Michael Lewis says that even in this financial mess (to use a much weaker word than I’d like), we can look on the bright side. Sort of.
A lot of attractive office space seems to be opening up in midtown Manhattan, for instance, and the U.S. government is now getting paid to borrow money. (And with T-bills yielding 0 percent, they really ought to borrow a lot more of it, and quickly.
Lewis wrote Liar’s Poker, a startlingly engaging and scary story about the birth of mortgage-backed securities (otherwise known as, the Legalized Gambling That Is Screwing Wall Street And Everyone Else Over Right Now) in the 80’s. When I started training before beginning my job at Banc of America Securities in June of 2005, our instructor insisted that we read Liar’s Poker before we start work, and it was fascinating but really and truly frightening. I sat reading it and feeling like our whole financial system was just a house of cards waiting for a little puff of air. And what do you know? Two years later.
I skim a lot of blogs relating to arts and culture during the day, and things catch my eye, but I hate to repeatedly blog little links here. I’ve been experimenting with Tumblr and I think it’s the right way to do it, leaving this blog for stuff that’s actually about us (hence the name, right?).
I’ll be blogging several links and quotes and things per day that I find interesting. It’s all completely subjective. Tumblr doesn’t provide commenting features, which I’ve fallen progressively more out of love with anyhow, and it makes it very easy to quickly blog all kinds of media. Culture Log has an RSS feed, so feel free to subscribe . . . or not. This is mostly for my own edification and for anyone else who wishes to look over my shoulder and see what I’m reading.
I’ve got kind of semi-ringside seats to this Elliot Spitzer scandal - my Mom works for the Department of State in Albany - and I am sad about the whole thing, and trying to understand what the Christian reaction should be (moral outrage, yes; name-calling and snide remarks, probably not).
But is it awful of me that I’m immediately thinking just what a great movie this will make in a few years?
Our friend Angela blogs a lot and it’s hard to keep up with all of it, but this post of hers from a few weeks ago struck me as so insightful and encouraging for why we should continue speaking the truth, I thought it deserved reposting here:
Driving back down here, David was telling me about taking some friends around the Capitol building who remarked, These people are talking to nobody. Which, for the uninitiated, Congressmen are, indeed, usually talking to a bunch of empty seats with the tape recorder rolling. But David said, No, they’re talking to posterity. Which is a great way of thinking about it. And judges really do read these transcripts when they are interpreting legislation to figure out what the lawmakers intended…Ocassionally it’s a surprise who finds you as a result. But you figure, with a few exceptions, it’s the choir that’s approaching you. And it’s nice to be appreciated, but so what, you found each other. What about the bad guys. Do they care? For the little bit of posterity that will want to know, for the noise that percolates to the street, for the guy who just might be on the fence that day, I’ll keep speaking into the record.