Quite frankly, I'm not precisely sure what I had in mind at all. I think I may have envisioned it as a meta-blog - a blog about blogs! I mean, heck, that's been, er, rarely done. The fact is, I have a pretty demanding job, very little free time and, this is the kicker, very little to say. Until now, that is. Now I have one thing to say (phrased in the form of a question): Are we going into a great depression?
Probably not. I hope not.
I'm a little too old, a little too chickenshit (and not nearly rich enough) to contemplate a "Road Warrior" America with anything other than abject horror. I've done the poor grad student thing, I've done the buy whatever you want on credit thing, and have had enough. I am now the anxious, risk averse, penny pinching, petty bourgoise businessman that Rousseau warned you about. Just like everyone else, by the way.
Just like everyone else (see, that was worth saying twice). That is to say, we're all hunkered down, waiting to see how it'll go. Because we have no fucking idea what's going on, what caused it, or what will happen next. Even the people who always pretend to know what's going on have stopped pretending. That terrifies us most of all.
So, this blog will be my attempt to figure out what happened, what caused it and what's going to happen. It serves this purpose in two ways.
First, it'll give me a chance to record my impressions of things on a regular basis. No small advantage that. When you're busy, time passes, you forget what you were thinking last summer or spring, much less what you were thinking two years ago. Two years ago I know that I had at least an inkling of some serious problems with subprime mortgages; did I understand that the mortgage mess would metastasize into what we have now? I don't know, I can't remember, I didn't write anything down. Writing it down ... like marking off days in a prison cell, as it were. At least you know where you've been.
Second, I'd like to take the opportunity to learn a little about the financial system. Not for any practical purpose that I can think of, mind you. More akin to the way a terminally ill patient might study up on his disease ("hmmm, they said the hallucinations would start about now, I'll be darned").
So there ya go.
The Apocalypse will be blogged.
***
Yesterday, I happened to run across this article. A fascinating primer for a neophyte like myself. Incidentally, Michael Lewis is also the author of Liar's Poker. The wikipedia entry for the book included the following:
"He also noted that, although most arrivals on Wall Street studied economics, this knowledge was never used—in fact, any academic knowledge was frowned on by traders."
Take away points for me:
1. The guys managing the finances of, well, the world are not economists, they're salesmen.
2. They're cunning rather than bright (and palpably anti-intellectual).
I have to admit, this sort of surprised me. I suppose that at higher levels (engineers of trading software and so forth) there is some serious thought put into basic questions of how markets function. But the guys actually making the deals are high end car salesmen.
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