Originally written August 23, 2005, a John Q Treasury reprint:
She is slight and crisply grey suit clad, her hair pinned into a bun and her lip bitten. The office is large, with only one window letting in dusk’s strained light. Three walls are covered with maps and graphs, each pinned neatly in place. In one corner, a muted television changes channels each minute and the final wall is nothing but crisp LCD screens. Some display stock tickers, others charts, still others a blur of words or news tickers. The woman sits cross legged in her chair at the center of this, completely motionless. She is looking in the direction of a series of charts whose titles all relate to housing and credit risk derivatives, but her eyes are unfocused…
When the man says her name, “Libby”, she doesn’t so much as twitch until long seconds have gone by. Slowly, with a shift of her weight, she swivels the chair to face the silver haired man.
“John.”
He smiles faintly, “Libby.”
“Credit derivatives.”
“Offloading default risk from banks onto investors. The chairman says they make the market much… stronger.”
“Who’s buying these derivatives?”
“Hedge funds are big. Those boys need big profits. No one parks their money in a hedge fund to get mutual fund returns.”
“Lot of them are getting mutual fund returns.” She nods towards one of the charts
“I’m guessing their risk profile isn’t the same as a mutual fund’s.” It’s not a question but Libby nods to another chart.
“Nope. Lots of refi exposure too. ‘Cause the risk of someone defaulting on a second mortgate is no big deal.” She gestures with her chin to a series of charts pinned to one wall and he turns to look at them.
“Time to sale of housing. Seems to be going up in a lot of markets.”
“When a market hits a sharp discontinuity who gets hurt worst, first?”
“People who expect it to continue trend.”
“How do many hedge funds make their money?”
“Buy on variations from trend expecting a return to trend.” The silver haired man turns back to Libby. His voice is weary, “are we going to hit a discontinuity?”
“Ever blow bubbles as a kid?” One corner of her mouth tilts up. “Any of them ever not burst?”
John shakes his head, but says, “well, not that I know of. But maybe one’s still blowing on the wind somewhere.”
is the title of an email a friend sent to me about the threats made by Britain and the Netherlands to Iceland, when Iceland’s President refused to ratify a bill which would have required Iceland to pay 5.5 billion US to the Netherlands and Britain. When Iceland’s banks failed, Britain and the Netherlands made up the deposits, and now they want Iceland to pay. If Iceland doesn’t, they have threatened to spike both its entry to the European Union and its 10 billion dollar aid package from the IMF.
The President’s decision means there must be a referendum to determine the fate of the bill. A lot of folks are decrying this and insisting that Iceland should pay, but the background and the consequences aren’t that simple.
First, by European law, only the first 20K of each account is covered. Iceland already passed a bill in which they agreed to pay that back, and that bill was not vetoed. England and the Netherlands insisted that they cover all of the money, not just the amount legally required.
Second, Iceland is a small country,with a population of 316,960. That isn’t even as large as most Canadian suburbs. The cost per citizen, including children, people out of work, and seniors, would be $17,352. Given Iceland is in complete economic collapse, that is a massive burden they simply can’t afford.
Third, the banks were essentially unregulated. Britain, yes Britain, gave them licenses to operate despite the fact that other European nations lobbyed against it. Given how lightly regulated British banks were, this means that Icelandic banks were being used by the City (London) to do things too dubious even for the City. And given what the City was (and is) willing to do, that means they were black holes. You put your money in a country like Iceland where the banks are set up for those sort of unregulated operations, you take your bloody chances. The old saying “you can’t cheat an honest man” applies. The depositors wanted largely unregulated earnings. In exchange they need to accept the risk that comes with it.
Fourth, a fifth of the population had signed a petition asking the President to block the law and force a referendum. Responding to that is democracy.
Fifth: the corporations are limited liability corporations. Are countries responsibility for all the debts of limited liability corporations in their country? I don’t think so.
Britain and the Netherlands are extorting money with what amounts to threats to turn Iceland into a third world country where people may well starve to death. They are doing so to bail out depositors who were greedy or stupid enough, or both, to be put money into banks set up precisely because they were doing stuff too risky even for London to do and which are limited liability companies.
After Gordon Brown used anti-terrorism laws to seize Icelandic assets, this is a further descent into thuggery and blackmail and those who say that Icelanders should pay it all off should think very carefully if they want their country to be forced to pay off all its private companies debts to foreigners.
For shame.
I received news today that my father had died. He’d had pneumonia, the “old man’s friend”, but somehow I didn’t expect him to die of it. He’d been written off so many times and pulled through that even though I thought it was theoretically possible, I didn’t really believe this would be it. And perhaps the idea that my father could die, that it was possible, wasn’t something I really believed, emotionally
But he could. And he has.
A big man, both tall and broad with a red face, my father was one of those men for whom “larger than life” was coined. His temper was legendary, and he often seemed to radiate fury. I had seen him, in his prime, wade into large crowds, and a path would melt open in front of him without a word being spoken or him having to push at all. I have seen men literally shake when he lowered his voice to a whisper. His ready temper made him a bad father in many respects, and a worse husband, but it had its uses. I still remember, when I was 23, and extremely ill, the way my father used his fury, a living thing which seemed barely leashed, to make sure I got the care I needed, and was treated the way he felt I should be.
He had me late, at age 39, so I never knew him as a young man. From the time I was 1 till I was 5, we lived in Malaysia, and we seemed to be quite wealthy. But a business deal went bad, due to politics, and my father lost it all. He never really recovered. There was a nasty edge to his temper afterwards which I don’t remember from before. Always a bit of a boozer, he hit the alcohol harder, drinking every night when he came home. We returned to Canada, but somehow he seemed out of place there. He was a man meant for Asia, a man more at home in other countries than in his own.
In my life, he seemed most comfortable as a boss, especially in third world countries. When he managed a large project in Bangladesh during my teens, he seemed in his element The temper which in Canada caused him problems was shrugged off, and his loyalty and fairness shone through and were respected by those who worked for him. I remember his second in command, a local man, telling me that he didn’t care about my father’s rages, what he cared about was that if my father was wrong, or did wrong, he would admit and apologize. What mattered is that when man’s wife was sick, and needed medicine, he’d get it for him. What mattered is that if a man needed help in court, my father would be there for him. In Bangladesh the temper was not an issue, and his virtues were respected.
Infamously focused on “getting the job done”, he didn’t manage UN FAO (Food and Agriculture) headquarters well, cutting past their procedures and concerns time and time again. I remember hearing the blow-by-blow of his battles with “Rome”, year after year. He was protected by the fact that the locals whom he was there to help, including the Chief Forester and the Minister, loved him.
Eventually, of course, Rome finished him off. They told his supporters in country that it was bad for his career to stay so long in one place, removed him from Bangladesh and his support, then they never gave him work ever again. A beautiful piece of bureaucratic infighting, from which he never fully recovered, being a man who needed a job to do which mattered. Playing nice and by the rules had won out over getting the job done, and my father was a dinosaur, a man who grew up in the Great Depression, a man with little finesse and no respect for rules which didn’t make sense to him. The bull had been gelded.
My own relationship with my Dad was rocky. I didn’t like how he treated me, and more importantly, I didn’t like how he treated my mother. For a couple years in my twenties I cut off all contact with him, and unfortunately with my mother (it being one of those households where it was impossible to get to the wife without going through the husband.) His drinking and his temper revolted me.
As with many men, much of what I am today is in direct reaction to my father—in direct reaction against him. And yet, the truth is I have many of his characteristics, including his distaste for game playing, his belief that doing the job right is what matters and his unwillingness to tolerate bullshit and hypocrisy.
But as he aged, he mellowed. We arranged that there would be no drinking during my visits. And, perhaps most importantly, when I was deathly ill in my early 20s, he charged out from Victoria BC, to Toronto and helped in every way he could. It’s something I’ve never forgotten. The one time it really mattered, he came through.
So I’ll miss the old bastard. I wish I’d taken his illness more seriously this time, and gone out to see him, but I’ll try and honor his memory by remembering the best of him, the man who got the job done in the third world, saving many lives and to hell with Rome; the man who charged out to Toronto and helped me when I was sick; the man who helped many of those who needed it, who was loyal to his friends and those who worked for him.
If there is an afterlife, may he find in it a battle worthy of his rage, and the wisdom to know when and who to unleash it on. In many ways he wasn’t a good man, but he was a man, and if he wasn’t a good family man, it is still true that the world is a better place for him having lived than if he had not.
May we all be able to say the same when our own time comes.
[Barney Frank’s bill, H.R. 4173] supports the biggest banks. It authorizes Federal Reserve banks to provide as much as $4 trillion in emergency funding the next time Wall Street crashes. So much for “no-more-bailouts” talk. That is more than twice what the Fed pumped into markets this time around.
Best of all, the bill contains a provision that, in the event of another government request for emergency aid to prop up the financial system, debate in Congress be limited to just 10 hours.
Hahahahahaha.
1) the next crisis is inevitable, and the elites know it
2) they don’t intend to get stuck with the bill
3) Barney Frank is a whore. I find it funny that Dodd’s the one in trouble, because Frank is far far worse, and has been all along. He’s also smart enough to know exactly what he’s doing.
Today is my mother’s birthday, or would be if she wasn’t dead. In honor of her memory, I’m re-posting what I wrote about her last mother’s day.
It being mother’s day, and the entire world conspiring to tell me about it, over and over again, I’ve been thinking a bit about my mum. She died 3 years ago of cancer. I spent her last two weeks by her bed, and she died the night I told her that everyone had come and that it was ok for her to die. By that point she couldn’t speak, and while she didn’t seem to be in much pain, she certainly wasn’t enjoying what was left of her life.
She had lived her life for other people–for me, and for her husband. I don’t know any of her close friends who didn’t think she should have gotten a divorce when I was a young kid, but she didn’t. At that time I’m pretty sure it was because she was threatened with losing me.
But really, the woman she was when I was young died when I was 13. I remember it well. My father had gotten a job with the UN, in Bangladesh. My mother didn’t want to go. As far as my father was concerned, where the husband went the wife went.
In Canada she had a job, as the secretary to the woman who ran the Coquitlam library system. It was the most senior secretarial position in the organization and quite responsible. In her early forties, she looked ten years younger, fit and slim, with dark black hair. She walked everywhere, regularly walking 30 or 40 blocks a day, and while I think it’s safe to say she wasn’t happy, she had a life with some happiness in it.
She went with my father to Bangladesh. I went to boarding school in Vancouver. 4 months later I visited my parents, for Christmas, in Bangladesh. She had no job, no life outside the house. She had loved children, and they loved her, but now she had no child to look after, neither me nor our cousins. Her life was completely her husband’s. My mother had put on 40 pounds, her hair was half gray and her eyes were dull.
She had been broken.
The woman she was had died. Like a man who cages a nightingale in his fist, by not letting it have any freedom, my father had killed what he loved. I don’t know if he ever even realized it, or if he did, if he cared, or if the pleasure of imposing his will made up for it.
The women in my family usually make it to their late 80s and my father was 10 years older than my mother and not in good health. So I always assumed she’d have a good 20 years free. She didn’t.
But she died free.
About 3 weeks before she died, when she knew she had cancer but assumed she had 8 months to a year left, we talked. She told me that she had decided to move out, and that she would never live with him again. I was never so happy for her.
A few days later she collapsed, and never walked again. Then she died.
But she died free.
My wish to you and for myself, then, is this.
Don’t die free.
Live free.
To all my readers, a happy new year. I hope your last year was good, and that your new year will be better.
It’s odd, but new years eve I received I note that my old headmaster, Alan Brown, had died. I suspect Alan (or Mr. Brown, as I still think of him) thought I didn’t like him, but in fact I both like and respected him.
He ran a highly disciplined school, and was a stern taskmaster, but there was also a deep kindness in him. He knew every student’s name, of around 500 and kept a firm finger on the pulse of the school. If there were problems, he knew what they were, and they got dealt with if at all possible. I remember in particular him asking my permission to deal with one kid who was tormenting me in grade 9. Of course, I was horrified at the thought, but he swore to me that he wouldn’t make things worse, so I gave my ok. And indeed, the kid stopped bothering me. To this day I have no idea what he said, but I was very impressed.
I don’t think I was his type of his teenager. He was big on “building characer”, athletics, and so on and I wasn’t the sort of student the school really admired: square jawed, athletic and brilliant. But I don’t remember him ever being unkind and in fact I remember his kindness well and it impressed me all the more because I wasn’t his preferred kind of student.
I remember in particular making him absolutely furious (though he never said a word to me directly) when there was a day we were supposed to skip lunch to show we understood hunger. I was, I think, the only student at the senior school who walked down the junior school and ate. I had a race that afternoon, and be damned if I was going to run it without fuel. The race took place in the semi-wilderness of the University of British Columbia’s endowment lands, and the course was not well marked. So about half the runners ran off in the wrong direction, and the race was called. So I made him furious for, in the end, nothing.
But that epitomized much of my stay at Saints. As the years went on I can became sullen and stubborn, not doing enough to be punishable, but definitely a pain in the butt.
My last memory of him, which saddens me slightly, is after graduation. Having hated the school with a passion (though still preferring it to living at home), I didn’t go to most of the graduation events. I did go to one, at a very nice mansion on the coast, just to see how the other half lived. It was an area with no bus service, so I walked in. When I was leaving, Alan drove by in his car, with a couple of other students, and asked if I wanted a lift. I waved him off.
I’m sure he thought it an insult to him, but in fact, I didn’t like the people he was with. The event was the last event involving Saints I intended to ever go to, and I wanted to put the school behind me.
Nonetheless I remember him fondly. He was a good man, stern but kind, who seemed not to have a mean bone in his body (though that certainly didn’t stop him from ladling out punishment duty.) I don’t know if there’s an afterlife, but if there is, my best wishes go with him. He, and his family, can be proud of the life he lived and the man he was.
