A very, very short interview I conducted with Charles Simic is in this month’s (i.e. April’s) Chicago Magazine. Check it out…
For more on Simic see here and here and here.
Some morning comedy, brought to you by the New York Times.
1/ Gail Collins, from “The Uncle Al Election”:
Too much of a good thing is our middle name. Now, the Democratic primary has become the McMansion of politics.
2/ Kirk Johnson, from “Plans to Mix Oil Drilling and Art Clash in Utah”:
Proceeding down to the foot of the “Jetty,” they inserted the section of the bike frame into a hole in the top of the stool—echoing Duchamp’s famous sculpture “Roue de Bicyclette.” Then they positioned their creation with “Spiral Jetty’s” rock—black and white and rimed with salt—as the backdrop.
Mr. McMillin swung his club while Ms. Wing, 29, who is pursuing her master’s degree in museum studies at Harvard, snapped the pictures: earth-art, Dadaism and golf.
“It was sort of idiotic,” said Mr. McMillin, 28, an artist who lives in Greenpoint section of Brooklyn. “And the Duchamp reference was, in retrospect, totally pretentious.”
My friend Ben Calhoun did a nice NPR story on Jeremiah Wright this last weekend. Listen to it here.
Kudos to Paul Krugman for recognizing how silly it was for Hillary Clinton to suggest bringing Alan Greenspan back to address the current crisis. After his column earlier this week I’d begun to wonder if he’d ever allow himself a word against her. Apparently so:
OK, this is pretty dumb. Hillary Clinton wants a high-level commission to analyze ways to resolve the mortgage crisis — including Alan Greenspan.
Yes, I know people still listen when Greenspan speaks — and John McCain once joked about taking Greenspan’s advice even if he’s dead. But for those in the know, AG is a key villain in the whole affair.
I mean, why not add Charles Prince, Stanley O’Neal, and Angelo Mozilo to the commission?
If you want to understand what’s at stake with the current economic crisis, and why it could very easily go from bad to 45-trillion-dollar bad, you could do worse than to read the two articles from the New York Times Sunday Business page on credit default swaps. Nelson D. Schwartz and Julie Creswell lay out the basic story in “What Created This Monster?” and Gretchen Morgenson explains the implications of the Fed/JPMorgan bailout of Bear Stearns in her Fair Game column.
Here’s the key grafs from each article (at least as they appear from the very distant sidelines where I’m sitting). From Morgenson, who’s discussing the possibility that JPMorgan had effectively sold insurance on Bear Stearns’s bonds via credit default swaps, and therefore had a very direct interest in making sure that Bear didn’t end up in bankruptcy:
An interesting side note: It’s likely that JPMorgan, the biggest bank in the credit default swap market, had a good deal of this kind of exposure to Bear Stearns on its books. Absorbing Bear Stearns for a mere $250 million allows JPMorgan to eliminate that risk at a bargain-basement price. JPMorgan declined to comment on the size of its portfolio of credit default swaps.
And from Schwartz and Creswell, who are discussing the reason the Fed had to get involved:
Bear Stearns held credit default swap contracts carrying an outstanding value of $2.5 trillion, analysts say. “The rescue was absolutely all about counterparty risk. If Bear went under, everyone’s solvency was going to be thrown into question. There could have been a systematic run on counterparties in general,” said Meredith Whitney, a bank analyst at Oppenheimer. “It was 100 percent related to credit default swaps.”
And finally, check this article for a look at the fight that’s already brewing: how to implement regulations that will help keep all this from happening again.
Gentlemen:
I have been alone in a room for almost 24 hours with 6 TVs, a laptop and two radios, listening to and watching and reading only political shows and pundits and blogs, sometimes monitoring four or five things at the same time. Just to see if it can be done.
I’ll tell you it can be, but I cannot tell you how horrible it is. It rattles the very center of your being. If you care about the state of humankind, it fills you with despair. We are as a people bleak and hostile and suspicious, filled with senseless partisanship and willing to believe anything and everything about anyone. We are full of ourselves and we hate. And we do it 24-7.
Would you be willing, as a sign of compassion and empathy, to do the unthinkable and broadcast right now, as a Valentine to me, 20 seconds of blessed dead air?
Complete silence. Just read my text and then say . . . nothing. Twenty seconds.
Just to show it can be done.
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