winners are] those who have never needed capital or those who raised it early. There are going to be national champions.'”