... or whatever the Village
holds while waiting for something to happen.
I took a quick tour of Pravda on the Potomac and Izvestia on the Hudson, and I'm not seeing any great enthusiasm for handing the Bush administration $800 billion dollars to do whatever the fuck it wants with using the same decision makers and consultants who got us into the mess in the first place.
The only thing I see in WaPo is a hilarious "balanced" column by Sebastian Malloy, who writes about "Hank" Paulson's "moment of truth" without describing either the moment, the truth, or what the policy outcome should be, and nothing at all from Broderella, who has a thumbsucker on master debaters of times present and past. The Times has nothing on the bailout at all, though they do manage to sneak in a feuilleton on the "surreal silence" of Finland's forests. A buried metaphor? Paulson, quelle surprise wants a "clean bill" that helps only bankers.* I conclude that the Village has no narrative to deal with the matter, and no conventional wisdom; otherwise the editorial pages would be full of it. Well, the editorial pages are always full of it, but you know what I mean.
So, let me burnish my credentials for the time when I apply for an extremely well paid job as a commentator on the teebee by explaining what's happening today, and predicting the future, one entire day ahead!
Today, Sunday, three important things are happening:
1. The Village's official narrative is being invented on the talk shows. Since it's being invented on the fly by stupid and fearful people, it won't be a very good one, but I don't know what it is, because I don't have a teebee.
2. The Wall Street boiz who can still afford it are playing golf right now. In a few hours, they're going to head for the 19th hole and get sloppy drunk. Some of them will see on the scroll that the Village hasn't yet given them the $800 billion to which they are entitled, and they will get even more drunk.
3. The Powers That Be are working through the weekend. Paulson is shouting "Give me $800 billion or I shoot this kitten!" The hard-core Rs are chanting "We hate kittens!" The Wall Street Rs are saying "Gosh, Hank's language is a little crude, but we really need the money!!!" Steney Hoyer is shouting "So where's my cut?" Harry Reid is saying, "Gosh, Steney's language is a little crude, but could we put in a few million for kitty litter?" And the Obama campaign is sayingMR SUBLIMINAL As Paul Volcker bangs his head on the desk "Kittens? I thought we were here to talk about ponies!" As indeed they are...
On Monday:
1. Congress will get a wave of phone calls and faxes and even FedEx's from outraged little people citizens whoa see the whole process for the legalized theft that it is.
Yes, I plan to do this, and so should you -- it's the only way to make the rest of this horrible scenario not come true. Pressure did work on FISA the first time, at least. And it did work on Social Security. Of course, in neither case did we have the extremely coincidental crisis atmosphere that enables Shock Doctrine policies like this to be put in place in third world countries like ours.
That said:
2. The brokers will straggle into their cubes on Wall Street horribly hung-over and low in their animal spirits, some of them drunk from their eye-opener in the limo, and the market will panic again, undoing all Friday's gains.
3. The key log right now is the Obama campaign, and late in the day, they will cave -- because the drunk brokers caused the market to tank -- and approve the$800 billion, because all the experts say making this kind of "hard decision" is the right thing to do. A Potemkin homeowners program will be extracted, say $250 million.
4. That will throw the still solvent middle class under the bus with everyone else. And they will know it.
5. Ponies for everyone!
Yes, I really, really hope I am wrong.
NOTE * The savage irony here is that programs, like HOLC, that help homeowners, also help bankers.
The crisis is not one of liquidity, but solvency. An $800 billion transfusion of liquidity into an insolvent system won't cure a thing, though it may lend the patient a temporary and illusory flush of health.
The way to restore solvency is to clean up the banks balance sheets by reducing the debt that cannot be paid; unpayable debts are the mess on all the banks' balance sheets that they're each afraid to show each other. How to do that? Set up HOLC-style debt reduction workouts for homeowners; by making the homeowners solvent with the workouts, the banks with loans out to those homeowners get their solvency back, too. Gawd, I hope I'm getting this right! See here for Roubini and Hillary explaining it. HOLC has worked in the past, and even made the government a profit.
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Ha! Made me look--from Wiki
Feuilleton (a diminutive of French feuillet, the leaf of a book) was originally a kind of supplement attached to the political portion of French newspapers. Its inventors were Julien Louis Geoffroy and Bertin the Elder, editors of the Journal des Débats. It was not usually printed on a separate sheet, but merely separated from the political part of the newspaper by a line, and printed in smaller type. In French newspapers it consisted chiefly of non-political news and gossip, literature and art criticism, a chronicle of the latest fashions, and epigrams, charades and other literary trifles. German newspapers still use the term for their literary and arts sections.
Besides France, Russia in particular cultivated the feuilleton genre since the 19th century, and the word acquired the general meaning of satirical piece in the Russian language.
The feuilleton in its French sense was never adopted by English newspapers, though the sort of matter represented by it eventually came to be included. But the term itself entered English use to indicate the installment of a serial story printed in one part of a newspaper. ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feuilleton
Atrios notes that SocSec, even FISA, were much easier bcz it was a Just Say No campaign--this requires an alternative. Of which there is one, HOLC-type set up, already proposed by Hillary, as noted.
Problem, again, is the MCM seems to be ignoring Clinton on any policy ideas, giving some coverage when she campaigns for Obama.
Again, if HOLD is pronounced like Hulk, I think it will gain a hold in people's and MCMers' memories.
HOLC as separate letters too easy to confuse, forget. Give it a personality, a name, The HOLC (pronounced the Hulk) approach--mental image of the green muscular figure taking hold of those Wall Streeters by the nape of the neck, shaking some sense into them, making real regulatory change, shaking some change out of the pockets of the Fat Cats, etc.--may help by giving the public and pols something to think about other than caving so they won't be called obstructionists.
Must have the alternative--and make that alternative understandable.
I, too, hope you're wrong, Lambert--but realistically....
Ponies
To quote a commenter on another blog:
My pony arrived dead.
The pony will arrive dead
and you will be presented with a bill for the vet, and another for shipping. Also you will have to pay someone to haul the carcass away. Other than that, you got your damn pony so stop complaining and work harder; America needs your help.