John Lanchester's Excerpt -- From "I.O.U."

(c)2010 F. Bruce Abel

It's the Woody Allen (response to Christopher Walken) quote that I like so much:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/books/excerpt-iou.html

Here's the excerpt:



Annie Hall is a film with many great moments, and for me the best of them is the movie's single scene with Annie's younger brother, Duane Hall, played by Christopher Walken, the first of his long, brilliant career of cinema weirdos. Visiting the Hall family home, Alvy Singer — that's Woody Allen — bumps into Duane, who immediately shares a fantasy:
"Sometimes when I'm driving . . . on the road at night . . . I see two headlights coming toward me. Fast. I have this sudden impulse to turn the wheel quickly, head-­on into the oncoming car. I can anticipate the explosion. The sound of shattering glass. The . . . flames rising out of the flowing gasoline."
It's Alvy's reply which makes the scene: "Right. Well, I have to — I have to go now, Duane, because I, I'm due back on the planet Earth."
I've never shared Duane Hall's wish to turn across the road into the oncoming headlights. I have to admit, though, that I have sometimes had a not-too-distant thought. It's a thought which never hits me in town, or in traffic, or when there's anyone else in the car, but when I'm on my own in the country, zooming down an empty road, with the radio on, and everything is moving free and clear, as it hardly ever is with today's traffic, but when it is, I sometimes have a fleeting thought, one I've never acted on and hope I never will. The thought is this: what would happen if I chose this moment to put the car into reverse?
When you ask car buffs that, the first thing they do is to give you a funny look. Then they give you another funny look. Then they explain that what would happen is that the car's engine would basically explode: bits of it would burst through other bits, rods would fly through the air, the carburetor would burst into fragments, there would be incredible noise and smell and smoke, and you would swerve off the road and crash with the certainty of serious injury and the high probability of death. These explanations are sufficiently convincing that I find that the thought of putting the car into reverse flits across my mind only very temporarily, for about half a second at a time, say once every two or three years. I'm sure it's something I'll never do.
For the first years of the new millennium, the whole planet was zooming along, doing the equivalent of seventy on a clear road on a sunny day. Between 2000 and 2006, public discourse in the Western world was dominated by the election of George W. Bush, the attacks of 9/11, the "global war on terror" and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But while all that was happening, something momentous was taking place, not quite unnoticed but with bizarrely little notice: the world's wealth was almost doubling. In 2000, the total GDP of Earth — the sum total of all the economic activity on the planet — was $36 trillion. By the end of 2006, it was $70 trillion. In the developed world, so much attention was given to the bust in dot-com shares in 2000 — "the greatest destruction of capital in the history of the world," as it was called at the time — that no one noticed the way the Western economies bounced back. The stock market was relatively stagnant, for reasons I'll go into later, but other sectors of the economy were booming. So was the rest of the planet. An editorial in The Economist in 1999 pointed out that the price of oil was now down to $10 a barrel, and issued a solemn warning: it might not stay there: there were reasons for thinking the price of oil might go to $5 a barrel. Ha!
By July 2008 the price of oil had risen to $147.70 a barrel, and as a result the oil-producing countries were awash with cash. From the Arab world to Russia to Venezuela, the treasury departments of all oil-producing countries resembled the scene in The Simpsons in which Monty Burns and his assistant, Smithers, pick up wads of cash and throw them at each other while shouting "Money fight!" The demand for oil was so avid because large sections of the developing world, especially India and China, were undergoing unprecedented levels of economic growth. Both countries suddenly had a hugely expanding, highly consuming new middle class. China's GDP was averaging growth of 10.8 percent a year, India's 8.9 percent. In fifteen years, India's middle class, using a broad definition of the term meaning the section of the population who had escaped from poverty, grew from 147 million to 264 million; China's went from 174 million to 806 million, arguably the greatest economic achievement anywhere on Earth, ever. Chinese personal income grew by 6.6 percent a year from 1978 to 2004, four times as fast as the world average. Thirty million Chinese children are taking piano lessons. Two-fifths of all Indian secondary school boys have regular after-school tuition. When you have two and a quarter billion people living in countries whose economies are booming in that way, you are living on a planet with a whole new economic outlook. Hundreds of millions of people are measurably richer and have new expectations to match. So oil is up, manufacturing is up, the price of commodities — the stuff which goes to make stuff — is up, the economy of (almost) the entire planet is booming. Who knows, optimists think, with the global economy growing at this rate, we can perhaps begin to think seriously about meeting the United Nations' Millennium Development goals, such as halving the number of hungry people, and of people whose income is less than $1 a day, by 2015.1 That seemed utopian at the time the goals were set, but with the world $34 trillion richer, it suddenly looked as if this unprecedented target might be achieved.
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GS -- Of Course

(c) 2010 F. Bruce Abel

And Goldman Sachs was there in the 1980s to show Japan how to get over end-of-fiscal-year issues that set the country back about 15 years.

And GS was in South Korea...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/business/global/14debt.html?hp

Wonderful Sports Stories

(c) 2010 F. Bruce Abel

It feels like we're in the Dead of Winter all right!


A year ago we were in hot and humid Manila with dear Genny. But today...


Wonderful sports stories in today's Sunday New York Times, on this frigid Sunday.

Among them, stories elicited by Willie Mays;

The life of a basketball journeyman named Moom now playing for the Cavaliers;

Baron, the coach of Rhode Island, and formerly St. Bonaventure.


And I'm going to re-read "I.O.U." a wonderfully posited book on our financial troubles.

Even the Cincinnati Enquirer outdid itself today with a tear-out section on Duke Energy's Smart Grid doings. I hope to be the first to try it (I'm the first to apply, they told me).

"I.O.U." -- Reviews on Amazon

(c) 2010 F. Bruce Abel

Let's go deep on this:

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle drabelled@washpost.com British journalist and novelist John Lanchester's gift is to see the big picture in new ways. Much of our current plight, he argues, comes from lack of competition in the broadest possible sense. The end of the Cold War left the United States, in his view, with no countervailing ideological force to worry about. "One of the most vivid consequences was the abolition of the ban on torture, which had previously been a defining characteristic of the democratic world's self-definition." But with no conflicting worldview to which the United States needed to feel superior, a big reason not to torture was swept off the board. "The same goes for the way in which the financial sector was allowed to run out of control," Lanchester adds. With capitalism "unchallenged as the world's dominant political-economic system . . . it could have been predicted that the financial sector . . . was in a position to reward itself with a disproportionate piece of the economic pie. There was no global antagonist to point at and jeer at the rise in the number and size of the fat cats; there was no embarrassment about allowing the rich to get so much richer so very quickly." As for the bust-bailout syndrome that has afflicted the United States and other economies, Lanchester sums it up in a phrase that could almost be a poetic couplet: "a huge, unregulated boom in which almost all the upside went directly into private hands, followed by a gigantic bust in which the losses were socialized." Copyright 2010, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Review
"Warning to bankers everywhere in the world. You better buy every single copy of I.O.U. because Lanchester's painted the target on you that the rest of us so desperately wanted to see. My prediction: bankers may be an endangered species once I.O.U. gets out, and from this read, I can tell you, while I hate to rush Darwin, it can't happen fast enough." -- James J. Cramer, host of CNBC's Mad Money and author of Jim Cramer's Getting Back to Even"I.O.U. is the map to the crazed world of contemporary finance we have all been waiting for. John Lanchester's superb book is everything its subject, the 2008 crash, was not: namely lucid, beautifully contrived, comprehensible to the reader with no specialist knowledge -- and most of all devastatingly funny. I urge you to read it." -- Will Self, author of Liver
See all Editorial Reviews

"I.O.U." -- Excerpt

Excerpt
‘I.O.U.’


By JOHN LANCHESTER
Published: January 5, 2010
Introduction
Skip to next paragraph
Related
'I.O.U.,' by John Lanchester: Laughing All the Way to the Bank (January 6, 2010)
Annie Hall is a film with many great moments, and for me the best of them is the movie's single scene with Annie's younger brother, Duane Hall, played by Christopher Walken, the first of his long, brilliant career of cinema weirdos. Visiting the Hall family home, Alvy Singer — that's Woody Allen — bumps into Duane, who immediately shares a fantasy:
"Sometimes when I'm driving . . . on the road at night . . . I see two headlights coming toward me. Fast. I have this sudden impulse to turn the wheel quickly, head-­on into the oncoming car. I can anticipate the explosion. The sound of shattering glass. The . . . flames rising out of the flowing gasoline."
It's Alvy's reply which makes the scene: "Right. Well, I have to — I have to go now, Duane, because I, I'm due back on the planet Earth."
I've never shared Duane Hall's wish to turn across the road into the oncoming headlights. I have to admit, though, that I have sometimes had a not-too-distant thought. It's a thought which never hits me in town, or in traffic, or when there's anyone else in the car, but when I'm on my own in the country, zooming down an empty road, with the radio on, and everything is moving free and clear, as it hardly ever is with today's traffic, but when it is, I sometimes have a fleeting thought, one I've never acted on and hope I never will. The thought is this: what would happen if I chose this moment to put the car into reverse?
When you ask car buffs that, the first thing they do is to give you a funny look. Then they give you another funny look. Then they explain that what would happen is that the car's engine would basically explode: bits of it would burst through other bits, rods would fly through the air, the carburetor would burst into fragments, there would be incredible noise and smell and smoke, and you would swerve off the road and crash with the certainty of serious injury and the high probability of death. These explanations are sufficiently convincing that I find that the thought of putting the car into reverse flits across my mind only very temporarily, for about half a second at a time, say once every two or three years. I'm sure it's something I'll never do.
For the first years of the new millennium, the whole planet was zooming along, doing the equivalent of seventy on a clear road on a sunny day. Between 2000 and 2006, public discourse in the Western world was dominated by the election of George W. Bush, the attacks of 9/11, the "global war on terror" and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But while all that was happening, something momentous was taking place, not quite unnoticed but with bizarrely little notice: the world's wealth was almost doubling. In 2000, the total GDP of Earth — the sum total of all the economic activity on the planet — was $36 trillion. By the end of 2006, it was $70 trillion. In the developed world, so much attention was given to the bust in dot-com shares in 2000 — "the greatest destruction of capital in the history of the world," as it was called at the time — that no one noticed the way the Western economies bounced back. The stock market was relatively stagnant, for reasons I'll go into later, but other sectors of the economy were booming. So was the rest of the planet. An editorial in The Economist in 1999 pointed out that the price of oil was now down to $10 a barrel, and issued a solemn warning: it might not stay there: there were reasons for thinking the price of oil might go to $5 a barrel. Ha!
By July 2008 the price of oil had risen to $147.70 a barrel, and as a result the oil-producing countries were awash with cash. From the Arab world to Russia to Venezuela, the treasury departments of all oil-producing countries resembled the scene in The Simpsons in which Monty Burns and his assistant, Smithers, pick up wads of cash and throw them at each other while shouting "Money fight!" The demand for oil was so avid because large sections of the developing world, especially India and China, were undergoing unprecedented levels of economic growth. Both countries suddenly had a hugely expanding, highly consuming new middle class. China's GDP was averaging growth of 10.8 percent a year, India's 8.9 percent. In fifteen years, India's middle class, using a broad definition of the term meaning the section of the population who had escaped from poverty, grew from 147 million to 264 million; China's went from 174 million to 806 million, arguably the greatest economic achievement anywhere on Earth, ever. Chinese personal income grew by 6.6 percent a year from 1978 to 2004, four times as fast as the world average. Thirty million Chinese children are taking piano lessons. Two-fifths of all Indian secondary school boys have regular after-school tuition. When you have two and a quarter billion people living in countries whose economies are booming in that way, you are living on a planet with a whole new economic outlook. Hundreds of millions of people are measurably richer and have new expectations to match. So oil is up, manufacturing is up, the price of commodities — the stuff which goes to make stuff — is up, the economy of (almost) the entire planet is booming. Who knows, optimists think, with the global economy growing at this rate, we can perhaps begin to think seriously about meeting the United Nations' Millennium Development goals, such as halving the number of hungry people, and of people whose income is less than $1 a day, by 2015.1 That seemed utopian at the time the goals were set, but with the world $34 trillion richer, it suddenly looked as if this unprecedented target might be achieved.
1
2 Next Page »
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