Occasionally, a relationship between seemingly unrelated things makes itself known. In the course of a few hours the other day just such a relationship popped up. I was drinking my morning coffee watching Global News and getting an ear full of the latest blood and gore in metro Toronto and Vancouver: two innocent by-standers gunned down over the course of the week in the former city, and two gangsters dispatched to their just reward in the latter. Following the news brief about the actual murders came the chorus of condemnation by an assortment of politicians and social activists. Calls for a total ban on hand guns were repeated and blame was heaped on the court system, lax laws and even laxer judges. I have to admit that, despite being a life-long left leaning liberal (also occasionally characterized as a bleeding heart liberal or socialist sympathizer), I do find myself favouring the law and order posture of the conservative crowd whenever my morning coffee experience is tainted by these stories of gangland violence. At such moments strange musings about vigilante justice even occur to me. Like most people, however, I merely fume for a few moments until the next news story comes on the screen about a cuddly new polar bear cub or charity fund-raiser and let the dark thoughts fade away.
On this particular day, I picked up yesterdays unopened mail and discovered something that changed my mood completely, that annual mailbox miracle, one of the world’s most blessed time-passers, the Vesey Spring Seed Catalogue! Is there anything better than idling away the hours envisioning what fabulous abundance of vegetables one is going to nurture in the coming year? Or picturing the amazing blanket of colour that will blossom around the back porch, by the front steps, or beyond the tiny footbridge and fountain that surely one will have time to build this year in the back yard? The Vesey Catalogue! There may be a foot of snow still on the ground but with that precious book in hand spring has to be just around the corner.
The problem was that for once not even the volume from Vesey could completely eliminate the miserable echoes of violence brought on by the morning news. Then CBC radio came to the rescue. Not that the program I tuned to made me feel that much better, but at least it explained my problem. I was experiencing cognitive dissonance I learned, a condition in which the brain is forced to consider two ideas that are mutually exclusive.
The brain doesn’t like that. It wrestles with the ideas until one becomes dominant. A con artist knows stealing is wrong, but wants to steal so he convinces himself that anyone dumb enough to fall for the con deserves to lose his money. The cognitive dissonance is resolved and he can steal the money without feeling guilty.
In my case, it was hard that morning to reconcile a world in which some people feel comfortable shooting others to death in the street while most would prefer to grow plants from seeds and watch them either blossom or bear fruit. But that annoying cognitive dissonance insisted that I resolve the conflict one way or another. I thought of adding my voice to the many who express their dismay continually with the legal and law enforcement systems, but in the end decided on a greener approach to the problem.
I sent an e-mail to the Attorney General encouraging the prison system to allow inmates to plant window gardens and suggested that he ask Vesey to send a thousand seed catalogues. Then I placed my own order. It was even larger than last year, and though I know that I will have seeds left over and will end up begging neighbours to take some of my pole beans and squash, I can see the corn stalks sprouting and taste the tomatoes already.
Copywrite Grand Forks Gazette 2008
Thursday, January 31, 2008
The Sub Prime Fiasco
Another global economic crisis. Every time the engines of capitalism cough, sputter or stall I think back to a conversation I had at university with a bow-tied economics graduate student who insisted that his academic discipline was a science. New economic theories, he claimed, made forecasting of profit and loss as predictable as anything that physics or chemistry could offer. Amazing.
Yet recently we have come to learn that every major financial institution in the western world and half of the far east all somehow failed to grasp the idea that if you loan money out at a rate of return lower than you yourself borrowed the money, you might end up in a bit of trouble. The economic gurus with advanced business degrees and enormous salaries somehow missed the same crucial point that the poor sods who borrowed the money did: When the sub-prime grace period on the loan expires and the interest rate goes up to normal levels, the poor borrower will no longer be able to afford it! That’s why he hadn’t borrowed the money at the regular rate in the first place! Then when the economic downturn that everyone has been predicting for four years occurs and those borderline borrowers are laid off…oops! One begins to see long rows of For Sale signs on houses that are now worth less than they were purchased for. The bubble bursts; panic ensues; and, like rats from a sinking ship, investors try to abandon the market.
It appears that every bank from the First National Bank of Ottumwa, Iowa, to Citibank, Chase Manhattan, and RBC neglected to predict the obvious. These fiscal visionaries missed what my neighbours Carl, Walt and Larry had been forecasting for months. My barber talked about it with me last March, and my 92 year old father had, as early as 2006 shaken his head ruefully at what he knew would be inescapable financial havoc.
Listening to the same economists, gurus and sooth-sayers now, provides one with a typical grab-bag of doublespeak and learned bafflegab. It was, they say, a completely unpredictable combination of various economic elements, an unusual configuration of unfathomable indicators, a perfect storm of coincidental world-wide negative factors.
Horse hockey!
The only thing worse than believing that they should have known but didn’t is believing that they knew and didn’t care, that greed and ambition made the movers and shakers lower rates to absurd levels in order to keep the economic engines running as long as possible in order to wring out as much profit as they could for as long as they could. But believing that would be just too cynical. Still, I wonder if there are any CEOs of banks or investment firms losing their houses. I can’t help but think probably not.
Copywrite Grand Forks Gazette 2008
Yet recently we have come to learn that every major financial institution in the western world and half of the far east all somehow failed to grasp the idea that if you loan money out at a rate of return lower than you yourself borrowed the money, you might end up in a bit of trouble. The economic gurus with advanced business degrees and enormous salaries somehow missed the same crucial point that the poor sods who borrowed the money did: When the sub-prime grace period on the loan expires and the interest rate goes up to normal levels, the poor borrower will no longer be able to afford it! That’s why he hadn’t borrowed the money at the regular rate in the first place! Then when the economic downturn that everyone has been predicting for four years occurs and those borderline borrowers are laid off…oops! One begins to see long rows of For Sale signs on houses that are now worth less than they were purchased for. The bubble bursts; panic ensues; and, like rats from a sinking ship, investors try to abandon the market.
It appears that every bank from the First National Bank of Ottumwa, Iowa, to Citibank, Chase Manhattan, and RBC neglected to predict the obvious. These fiscal visionaries missed what my neighbours Carl, Walt and Larry had been forecasting for months. My barber talked about it with me last March, and my 92 year old father had, as early as 2006 shaken his head ruefully at what he knew would be inescapable financial havoc.
Listening to the same economists, gurus and sooth-sayers now, provides one with a typical grab-bag of doublespeak and learned bafflegab. It was, they say, a completely unpredictable combination of various economic elements, an unusual configuration of unfathomable indicators, a perfect storm of coincidental world-wide negative factors.
Horse hockey!
The only thing worse than believing that they should have known but didn’t is believing that they knew and didn’t care, that greed and ambition made the movers and shakers lower rates to absurd levels in order to keep the economic engines running as long as possible in order to wring out as much profit as they could for as long as they could. But believing that would be just too cynical. Still, I wonder if there are any CEOs of banks or investment firms losing their houses. I can’t help but think probably not.
Copywrite Grand Forks Gazette 2008
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