Let's get one thing clear at the start: I'm no expert on film, so don't expect too much expertise from what follows. I've passed no exams in the subject, earned no diplomas, written no books. I've just paid my money and watched.
But after nearly three years living near LA, having been through three Cinecon seasons and now into my third season of film noir at the Egyptian, some of it may be sinking in.
After last night's session, encompassing Alias Nick Beal and Fly-by-Night, the question being asked was 'were they really films noirs?' Which naturally depends on how you answer 'what IS film noir?'
Wikipedia says it 'describes stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize moral ambiguity and sexual motivation.'
In their 1955 book Panorama du film noir américain 1941–1953 (A Panorama of American Film Noir), said to be the original and seminal extended study of the subject, the French critics Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton say: "We'd be oversimplifying things in calling film noir oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel...." Oneiric means dreamlike.
Apart from the facts that 'film noir' is a French phrase and Borde and Chaumeton are French, I'm not sure that their view is any better than anyone else's - after all, the fact I speak English doesn't make me an authority on roast beef - but it fleshes out the Wiki attempt.
To me, though, Alias Nick Beal, a remake of Faust, fits the Borde-Chaumeton definition but not Wiki. The story of the seduction of a politician was dreamlike, ambivalent and cruel, with even a touch of eroticism. But there was next to no sexual motivation and little moral ambiguity - how could there be when it came down to a fight between a vicar and the devil?
Fly-by-Night felt more like a romantic comedy made for Rock Hudson and Doris Day than a true film noir. It had crime and a light dusting of sexual motivation, but again no moral ambiguity. The far-fetched plot was a little strange, but it didn't strike me as dreamlike, erotic, ambivalent or cruel.
These two films were much more borderline than the previous night's, the two Jane Greer movies, Out of the Past and The Company She Keeps, which seemed right in the middle of what you'd expect from a film noir evening.
Like all artistic movements, film noir was categorized as such only in retrospect. At the time, they were just an era of black and white movies that were in tune with the morally fluid climate that caught plenty of people during and soon after the second world war. And many of them were based on books that had been written in the depression of the 1930s.
The LA Times reports today that romantic novels are big sellers as millions of people try to escape their financial problems. Maybe in the 2020s the Egyptian will host seasons of film rouge for a new generation eager to understand what we are currently going through. I bet you won't be able to get in for $7, though.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Sunday, March 29, 2009
The real solution to the economic crisis by Bill Kay
Don't get excited - what I'm about to say may strike you as so obvious as to be a complete waste of blog space. If so, please move swiftly on with my good wishes and the hope that the word will spread and we can all then get down to sorting out this mess.
For it seems to me that the millions of words, acres of newsprint and forests of trees that have been devoted to the causes of and solutions to the crisis have left many people - expert as well as non-expert - confused. Meanwhile, thousands of protesters in London are threatening to string up bankers, brandishing slogans like 'We won't pay for their crisis', and up in Edinburgh that nice, shy Fred Goodwin gets his windows broken and his car vandalised over the huge pension he is insisting on drawing from RBS. Good on you, Fred, I'd do the same - but I'd keep my home address quiet.
Ironically in view of the public outrage, the bank bailouts are last year's story. The banks' losses started the crisis, so they needed fixing first. However, that put politicians in the uncomfortable position of lending them money to sort out their mistakes, instead of letting them go bust as would happen with nearly every other industry. But that phase is virtually over, give or take the odd few billion here or there.
The real problem is just beginning, as brilliantly set out by John Waples in today's London Sunday Times. It's so succinct, it's worth quoting at length:
'The jump in stock markets on both sides of the Atlantic over the past two weeks, combined with the bank recapitalisations, has given hope that the worst may be over. But let’s be clear — this recession has only just begun.
'All we have achieved so far is to make the banks strong enough to withstand the onslaught of what is to come. The recession is now making a direct hit on the economy. We know that the government thinks it can contain at least £120 billion of bad news. That is the size of the total buffer it has insisted our big four banks need to hold in reserve to withstand the torrent of impairments to come. And that is before the banks take part in the asset protection scheme, designed to help dispose of toxic assets. This could run into hundreds of billions.
'Some 120 small businesses are going bust every day and the economic consequences of this are huge — mortgage and credit-card defaults, personal bankruptcies and a collapse in consumer spending.
'And there are some corporate upheavals, in the shape of big restructurings, around the corner. These will result in debt-for-equity swaps and multi-billion-pound bank write-offs. You only have to look at the 50% fall in Boeing’s order book last year to get a feel for what’s happening. Then work back through the supply chain.
'We are still only at the beginning of taking leverage out of the system and it is going to take years to unwind everything. There are some encouraging signs, such as the issuance of corporate bonds, but too many people still cling to the hope that recovery is not far off. This is going to be a long haul. The stock-market bounce of the past two weeks reflects only the fact that at a (pre-exceptional) trading level the likes of Barclays, RBS and Lloyds are on the mend, even though lots of their corporate and retail customers are heading for intensive care.'
Got it? The problems are only just beginning. The solution? It's so obvious that it shouldn't need saying - more economic activity.
That can come in one of three ways: more spending, more investing (in real things, not just stock market investors passing money among themselves), or more donations - to charity if you like, but the nearest beggar will do just as well.
The important point is that whoever you release money to must also use it to do one of those three things. Keeping in a bank or under a mattress will not do.
Critics have said that debt got us into this mess, so it can't be the way out. But one of the big problems is that banks aren't lending. They've taken fright, and that is starving industry of the cash that keeps it going. You can say it shouldn't, but that's the way business works and keeps everyone in jobs.
Banks are still lending in small ways. They haven't yet started cutting credit card limits. Stores are still issuing store cards.
The problem there is that more and more of us are worried about keeping our jobs or maintaining other sources of income as interest rates have been cut. So we don't want to borrow, thank you very much.
We have national leaders, many of whom will be saying their piece in London this week, telling us to spend (but not too much) and then go into reverse and save (but not too much), unless you are in China, in which case it is your global duty never to save another penny and go on a wild binge for the rest of your life, preferably buying as much foreign stuff as your government will let you.
But while these mixed messages sound all very well in economics seminars, they are no use to the general public. Craziest of all is this notion that we should spend to beat the recession but then save and pay off debt to get western economies back in balance.
We are creatures of habit, so once we are used to a given level of spending - and the standard of living that that brings - we don't like reining it back. What are we supposed to cut? Ditching the odd trip to Starbucks or McDonald's is fine, even overdue, but are you going to stop seeing your friends, or going on holiday, watching TV or using an iPhone? These are the kinds of decisions that would make a serious impact, but they are the hardest to do.
So I think the politicians and economists are going to be disappointed twice over. We will spend, but more cautiously than before, and save, but not enough. The biggest source of new debt, mortgages on bigger and bigger houses, will simply not be permitted by the banks, whatever Obama or Brown may say. And an enormous amount of spending was tied to moving house - new carpets, curtains, TVs, washing machines and so on.
And we will save more, but much less than our leaders would like. Result: as Waples predicts, this crisis is going to have to be allowed to play itself out, painfully and over several years. The quick fix, of lurching from overspending to oversaving at a signal from on high, just ain't gonna happen. As with the long-predicted pension crisis - too many baby boomers soon drawing pensions that will have to be paid for by a shrinking workforce - we will muddle through. But millions will be thrown out of work and there will be more social upheaval. We must pray that that upheaval does not install the sort of power-crazed warmongers that the world suffered in the 1930s. That's the real bottom line.
For it seems to me that the millions of words, acres of newsprint and forests of trees that have been devoted to the causes of and solutions to the crisis have left many people - expert as well as non-expert - confused. Meanwhile, thousands of protesters in London are threatening to string up bankers, brandishing slogans like 'We won't pay for their crisis', and up in Edinburgh that nice, shy Fred Goodwin gets his windows broken and his car vandalised over the huge pension he is insisting on drawing from RBS. Good on you, Fred, I'd do the same - but I'd keep my home address quiet.
Ironically in view of the public outrage, the bank bailouts are last year's story. The banks' losses started the crisis, so they needed fixing first. However, that put politicians in the uncomfortable position of lending them money to sort out their mistakes, instead of letting them go bust as would happen with nearly every other industry. But that phase is virtually over, give or take the odd few billion here or there.
The real problem is just beginning, as brilliantly set out by John Waples in today's London Sunday Times. It's so succinct, it's worth quoting at length:
'The jump in stock markets on both sides of the Atlantic over the past two weeks, combined with the bank recapitalisations, has given hope that the worst may be over. But let’s be clear — this recession has only just begun.
'All we have achieved so far is to make the banks strong enough to withstand the onslaught of what is to come. The recession is now making a direct hit on the economy. We know that the government thinks it can contain at least £120 billion of bad news. That is the size of the total buffer it has insisted our big four banks need to hold in reserve to withstand the torrent of impairments to come. And that is before the banks take part in the asset protection scheme, designed to help dispose of toxic assets. This could run into hundreds of billions.
'Some 120 small businesses are going bust every day and the economic consequences of this are huge — mortgage and credit-card defaults, personal bankruptcies and a collapse in consumer spending.
'And there are some corporate upheavals, in the shape of big restructurings, around the corner. These will result in debt-for-equity swaps and multi-billion-pound bank write-offs. You only have to look at the 50% fall in Boeing’s order book last year to get a feel for what’s happening. Then work back through the supply chain.
'We are still only at the beginning of taking leverage out of the system and it is going to take years to unwind everything. There are some encouraging signs, such as the issuance of corporate bonds, but too many people still cling to the hope that recovery is not far off. This is going to be a long haul. The stock-market bounce of the past two weeks reflects only the fact that at a (pre-exceptional) trading level the likes of Barclays, RBS and Lloyds are on the mend, even though lots of their corporate and retail customers are heading for intensive care.'
Got it? The problems are only just beginning. The solution? It's so obvious that it shouldn't need saying - more economic activity.
That can come in one of three ways: more spending, more investing (in real things, not just stock market investors passing money among themselves), or more donations - to charity if you like, but the nearest beggar will do just as well.
The important point is that whoever you release money to must also use it to do one of those three things. Keeping in a bank or under a mattress will not do.
Critics have said that debt got us into this mess, so it can't be the way out. But one of the big problems is that banks aren't lending. They've taken fright, and that is starving industry of the cash that keeps it going. You can say it shouldn't, but that's the way business works and keeps everyone in jobs.
Banks are still lending in small ways. They haven't yet started cutting credit card limits. Stores are still issuing store cards.
The problem there is that more and more of us are worried about keeping our jobs or maintaining other sources of income as interest rates have been cut. So we don't want to borrow, thank you very much.
We have national leaders, many of whom will be saying their piece in London this week, telling us to spend (but not too much) and then go into reverse and save (but not too much), unless you are in China, in which case it is your global duty never to save another penny and go on a wild binge for the rest of your life, preferably buying as much foreign stuff as your government will let you.
But while these mixed messages sound all very well in economics seminars, they are no use to the general public. Craziest of all is this notion that we should spend to beat the recession but then save and pay off debt to get western economies back in balance.
We are creatures of habit, so once we are used to a given level of spending - and the standard of living that that brings - we don't like reining it back. What are we supposed to cut? Ditching the odd trip to Starbucks or McDonald's is fine, even overdue, but are you going to stop seeing your friends, or going on holiday, watching TV or using an iPhone? These are the kinds of decisions that would make a serious impact, but they are the hardest to do.
So I think the politicians and economists are going to be disappointed twice over. We will spend, but more cautiously than before, and save, but not enough. The biggest source of new debt, mortgages on bigger and bigger houses, will simply not be permitted by the banks, whatever Obama or Brown may say. And an enormous amount of spending was tied to moving house - new carpets, curtains, TVs, washing machines and so on.
And we will save more, but much less than our leaders would like. Result: as Waples predicts, this crisis is going to have to be allowed to play itself out, painfully and over several years. The quick fix, of lurching from overspending to oversaving at a signal from on high, just ain't gonna happen. As with the long-predicted pension crisis - too many baby boomers soon drawing pensions that will have to be paid for by a shrinking workforce - we will muddle through. But millions will be thrown out of work and there will be more social upheaval. We must pray that that upheaval does not install the sort of power-crazed warmongers that the world suffered in the 1930s. That's the real bottom line.
Friday, March 27, 2009
From Torquay to toreadors by Bill Kay
I've just been listening to a podcast of the latest in a long-running BBC radio show, Excess Baggage, about the origin and growth of travel guides, which got me thinking about my own journey.
Travel guides began in the early 19th century when mass leisure travel began thanks to the provision of commercial sea-going services from Britain to the Continent, and later the advent of the railways. Of course such ventures were only for the rich but, in comparison to the aristocrats doing their obligatory tour of Europe's capitals, money and therefore saving money were becoming a factor in travel plans. The guide books offered to replace human guides at far less cost, and was therefore an element in the great expansion of travel purely for the fun of it.
It occurred to me as I listened to this that I had undergone a similar expansion of my personal horizon. For the first 12 years of my life I never left Britain. Holidays took place either on the sunny south coast, where there are many seaside resorts from Brighton to Torquay, or up to Scotland to visit my family. Even these were quite ambitious projects at a time when many Londoners didn't get much beyond the nearby areas of Kent, Essex or East Anglia.
And then we went to Switzerland. That is virtually unthinkable now, with the British pound fetching only 1.64 Swiss francs. Back then, though, a pound was worth 12 francs. I suppose the early package holiday firms thought they had to offer something different from a beach holiday, though it was the Mediterranean beach holiday that eventually captured the big business because of its combination of sun, sand and cheap booze.
My mother was always keen on getting one over on her family, so bragging about a trip to Switzerland must have been right up her street. The first I knew about it was the brochures arriving in our flat, and finally settling on two weeks in Interlaken, a tiny village in the mountains and, as its name suggests, between two lakes.
We didn't fly, that would have been far too extravagant. It was a train from London to Dover, ferry across the English Channel, and then night train across France to Switzerland. I remember thinking sniffily that these French trains weren't up to much as the lower-class sleeping compartments had six bunks instead of the four then customary in Britain.
But at the age of 13 I did things on that trip that I rarely, if ever, did again. Pleasure trips across the lakes. A train up the 13,600-foot Jungfraujoch mountain in the Bernese oberland, still rated Switzerland's most popular railway journey, to an ice palace. A train south to Lake Maggiore in Italy, to be taken round the magical palace of Isola Bella. Somehow my parents let me get my hands on a bottle of Chianti - they couldn't have realised how strong it was, for I drank the lot before weaving off the train at Berne.
We did go back to Scotland on holiday in later years, mainly because mum had found a swanky hotel in the golf resort of St Andrews where my wealthy uncle used to take his family. Otherwise, though, we never holidayed in Britain again.
A couple of years later we joined the trek to the Med - Lloret de Mar on the Costa Brava near Barcelona, where I got such severe sunburn that I was reduced to lying on my front in my room for a few days until the blisters finished cooling my back.
I was becoming interested in journalism then and also in the hotel was a family whose father was Alf Brockman, editor of Parade, a rather shady mag produced by the News of the World. It didn't lead to anything in terms of work, but it was great to talk Fleet Street with a real live editor and he gave up a lot of his holiday to humour me.
The most glamorous trip of that holiday was the coach into Barcelona, either to go sightseeing or to take in the bullfight. I was mesmerised by both, and thoroughly hooked on foreign travel.
Alcohol played a part in that trip, too, not because I drank too much but because the local bodegas had the charming custom of letting you pour as much wine or vodka as you wanted from huge barrels, and then telling the patron at the end of the evening how much you had had. This probably worked well when the customers were locals and everyone knew everyone, but I suspect that quite a few British and German tourists (the majority) soon realised that they could get away with accidently underestimating how much they had consumed. Anyway, when we went back two years later, each barrel was supervised by a member of staff, who took your money drink by drink. Shame.
By that time the tourist industry was in full swing. Hotels were being built as fast as they could clear a plot of land, and some bright entrepreneur had decided to head off the trips to Barcelona by constructing Lloret's own bullring - no atmosphere, second-rate matadors, but who cares? It makes a change from lying on the beach.
Travel guides began in the early 19th century when mass leisure travel began thanks to the provision of commercial sea-going services from Britain to the Continent, and later the advent of the railways. Of course such ventures were only for the rich but, in comparison to the aristocrats doing their obligatory tour of Europe's capitals, money and therefore saving money were becoming a factor in travel plans. The guide books offered to replace human guides at far less cost, and was therefore an element in the great expansion of travel purely for the fun of it.
It occurred to me as I listened to this that I had undergone a similar expansion of my personal horizon. For the first 12 years of my life I never left Britain. Holidays took place either on the sunny south coast, where there are many seaside resorts from Brighton to Torquay, or up to Scotland to visit my family. Even these were quite ambitious projects at a time when many Londoners didn't get much beyond the nearby areas of Kent, Essex or East Anglia.
And then we went to Switzerland. That is virtually unthinkable now, with the British pound fetching only 1.64 Swiss francs. Back then, though, a pound was worth 12 francs. I suppose the early package holiday firms thought they had to offer something different from a beach holiday, though it was the Mediterranean beach holiday that eventually captured the big business because of its combination of sun, sand and cheap booze.
My mother was always keen on getting one over on her family, so bragging about a trip to Switzerland must have been right up her street. The first I knew about it was the brochures arriving in our flat, and finally settling on two weeks in Interlaken, a tiny village in the mountains and, as its name suggests, between two lakes.
We didn't fly, that would have been far too extravagant. It was a train from London to Dover, ferry across the English Channel, and then night train across France to Switzerland. I remember thinking sniffily that these French trains weren't up to much as the lower-class sleeping compartments had six bunks instead of the four then customary in Britain.
But at the age of 13 I did things on that trip that I rarely, if ever, did again. Pleasure trips across the lakes. A train up the 13,600-foot Jungfraujoch mountain in the Bernese oberland, still rated Switzerland's most popular railway journey, to an ice palace. A train south to Lake Maggiore in Italy, to be taken round the magical palace of Isola Bella. Somehow my parents let me get my hands on a bottle of Chianti - they couldn't have realised how strong it was, for I drank the lot before weaving off the train at Berne.
We did go back to Scotland on holiday in later years, mainly because mum had found a swanky hotel in the golf resort of St Andrews where my wealthy uncle used to take his family. Otherwise, though, we never holidayed in Britain again.
A couple of years later we joined the trek to the Med - Lloret de Mar on the Costa Brava near Barcelona, where I got such severe sunburn that I was reduced to lying on my front in my room for a few days until the blisters finished cooling my back.
I was becoming interested in journalism then and also in the hotel was a family whose father was Alf Brockman, editor of Parade, a rather shady mag produced by the News of the World. It didn't lead to anything in terms of work, but it was great to talk Fleet Street with a real live editor and he gave up a lot of his holiday to humour me.
The most glamorous trip of that holiday was the coach into Barcelona, either to go sightseeing or to take in the bullfight. I was mesmerised by both, and thoroughly hooked on foreign travel.
Alcohol played a part in that trip, too, not because I drank too much but because the local bodegas had the charming custom of letting you pour as much wine or vodka as you wanted from huge barrels, and then telling the patron at the end of the evening how much you had had. This probably worked well when the customers were locals and everyone knew everyone, but I suspect that quite a few British and German tourists (the majority) soon realised that they could get away with accidently underestimating how much they had consumed. Anyway, when we went back two years later, each barrel was supervised by a member of staff, who took your money drink by drink. Shame.
By that time the tourist industry was in full swing. Hotels were being built as fast as they could clear a plot of land, and some bright entrepreneur had decided to head off the trips to Barcelona by constructing Lloret's own bullring - no atmosphere, second-rate matadors, but who cares? It makes a change from lying on the beach.
Poolside paranoia by Bill Kay
A well-meaning gathering at a plush poolside house in Santa Monica last night gave me a vivid insight into how Hitler rose to power - and how a modern-day demagog might repeat that deadly feat amid the ashes of today's economic crisis.
I was attending the launch of a book, Web of Debt by Ellen Hodgson Brown, which tries to explain the banking failures that led to the current recession and suggest remedies. Her favourite is for every US state - and, eventually - every country in the world to create its own publicly-owned bank, as already exists in North Dakota.
Brown said: "State banks could lend money to the state governments, but that is OK if it's being used for productive projects." That, like any nationalised industry, begs the question of what is productive or desirable. The beauty of nationalised banks in the present climate, is that such decisions are not being made by rapacious, money-grabbing, self-centred private bankers eager to generate huge bonuses for themselves with total disregard for public policy and the wishes of the rest of the population.
"Once you understand what credit it," said Brown, "you don't need bankers." But you do need someone to run banks, and if they also understand credit - as I would hope - then what are they but bankers? Of course they would start as outsiders determined not to repeat the mistakes of career bankers, but I predict that they would "go native" within a short time and become as bankerly as any Citigroup executive. Bank of North Dakota's website says: "It was never intended for Bank of North Dakota to compete with or replace existing banks. Instead, Bank of North Dakota was created to partner with other banks and assist them in meeting the needs of the citizens of North Dakota."
State banks are not unknown in the rest of the world, particularly in those countries with a strong agricultural economy like North Dakota. That is how France's Credit Agricole started, and communist countries have naturally had their own banks. The 1945 British Labour Government contented itself with nationalising the Bank of England, on the grounds that the central bank could and would control the commercial banks. It did so for 50 years, until the present Labour government took its supervisory powers away and gave them to the Financial Services Authority, UK counterpart of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Some UK commentators argue that that decision took the supervisors took far away from the sharp end, where the financial action is.
The evening began bizarrely, with a video of a tit-and-bum show - dignified as burlesque, as if that somehow made it respectable - which earned tut-tuts from some of the women in the audience, followed by a couple of songs. We were then given an extended advert for KTLK, a left-wing radio station that aims to balance the right-wing rants of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk. The plug came from an aspiring Limbaugh of the Left, Richard Greene, described in the press release as "master of charisma, one of the leading communication coaches in the world". I was less than whelmed, a view shared by a man at the back of the room who, after ten minutes of this self-promotion, asked impatiently when we were going to hear from Brown. Greene was reduced to whingeing uncharismatically that such disrespect was out of order. Maybe, but it did bring Brown to the mike. Lesson one to the communication coach: don't overstay your welcome.
At the outset of her talk, Brown earned gasps of disgust and grunts of approval by describing banks as Ponzi schemes, thus simultaneously smearing them as illegal and bracketing them with Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford, two prominent villains of the stock market collapse. Her argument was that, like Ponzi schemes, they need new customers to pay off the old ones - but no more than any other business needs a constant throughput of customers. But banks are at root much simpler than that: they take in money, for which they pay a small rate of interest, and lend it at a higher rate of interest. The difference is their profit. No Ponzi required. Indeed, banks could run like savings and loans, relying on the same bunch of savers to provide cash for a standing army of borrowers.
Brown's big revelation was that banks lend more than ten times the amount of money they receive from depositors - a "secret" known as credit creation that is taught to every first-year economics student. Indeed, Brown later explained that the practice dated back to 17th century goldsmiths who noticed that their customers preferred trading promissory notes to walking around with lumps of gold. I believe it goes back a lot further than the 17th century, but the point is that it is neither new nor sinister.
The presentation went downhill from there. Brown told us that derivatives were "basically bets" - yes, but no more than any other investment as they all depend on a view of the future, even bank deposits. In fact derivatives are widely used in industry and farming to hedge against the risk of prices going bad. If that is a bet, so is an insurance policy and virtually every other financial instrument.
Then we got an attack on the Bank for International Settlements, smeared as Hitler's bank even though Brown later lauded the Fuhrer for "standing up to the banks, like Lincoln and Kennedy, who got shot for doing so". The BIS, it seems, was partly to blame for the credit crisis because of its insistence on mark to market rules and maintaining banks' capital ratio at no less than 8%, which strikes me as an edict designed to rein in bank lending rather than encouraging more foolhardiness. Brown skipped over the fact that BIS is owned by 55 central banks, including the European Central Bank and those of Russia and the US. It may not be blameless but it is certainly not the evil Swiss secret dictator that Brown made it out to be. But her dire warning was well received in a room buzzing with paranoia and conspiracy theories.
Creating state banks was the fourth of four possible crisis remedies Brown outlined. The first was nationalising the Federal Reserve, which I reckon would make next to no difference as if it steps out of line at present the government would soon slap it down. In any case, Brown admitted she "rather liked" Fed chairman Ben Bernanke "because he's a professor". Hmm.
Next came the proposal that the Fed should fund federal projects by issuing bonds - fine, but that begs the question of who is going to buy these bonds and on what terms they are going to be sold.
Thirdly, Brown suggested nationalising the present commercial banks, but only after their balance sheets had been cleaned up by getting rid of the derivatives and toxic loans. No word of the impact on the counterparties to those securities, who happen to include pension and mutual funds serving millions of ordinary Americans.
What did this chaotic jumble of an evening have to do with the rise of Hitler. I am not for a second suggesting that this well-meaning author, a lawyer who could easily be mistaken for a bank CEO's PA, might be about to march on the White House at the head of a mass army of revolutionaries. But she was feeding on the same fertile ground of fear, ignorance, prejudice, anger and simplistic solutions that enabled Hitler to overthrow the previous German government. And that is the greatest danger of this crisis: that it could spawn a populist leader who wrests power from a legitimate president whose policies are judged to have failed.
Overthrow Obama? This crowd of well-fed, affluent Democrats? Yes, because in the end even he came in for cosying up to the banks - so, Greene suggested, that he might avoid Lincoln and Kennedy's fate.
But in the end Brown revealed her true colours - as a middle-aged hippy. She said: "We hippies of the 1960s had that vision that abundance is everywhere, if we could just fix the system." Aaaawwww, sweet.
And, for the old gent who plaintively asked what he and his white-haired wife should do with their meagre savings, Brown giggled as she gave the opinion that "the stock market looks pretty good now." A closet capitalist after all.
I was attending the launch of a book, Web of Debt by Ellen Hodgson Brown, which tries to explain the banking failures that led to the current recession and suggest remedies. Her favourite is for every US state - and, eventually - every country in the world to create its own publicly-owned bank, as already exists in North Dakota.
Brown said: "State banks could lend money to the state governments, but that is OK if it's being used for productive projects." That, like any nationalised industry, begs the question of what is productive or desirable. The beauty of nationalised banks in the present climate, is that such decisions are not being made by rapacious, money-grabbing, self-centred private bankers eager to generate huge bonuses for themselves with total disregard for public policy and the wishes of the rest of the population.
"Once you understand what credit it," said Brown, "you don't need bankers." But you do need someone to run banks, and if they also understand credit - as I would hope - then what are they but bankers? Of course they would start as outsiders determined not to repeat the mistakes of career bankers, but I predict that they would "go native" within a short time and become as bankerly as any Citigroup executive. Bank of North Dakota's website says: "It was never intended for Bank of North Dakota to compete with or replace existing banks. Instead, Bank of North Dakota was created to partner with other banks and assist them in meeting the needs of the citizens of North Dakota."
State banks are not unknown in the rest of the world, particularly in those countries with a strong agricultural economy like North Dakota. That is how France's Credit Agricole started, and communist countries have naturally had their own banks. The 1945 British Labour Government contented itself with nationalising the Bank of England, on the grounds that the central bank could and would control the commercial banks. It did so for 50 years, until the present Labour government took its supervisory powers away and gave them to the Financial Services Authority, UK counterpart of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Some UK commentators argue that that decision took the supervisors took far away from the sharp end, where the financial action is.
The evening began bizarrely, with a video of a tit-and-bum show - dignified as burlesque, as if that somehow made it respectable - which earned tut-tuts from some of the women in the audience, followed by a couple of songs. We were then given an extended advert for KTLK, a left-wing radio station that aims to balance the right-wing rants of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk. The plug came from an aspiring Limbaugh of the Left, Richard Greene, described in the press release as "master of charisma, one of the leading communication coaches in the world". I was less than whelmed, a view shared by a man at the back of the room who, after ten minutes of this self-promotion, asked impatiently when we were going to hear from Brown. Greene was reduced to whingeing uncharismatically that such disrespect was out of order. Maybe, but it did bring Brown to the mike. Lesson one to the communication coach: don't overstay your welcome.
At the outset of her talk, Brown earned gasps of disgust and grunts of approval by describing banks as Ponzi schemes, thus simultaneously smearing them as illegal and bracketing them with Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford, two prominent villains of the stock market collapse. Her argument was that, like Ponzi schemes, they need new customers to pay off the old ones - but no more than any other business needs a constant throughput of customers. But banks are at root much simpler than that: they take in money, for which they pay a small rate of interest, and lend it at a higher rate of interest. The difference is their profit. No Ponzi required. Indeed, banks could run like savings and loans, relying on the same bunch of savers to provide cash for a standing army of borrowers.
Brown's big revelation was that banks lend more than ten times the amount of money they receive from depositors - a "secret" known as credit creation that is taught to every first-year economics student. Indeed, Brown later explained that the practice dated back to 17th century goldsmiths who noticed that their customers preferred trading promissory notes to walking around with lumps of gold. I believe it goes back a lot further than the 17th century, but the point is that it is neither new nor sinister.
The presentation went downhill from there. Brown told us that derivatives were "basically bets" - yes, but no more than any other investment as they all depend on a view of the future, even bank deposits. In fact derivatives are widely used in industry and farming to hedge against the risk of prices going bad. If that is a bet, so is an insurance policy and virtually every other financial instrument.
Then we got an attack on the Bank for International Settlements, smeared as Hitler's bank even though Brown later lauded the Fuhrer for "standing up to the banks, like Lincoln and Kennedy, who got shot for doing so". The BIS, it seems, was partly to blame for the credit crisis because of its insistence on mark to market rules and maintaining banks' capital ratio at no less than 8%, which strikes me as an edict designed to rein in bank lending rather than encouraging more foolhardiness. Brown skipped over the fact that BIS is owned by 55 central banks, including the European Central Bank and those of Russia and the US. It may not be blameless but it is certainly not the evil Swiss secret dictator that Brown made it out to be. But her dire warning was well received in a room buzzing with paranoia and conspiracy theories.
Creating state banks was the fourth of four possible crisis remedies Brown outlined. The first was nationalising the Federal Reserve, which I reckon would make next to no difference as if it steps out of line at present the government would soon slap it down. In any case, Brown admitted she "rather liked" Fed chairman Ben Bernanke "because he's a professor". Hmm.
Next came the proposal that the Fed should fund federal projects by issuing bonds - fine, but that begs the question of who is going to buy these bonds and on what terms they are going to be sold.
Thirdly, Brown suggested nationalising the present commercial banks, but only after their balance sheets had been cleaned up by getting rid of the derivatives and toxic loans. No word of the impact on the counterparties to those securities, who happen to include pension and mutual funds serving millions of ordinary Americans.
What did this chaotic jumble of an evening have to do with the rise of Hitler. I am not for a second suggesting that this well-meaning author, a lawyer who could easily be mistaken for a bank CEO's PA, might be about to march on the White House at the head of a mass army of revolutionaries. But she was feeding on the same fertile ground of fear, ignorance, prejudice, anger and simplistic solutions that enabled Hitler to overthrow the previous German government. And that is the greatest danger of this crisis: that it could spawn a populist leader who wrests power from a legitimate president whose policies are judged to have failed.
Overthrow Obama? This crowd of well-fed, affluent Democrats? Yes, because in the end even he came in for cosying up to the banks - so, Greene suggested, that he might avoid Lincoln and Kennedy's fate.
But in the end Brown revealed her true colours - as a middle-aged hippy. She said: "We hippies of the 1960s had that vision that abundance is everywhere, if we could just fix the system." Aaaawwww, sweet.
And, for the old gent who plaintively asked what he and his white-haired wife should do with their meagre savings, Brown giggled as she gave the opinion that "the stock market looks pretty good now." A closet capitalist after all.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Beckham end game by Bill Kay
One of the greatest problems for footballers (soccer players to spell it out for our American cousins) is what to do after they retire from the game. A few go into management, usually thinking midfielders who fancy themselves as tactical superstars and are willing to put up with the internal politics of every club they join, just so they can get their hands on the train set. Others, if they have a tongue in their head and can string two words together, go into TV commentary. Indeed, that has proved to be a useful resting place for those who want to go into management. And it soon exposes those who aren't up to much, like the tragic Paul Gascoigne.
The traditional refuge for many of the rest was to run a pub, but that looks pretty pathetic for anyone who has had a few years on a Premiership salary. The temptation for them is to act like the lottery winners they are and spend the rest of their lives doing not very much.
That leaves David Beckham. Not the brightest, and definitely far too wealthy to bother with the grind of management - which in any case tends to favour those who didn't get to the top as players. His squeaky voice militates against a career in TV, where again the money probably doesn't stack up, and I suspect that, like many kids, he prefers playing to talking about football.
But, give the lad credit, he was clearly thinking ahead when he agreed the extraordinary deal with LA Galaxy. An alleged $250 million over five years made sense even for someone of his wealth, and the standard of football is so low that he could easily see out his contract without breaking sweat. Bye bye European football as the years catch up with him.
But what we didn't know until now was the clause in his contract that gives him the right to buy a US soccer franchise and actually make serious money as an owner - with a little help from his advisers, naturally.
All this hullaballoo about AC Milan is merely a distraction and, from Beckham's point of view, a bonus.
In his first winter break at the Galaxy he went to Arsenal to train - the break between seasons in the US is a ludicrous five months, so he had to do something to keep fit. That deal went to plan, he trained with the Arsenal players, no more came of it, handshakes all round. Arsene Wenger isn't the sort to throw his careful schemes in the air to play an aging superstar for a couple of months.
But this winter was different. He went to AC Milan, who more pragmatically gave him a few games: the Italian game is based on superstars who drift in and out of the first team. That was great for Beckham as it gave him match practice on top of his training routines - and, amazingly, he showed he has still got it at the top level. More importantly, that enabled him to show the England manager, Fabio Capello, that he was still capable of playing for England, and Capello could easily compare notes with the AC management. I suspect he also enjoys playing in Serie A after the struggles of the US league, where he is a man among boys with all the frustrations that entails.
That gave rise to the recent tug-o'-war between AC and Galaxy over Beckham's contract, which he must have loved at his age - 34 this year. But we now know that he was never going to abandon Galaxy entirely, because of that clause letting him buy a US club franchise, which I believe he sees as his long-term future after he stops playing.
Hence the convoluted compromise letting Beckham stay in Milan until the end of the current Italian season in May, taking a month off then joining Galaxy in July for the second half of the US season and enabling Galaxy's opponents to cash in on the Beckham factor at the box office.
'I don't mind if the Galaxy fans boo me,' Beckham says, I'll bet he doesn't. He is playing a much bigger game for much bigger stakes.
The traditional refuge for many of the rest was to run a pub, but that looks pretty pathetic for anyone who has had a few years on a Premiership salary. The temptation for them is to act like the lottery winners they are and spend the rest of their lives doing not very much.
That leaves David Beckham. Not the brightest, and definitely far too wealthy to bother with the grind of management - which in any case tends to favour those who didn't get to the top as players. His squeaky voice militates against a career in TV, where again the money probably doesn't stack up, and I suspect that, like many kids, he prefers playing to talking about football.
But, give the lad credit, he was clearly thinking ahead when he agreed the extraordinary deal with LA Galaxy. An alleged $250 million over five years made sense even for someone of his wealth, and the standard of football is so low that he could easily see out his contract without breaking sweat. Bye bye European football as the years catch up with him.
But what we didn't know until now was the clause in his contract that gives him the right to buy a US soccer franchise and actually make serious money as an owner - with a little help from his advisers, naturally.
All this hullaballoo about AC Milan is merely a distraction and, from Beckham's point of view, a bonus.
In his first winter break at the Galaxy he went to Arsenal to train - the break between seasons in the US is a ludicrous five months, so he had to do something to keep fit. That deal went to plan, he trained with the Arsenal players, no more came of it, handshakes all round. Arsene Wenger isn't the sort to throw his careful schemes in the air to play an aging superstar for a couple of months.
But this winter was different. He went to AC Milan, who more pragmatically gave him a few games: the Italian game is based on superstars who drift in and out of the first team. That was great for Beckham as it gave him match practice on top of his training routines - and, amazingly, he showed he has still got it at the top level. More importantly, that enabled him to show the England manager, Fabio Capello, that he was still capable of playing for England, and Capello could easily compare notes with the AC management. I suspect he also enjoys playing in Serie A after the struggles of the US league, where he is a man among boys with all the frustrations that entails.
That gave rise to the recent tug-o'-war between AC and Galaxy over Beckham's contract, which he must have loved at his age - 34 this year. But we now know that he was never going to abandon Galaxy entirely, because of that clause letting him buy a US club franchise, which I believe he sees as his long-term future after he stops playing.
Hence the convoluted compromise letting Beckham stay in Milan until the end of the current Italian season in May, taking a month off then joining Galaxy in July for the second half of the US season and enabling Galaxy's opponents to cash in on the Beckham factor at the box office.
'I don't mind if the Galaxy fans boo me,' Beckham says, I'll bet he doesn't. He is playing a much bigger game for much bigger stakes.
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Suicidal thoughts by Bill Kay
It’s amazing how a little close examination can unpack a vast number of unexpected facets of many everyday phenomena.
Take suicide. I don’t mean to belittle it by calling it everyday, though I believe that someone, somewhere on the planet, does kill themselves every hour, let alone every day. It’s always there, a part of our existence that for most people is not much more than an object of mild curiosity. No one wants to encourage suicide, especially in anyone we know, and I guess we all support measures to reduce the number of times it happens, either through making people less inclined to do it or through preventative measures such as removing or limiting the equipment or circumstances that allow suicide.
The odd snigger about suicide being illegal in many parts of the world – a piece of crass legal pedantry - and that’s about it for most people. Yet a Google search yields more than 69 million results, so there is a major suicide industry encompassing medical, legal, academic and sociological considerations. You can get help to do away with yourself, and to have second thoughts, as well as interminable analyses of whether second thoughts do any good.
I was made to think about suicide by a lengthy but tetchy exchange between a prosecutor and an expert witness this week in the murder retrial of Phil Spector, the millionaire record producer responsible for the Wall of Sound in the 1960s. Spector’s defence is that the victim, a small-time actress called Lana Clarkson, committed suicide when she was shot in the mouth by Spector’s Colt 38 revolver.
Naturally the prosecution is working hard to discredit this suggestion. There is no proof either way – no suicide note, no declaration of intent to kill herself, and no fingerprints on the gun.
We have had intense examination of the crime scene, and minute measurement of where and how far Clarkson’s teeth and blood flew. Someone removed and wiped the gun, so its location gave no clues.
That leaves room for endless theorising over whether Clarkson was in a suicidal frame of mind – again, nothing conclusive so both sides are straining at every shred of evidence in their favour.
The latest expert to take the stand had written learned papers on the chances of an impulsive suicide. If impulsiveness was likely, that would help the defence as they would not have to show a lengthy history of suicidal tendencies by Clarkson.
Listening to the cross-examination, I realised that I had had an oversimplified view of the thought processes leading up to a suicide attempt. The simple distinction is between someone, like my mother-in-law, who plans the event, researches poisons or firearms or length of drop from buildings or bridges, thinks about it long and hard and – at the appropriate moment - takes a rational decision to go ahead, and the impulse suicide who happens on a lethal dose of pills or a loaded gun or a convenient method described on the internet and decides to do it there and then.
But life, and death, are more complicated than that. Interviews with failed suicide attempters suggest a an in and out, up and down process that might go on for days, weeks, months or years. It might or might not involve acquiring plenty of information. It might involve screwing up courage, not amassing enough and going on with normal life until the next time.
The Spector trial exchanges highlighted San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, a famous suicide site. The witness said that there was a proposal to raise the parapet from its present four and a half feet, which sounds ludicrously low in view of the history, to around eight feet. This might not be insurmountable, but it would at least force would-be suicides to think a little longer about what they are contemplating. Apparently a proportion will be sufficiently deterred, physically or emotionally, to give up and go home. It will save lives.
But much of the courtroom discussion centred on whether someone who takes the trouble to travel to the bridge can be said to be impulsive. No one lives on the bridge, so every would-be suicide has to travel there. Most live within Marin County, the territory which includes San Francisco. But many come from other parts of America and even from other countries, after journeys that must take days if you allow for getting to and from airports – even more if you include the need to book and buy a plane or train ticket, or drive from the US east coast.
Can such long-distance travellers be impulsive suicides? Surely they have all planned their deaths, whether or not they succeed? But that doesn’t take account of the up and down process leading to an attempt.
Quite a few are in effect tourists – with a special interest, certainly, and with varying degrees of purposefulness and determination. Some may just want to see the site, imagine what it’s like, how easy it is at a practical level, where you might have to park your car, all the mundanities that can get in the way. And, while going over all that minutiae, some say to themselves ‘This looks easy, I think I’ll just go and do it.’ And they do, hence the value of a higher parapet. Others visit several times before making a final decision to go ahead or not.
So, like most human activities, it’s messy. But are all these people impulsive or are they planners?
In one sense it’s an academic question, literally. All that really matters is whether people die. We know that people have an infinite range of reasons for wanting to kill themselves, and there have been many studies of the biggest risk factors – depression, excess alcohol, loss of job or marriage or house and so on. Unfortunately these cannot be eliminated by edict or they might have been already (though being locked in a job or marriage can be as much a reason for suicide as losing them unwillingly, I’d have thought).
Court cases can easily get bogged down in tiny disputes, and whether Lana Clarkson killed herself on the spur of the moment is just such an issue. For what it’s worth, as a non-expert who has attended only a few days of a trial which began at the end of last October, what I’ve heard of the blood and teeth evidence suggests to me she did not pull the trigger – but I could be totally wrong. Like many 40-year-old actresses whose career was probably on the slide, she seemed to be emotionally volatile, so in the small hours of the morning with a load of drink inside her and a loaded gun to hand, who knows what might have happened. And the Spector side argue that the bloodstains on the jacket he was wearing show conclusively that he could not have been near enough to fire the gun.
The jury will decide, but I have had a free lesson in the nature of suicide that has taught me that it is a far more complex business than I had really appreciated before. And if you are ever tempted, just lie down and count to 100. With any luck the feeling will pass.
Take suicide. I don’t mean to belittle it by calling it everyday, though I believe that someone, somewhere on the planet, does kill themselves every hour, let alone every day. It’s always there, a part of our existence that for most people is not much more than an object of mild curiosity. No one wants to encourage suicide, especially in anyone we know, and I guess we all support measures to reduce the number of times it happens, either through making people less inclined to do it or through preventative measures such as removing or limiting the equipment or circumstances that allow suicide.
The odd snigger about suicide being illegal in many parts of the world – a piece of crass legal pedantry - and that’s about it for most people. Yet a Google search yields more than 69 million results, so there is a major suicide industry encompassing medical, legal, academic and sociological considerations. You can get help to do away with yourself, and to have second thoughts, as well as interminable analyses of whether second thoughts do any good.
I was made to think about suicide by a lengthy but tetchy exchange between a prosecutor and an expert witness this week in the murder retrial of Phil Spector, the millionaire record producer responsible for the Wall of Sound in the 1960s. Spector’s defence is that the victim, a small-time actress called Lana Clarkson, committed suicide when she was shot in the mouth by Spector’s Colt 38 revolver.
Naturally the prosecution is working hard to discredit this suggestion. There is no proof either way – no suicide note, no declaration of intent to kill herself, and no fingerprints on the gun.
We have had intense examination of the crime scene, and minute measurement of where and how far Clarkson’s teeth and blood flew. Someone removed and wiped the gun, so its location gave no clues.
That leaves room for endless theorising over whether Clarkson was in a suicidal frame of mind – again, nothing conclusive so both sides are straining at every shred of evidence in their favour.
The latest expert to take the stand had written learned papers on the chances of an impulsive suicide. If impulsiveness was likely, that would help the defence as they would not have to show a lengthy history of suicidal tendencies by Clarkson.
Listening to the cross-examination, I realised that I had had an oversimplified view of the thought processes leading up to a suicide attempt. The simple distinction is between someone, like my mother-in-law, who plans the event, researches poisons or firearms or length of drop from buildings or bridges, thinks about it long and hard and – at the appropriate moment - takes a rational decision to go ahead, and the impulse suicide who happens on a lethal dose of pills or a loaded gun or a convenient method described on the internet and decides to do it there and then.
But life, and death, are more complicated than that. Interviews with failed suicide attempters suggest a an in and out, up and down process that might go on for days, weeks, months or years. It might or might not involve acquiring plenty of information. It might involve screwing up courage, not amassing enough and going on with normal life until the next time.
The Spector trial exchanges highlighted San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, a famous suicide site. The witness said that there was a proposal to raise the parapet from its present four and a half feet, which sounds ludicrously low in view of the history, to around eight feet. This might not be insurmountable, but it would at least force would-be suicides to think a little longer about what they are contemplating. Apparently a proportion will be sufficiently deterred, physically or emotionally, to give up and go home. It will save lives.
But much of the courtroom discussion centred on whether someone who takes the trouble to travel to the bridge can be said to be impulsive. No one lives on the bridge, so every would-be suicide has to travel there. Most live within Marin County, the territory which includes San Francisco. But many come from other parts of America and even from other countries, after journeys that must take days if you allow for getting to and from airports – even more if you include the need to book and buy a plane or train ticket, or drive from the US east coast.
Can such long-distance travellers be impulsive suicides? Surely they have all planned their deaths, whether or not they succeed? But that doesn’t take account of the up and down process leading to an attempt.
Quite a few are in effect tourists – with a special interest, certainly, and with varying degrees of purposefulness and determination. Some may just want to see the site, imagine what it’s like, how easy it is at a practical level, where you might have to park your car, all the mundanities that can get in the way. And, while going over all that minutiae, some say to themselves ‘This looks easy, I think I’ll just go and do it.’ And they do, hence the value of a higher parapet. Others visit several times before making a final decision to go ahead or not.
So, like most human activities, it’s messy. But are all these people impulsive or are they planners?
In one sense it’s an academic question, literally. All that really matters is whether people die. We know that people have an infinite range of reasons for wanting to kill themselves, and there have been many studies of the biggest risk factors – depression, excess alcohol, loss of job or marriage or house and so on. Unfortunately these cannot be eliminated by edict or they might have been already (though being locked in a job or marriage can be as much a reason for suicide as losing them unwillingly, I’d have thought).
Court cases can easily get bogged down in tiny disputes, and whether Lana Clarkson killed herself on the spur of the moment is just such an issue. For what it’s worth, as a non-expert who has attended only a few days of a trial which began at the end of last October, what I’ve heard of the blood and teeth evidence suggests to me she did not pull the trigger – but I could be totally wrong. Like many 40-year-old actresses whose career was probably on the slide, she seemed to be emotionally volatile, so in the small hours of the morning with a load of drink inside her and a loaded gun to hand, who knows what might have happened. And the Spector side argue that the bloodstains on the jacket he was wearing show conclusively that he could not have been near enough to fire the gun.
The jury will decide, but I have had a free lesson in the nature of suicide that has taught me that it is a far more complex business than I had really appreciated before. And if you are ever tempted, just lie down and count to 100. With any luck the feeling will pass.
Monday, March 2, 2009
Buddy can you spare a Buddy? by Bill Kay
Old people applying to be lifeguards. Young and old queuing for food, drink, anything free. Real beggars - not the con merchants looking for an easy living, but the sad, sad losers with that awful combination of hope, despair and desperation in their eyes, with a facial expression that is preparing them and you for your refusal.
These are just some of the daily snapshots of the 21st century depression that leap out every day in southern California, one of the richest territories on the planet.
There are hundreds more around America. Some are only indirectly related to the economy, like the even older people being moved from private Florida nursing homes to taxpayer-funded county hospitals because they had entrusted their entire life savings to Bernie Madoff and could no longer pay the fees of the private refuge.
But LA hits me hardest because I live near there and the unemployment rate is one of the highest in the country - 10.5% compared with 8.7% for the whole of California and 8.3% for the entire US. I suspect that, as so often, LA is merely setting the trend. Within a few months the national jobless rate will be over 10% and where will LA be then? 15%? 20%?
These are the dry statistics of thousands after thousands losing jobs, homes and dreams. January's cinema attendances boomed just as Hollywood threw 23,000 on the street, many never to work again. No beggars to mar the Oscars, though: the streets were closed, guarded by police.
As is often the case, misfortune is polarising people. A commodities trader - presumably successful - has been on youtube asking why his taxes should be spent on giving economic stimulus to losers. Better to let the banks foreclose on their houses and he and his pals will put money into the economy by buying those houses cheap.
In a way it's a mercy that we don't have a red-toothed Republican in the White House. Instead, we have the freshly blooded Barack Obama, honeymoon over, thrown into announcing his first Budget, trying to keep faith with his millions of still dewy-eyed supporters for whom he can do no wrong and who yet expect so much. It's an impossible combination that I fear is bound to end in disillusion and resentment.
He has not started well, pandering to the view that he can walk on water by unveiling a Budget that offers a painless way out of the worst economic quagmire for at least 70 years - some say for a century. Tax the rich and improve efficiency and we'll all be OK.
I don't think so. There aren't enough rich, and those that are happen to be the most tenacious at holding onto their money - yes, that's why they're rich - and also have the best tax advice. As for eliminating waste, in the 20th century it took a Margaret Thatcher at her most ruthless to get anywhere at all with such a campaign, such are the forces of inertia ranged against anyone trying to ditch pet projects and jobs for the boys. But maybe Obama is simply letting us down gently, and can't bring himself to say so.
Meanwhile in LA we have an election for a new mayor, an exercise in democracy that seems as irrelevant as translating Shakespeare's sonnets into Urdu and transcribing them onto a grain of rice.
And yet, depending what bubble you inhabit here, there is a strange unreality about the downturn. You still hear radio hosts insisting it isn't really happening and reports of it have been got up by the meeja or the politicians or the fat cats in order to... well, at that point the explanation gets a little hazy.
But, apart from the growing number of boarded-up shops, there is little direct visible sign of what is happening. The story about 156 people applying for 25 lifeguard jobs at Huntington Beach, one of the big surfing beaches, appeared on TV this morning.
In Pasadena life has been continuing almost normally. A restaurant is opening on the main street, Colorado Boulevard. Our local Pavilions supermarket, part of Safeway, is holding a grand re-opening, not coincidentally timed to get in ahead of the opening across the road of a new branch of Fresh and Easy, the experimental west coast grocery chain launched by Tesco of the UK.
So there is economic activity. Most of my friends are unaffected because they weren't working anyway - except on 'projects' that don't pay right now but might if they get optioned by some sugar daddy who didn't give zillions to Bernie Madoff or Allen Stanford.
These are just some of the daily snapshots of the 21st century depression that leap out every day in southern California, one of the richest territories on the planet.
There are hundreds more around America. Some are only indirectly related to the economy, like the even older people being moved from private Florida nursing homes to taxpayer-funded county hospitals because they had entrusted their entire life savings to Bernie Madoff and could no longer pay the fees of the private refuge.
But LA hits me hardest because I live near there and the unemployment rate is one of the highest in the country - 10.5% compared with 8.7% for the whole of California and 8.3% for the entire US. I suspect that, as so often, LA is merely setting the trend. Within a few months the national jobless rate will be over 10% and where will LA be then? 15%? 20%?
These are the dry statistics of thousands after thousands losing jobs, homes and dreams. January's cinema attendances boomed just as Hollywood threw 23,000 on the street, many never to work again. No beggars to mar the Oscars, though: the streets were closed, guarded by police.
As is often the case, misfortune is polarising people. A commodities trader - presumably successful - has been on youtube asking why his taxes should be spent on giving economic stimulus to losers. Better to let the banks foreclose on their houses and he and his pals will put money into the economy by buying those houses cheap.
In a way it's a mercy that we don't have a red-toothed Republican in the White House. Instead, we have the freshly blooded Barack Obama, honeymoon over, thrown into announcing his first Budget, trying to keep faith with his millions of still dewy-eyed supporters for whom he can do no wrong and who yet expect so much. It's an impossible combination that I fear is bound to end in disillusion and resentment.
He has not started well, pandering to the view that he can walk on water by unveiling a Budget that offers a painless way out of the worst economic quagmire for at least 70 years - some say for a century. Tax the rich and improve efficiency and we'll all be OK.
I don't think so. There aren't enough rich, and those that are happen to be the most tenacious at holding onto their money - yes, that's why they're rich - and also have the best tax advice. As for eliminating waste, in the 20th century it took a Margaret Thatcher at her most ruthless to get anywhere at all with such a campaign, such are the forces of inertia ranged against anyone trying to ditch pet projects and jobs for the boys. But maybe Obama is simply letting us down gently, and can't bring himself to say so.
Meanwhile in LA we have an election for a new mayor, an exercise in democracy that seems as irrelevant as translating Shakespeare's sonnets into Urdu and transcribing them onto a grain of rice.
And yet, depending what bubble you inhabit here, there is a strange unreality about the downturn. You still hear radio hosts insisting it isn't really happening and reports of it have been got up by the meeja or the politicians or the fat cats in order to... well, at that point the explanation gets a little hazy.
But, apart from the growing number of boarded-up shops, there is little direct visible sign of what is happening. The story about 156 people applying for 25 lifeguard jobs at Huntington Beach, one of the big surfing beaches, appeared on TV this morning.
In Pasadena life has been continuing almost normally. A restaurant is opening on the main street, Colorado Boulevard. Our local Pavilions supermarket, part of Safeway, is holding a grand re-opening, not coincidentally timed to get in ahead of the opening across the road of a new branch of Fresh and Easy, the experimental west coast grocery chain launched by Tesco of the UK.
So there is economic activity. Most of my friends are unaffected because they weren't working anyway - except on 'projects' that don't pay right now but might if they get optioned by some sugar daddy who didn't give zillions to Bernie Madoff or Allen Stanford.
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