“Grilled Cheese Sandwich with Pickles and Fries” is the result of taking a handful of ideas languishing in the workshop, mixing them together to see how they might fit, and making a prose bracelet out of them. It was published in The Writing Disorder on New Year’s Eve last year.
“The honor of parents is a fair and noble treasure to their posterity, but to have the use of a treasure of wealth and honor, and to leave none to your successors, because you have neither money nor reputation of your own, is alike base and dishonorable.” — Plato, Menexenus (trans. Jowett)
“The king who does not deal with the concerns of his kingdom in person and on time, verily he, those concerns, and even his kingdom get ruined.” — Valmiki Ramayana, Aranyakanda Sarga 33
“You’re abandoning a lot of ideas when you are too into comfort.” — Christian Louboutin (from “Sole Mate,” by Lauren Collins)
“Countries may fall, but their rivers and mountains remain. When spring comes to the ruined castle, the grass is green again.” — Basho (from “Aftershocks,” by Evan Osnos)
“Never work before breakfast; if you have to work before breakfast, eat your breakfast first.” — Josh Billings
“The CDOs manufactured in 2006 and 2007 were in large part a direct manifestation of their ingredients–pools of tainted assets precariously situated atop a wave of home-price appreciation. As investors became addicted to the higher yields of investment-grade CDOs, their rose-colored glasses focused on the AAA rating rather than the pool of shoddy subprime mortgages they were really buying. The rating agencies put too much faith in their formulas, conveniently forgetting that a model is only as good as its inputs. Since there was little historical data on subprime or CDO performance, especially during times of economic distress, the inputs were essentially pulled from thin air, adjusted by the underwriters to maximize their AAA allotment. ‘Diversification’ was the magic word that could justify the inclusion of anything remotely resembling a legitimate fixed-income asset, as Wall Street and the rating agencies claimed that even the lowest quality bonds would not all default at the same time.
“However, that is exactly what happened. The trillion-dollar CDO market, built atop a single assumption, crumbled to ruins when house prices did the impossible: they first stopped rising and then they fell. In the end, who was hurt worst when the CDO market crashed had less to do with what they were doing than with when they were doing it. The best predictor of banks’ write-downs was not the quality of their CDOs, but instead the amount of CDOs they issued in 2007, for very few of those CDOs would ever leave the balance sheets of their creators. The CDO market was a game of musical chairs and the winners were those who sat down early on. The losers were those that lived by the philosophy of Citigroup’s ex-CEO, Charles Prince, that, ‘as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.’ Unfortunately, certain players in the CDO market, including Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Bear Stearns, Countrywide, S&P, and Moody’s, were having too much fun to notice when the music ended, never pausing from their CDO craze for long enough to see the warning signs develop.
“Once the conveyor belt stopped, it turned out that the hot potato, which had so efficiently been passed along the chain from mortgage broker to Wall Street and beyond, had been leaving pieces of itself along the way. Once investors no longer wanted to buy CDOs, Wall Street Banks were left holding the excess of unsold CDOs and yet-to-be-securitized CDO assets. And once Wall Street CDOs no longer wanted to buy subprime mortgages, mortgage originators were left holding a huge number of mortgage loans they knew had little chance of ever being repaid. And once mortgage companies no longer wanted to originate risky mortgages, homebuyers were left holding the subprime mortgages they had planned to refinance. And once homebuyers began to default on their mortgages in mass [sic], it became clear that the credit rating agencies had made a colossal mistake, and Moody’s, Fitch, and S&P were left holding the burden of a shattered reputation in a business built on the necessity of trust.” — Anna Katherine Barnett-Hart, “The Story of the CDO Market Meltdown: An Empirical Analysis” (emphases in the original)
“There’s a difference between an old-fashioned financial panic and what had happened on Wall Street in 2008. In an old-fashioned panic, perception creates its own reality: Someone shouts ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater and the audience crushes each other to death in its rush for the exits. On Wall Street in 2008 the reality finally overwhelmed perceptions: A crowded theater burned down with a lot of people still in their seats. Every major firm on Wall Street was either bankrupt or fatally intertwined with a bankrupt system.” — Michael Lewis, The Big Short
“With stagnant wages and booming consumption, the cash-strapped American masses had a virtually unlimited demand for loans but an uncertain ability to repay them. All they had going for them, from the point of view of Wall Street financial engineers, was that their financial fates could be misconstrued as uncorrelated. By assuming that one pile of subprime mortgage loans wasn’t exposed to the same forces as another–that a subprime mortgage bond with loans heavily concentrated in Florida wasn’t very much like a subprime mortgage bond more concentrated in California–the engineers created the illusion of security.” — Michael Lewis, The Big Short
“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.” — Tolstoy (from The Big Short, by Michael Lewis)
“Nothing so much contributes to promote the public well-being as the exportation of manufactured goods.” — Robert Walpole (quoted by John Cassidy in “Enter the Dragon”)
“CDOs were flawed from the outset, used too often as a junkyard for risky and substandard assets. CDOs survived because of changes in the credit markets that produced an excess quantity of these assets and herds of investors hungry for higher yields.” — Anna Katherine Barnett-Hart, “The Story of the CDO Market Meltdown: An Empirical Analysis”
“Not only did the rating agencies fail to examine the accuracy of their own prior collateral ratings, but in many cases, they also used other agency’s ratings without checking for accuracy. To correct for any shortcomings in the other agency’s rating methodology, they created the practice of ‘notching,’ whereby they would simply decrease the ratings of any collateral security that they did not rate by one notch. In other words, if Moody’s rated a CDO that was composed of collateral rated BB+ by Fitch only, Moody’s would instead use a rating of BB in their own CDO model because it was not their rating. They never went back and reanalyzed the other rating agency’s rating, conveniently assuming that decreasing it by a notch would compensate for any shortcomings in the initial risk analysis.” — Anna Katherine Barnett-Hart, “The Story of the CDO Market Meltdown: An Empirical Analysis” (footnotes omitted; emphasis in original)
“The line between gambling and investing is artificial and thin. The soundest investment has the defining trait of a bet (you losing all your money in hopes of making a bit more), and the wildest speculation has the salient characteristic of an investment (you might get your money back with interest). Maybe the best definition of ‘investment’ is ‘gambling with the odds in your favor.'” — Michael Lewis, The Big Short
“I think there is something fundamentally scary about our democracy. Because I think people have a sense that the system is rigged, and it’s hard to argue that it isn’t.” — Charlie Ledley (from The Big Short, by Michael Lewis)
“The upper classes of this country raped this country. You fucked people. You built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience. Nobody ever said, ‘This is wrong.'” — Steve Eisman (from The Big Short, by Michael Lewis)
“A society with deep, troubling economic problems had rigged itself to disguise those problems, and the chief beneficiaries of the deceit were its financial middlemen. How could this be?” — Michael Lewis, The Big Short
“There are actually people who do nothing but invest in European mid-cap health care debt. I don’t think the problem is specific to finance. I think that parochialism is common to modern intellectual life. There is no attempt to integrate.” — Charlie Ledley (from The Big Short, by Michael Lewis)
“Why do classical economists believe that free trade is good for everyone? Why does the amount of gold kept in the treasury not make much difference to a country’s wealth? Why don’t better machines for making pins eliminate jobs for good, instead of making more jobs of another kind? Why, for that matter, does it not matter whether we’re productive in farming or manufacturing so long as we’re productive? What does productivity even mean?” — Adam Gopnik, “Market Man”
“A few years ago, a group of economists looked at more than a hundred Fortune 500 firms, trying to figure out what predicted how much money the C.E.O. made. Compensation, it turned out, was only weakly related to the size and profitability of the company. What really mattered was how much money the members of the compensation committee of the board of directors made in their jobs. Pay is not determined vertically, in other words, according to the characteristics of the organization an executive works for; it is determined horizontally, according to the characteristics of the executive’s peers. They decide, among themselves, what the right amount is. This is not a market.” — Malcolm Gladwell, “Talent Grab”
“Advertisements of merchandise in all the colonies throw a good deal of light on the customs of the time, and, incidentally, also on the popular taste in reading. We find that Peter Turner has ‘Superfine Scarlet Cloth, Hat Linings, Tatlers, Spectators, and Barclay’s Apology’; that Peter Harry imports ‘Head Flowers in Boxes, Laces and Edgings, Psalm-books, Play-books, the Guardians in 2 vol., Women’s Short Cloaks, Men’s Scarlet Great Coats’ and other apparel. The ship Samuel, from London, brings over ‘sundry goods, particularly a very choice collection of printed Books, Pictures, Maps and Pickles, to be Sold very reasonable by Robert Pringle.'” — from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XV, Ch. 7
“In the future, to make a fortune will be considered as improper for the head of a big business as for the President of the United States or the mayor of a city.” — Walter Lippmann, 1934
“Laissez-faire is dead and the modern state has become responsible for the modern economy as a whole. The task of insuring the continuity of the standard of life for its people is now as much the fundamental duty of the state as the preservation of national independence.” — Walter Lippmann, Godkin Lectures, 1934.
It should be noted here and now (if not earlier) that the Lippmann quotes being posted to this site are sourced from Ronald Steel’s Walter Lippmann and the American Century, published in 1980 by the Atlantic Monthly Press.
“It is labor organized that alone can stand between America and the creation of a permanent, servile class.” — Lippmann, Drift and Mastery
“The curse of great fortunes is the degradation of the poor.” — Walter Lippmann
“Farmers without land, workers without jobs, ordinary men and women without hope, all were fodder for visionaries promising the earth.” – MacMillan, Paris 1919
“Dying used to be accompanied by a prescribed set of customs. Guides to ars moriendi, the art of dying, were extraordinarily popular; a 1415 medieval Latin text was reprinted in more than a hundred editions across Europe. Reaffirming one’s faith, repenting one’s sins, and letting go of one’s worldly possessions and desires were crucial, and the guides provided families with prayers and questions for the dying in order to put them in the right frame of mind during their final hours. Last words came to hold a particular place of reverence. These days, swift catastrophic illness is the exception; for most people, death comes only after long medical struggle with an incurable condition–advanced cancer, progressive organ failure (usually the heart, kidney, or liver), or the multiple debilities of very old age. In all such cases, death is certain, but the timing isn’t. So everyone struggles with this uncertainty–with how, and when, to accept that the battle is lost. As for last words, they hardly seem to exist anymore. Technology sustains our organs until we are well past the point of awareness and coherence.” — Atul Gawande, “Letting Go”
“People who don’t know much tend not to recognize their ignorance, and so fail to seek better information.” — James Surowiecki, “Greater Fools”
“Every part of this ship was built by the low bidder.” — Alan Shepard, pilot of Freedom 7, May 5, 1961