Sculpture As Prophecy

The above sculpture can be found by a Seventh Street Washington Mutual entrance in Los Angeles. In front of the statue is a poem by Phillip Larkin which follows.

They said
I had a head
for business.
They said
to get ahead
I had to lose
my head.
They said
be concrete
& I became
concrete.
They said
go, my son,
multiply,
divide, conquer.
I did my best.

The sculpture was built in 1990 to protest the '80s saving & loans bailout (provided to the American taxpayer by John McCain, Shambollocks shall remind you). Its current placement proves distinctly prophetic. Two decades from now, let's make sure hard lessons will be learned so that this statue reflects an understanding that the market not only provides but can just as casually dissolve assets at an alarming rate.

Picture from View From A Loft.

How Tom Wolfe's Masters of the Universe Are Faring

Even though we Americans still await someone, anyone to step into the Great Leadership Vacuum of 2008 (seriously, is there ANYONE out there who wants to be the adult and speak bluntly about what lies ahead of us, post-bailout? McCain? Obama? Jim Belushi? Every passing day makes me a bigger fan of Lincoln and FDR), our great writers have begun to add their two cents. Saturday it was Tom Wolfe, who checked in on his 'Masters of the Universe' for the New York Times. Shambollocks' long and passionate admiration for Mr. Wolfe's career has already been noted. Take it away, Tommy:

So where does this leave the Masters of the Universe? In Greenwich, Conn., mainly. The hottest, brightest, most ambitious young men began abandoning investment banking in favor of hedge funds six years ago. Your correspondent can describe scenes of raging carotid-aneurytic anger as the young hotshots resigned. Security goons seized them by the elbow and marched them off the floor at six miles an hour. They couldn’t touch anything in or on their desks — not even the framed picture of Mom and Buddy and Sis, propped upright from behind by little cardboard wings covered in synthetic velvet — so furious were their superiors. Their biggest producers and future leaders were walking out on them.

Greenwich is the center of the Masters’ hedge-fund world, replacing Wall Street. For five years, the heart of Wall Street, the fabled Floor of the New York Stock Exchange, has been gradually emptying out. A hundred years ago, the Floor was a club for gentlemen oligarchs. Only men with social credentials could have one of the insider “seats” on the Floor. By last year, when your correspondent paid his one and only visit to the Floor, one member came up to another and informed him that he, like so many others recently, was leaving the Exchange for good.

“What will you be doing?”

“I’m joining the Fire Department.”

“The Fire Department? In what capacity?”

“I’ll be a firefighter. The pension plan is awesome.”

Incidentally, there are no seats on the Floor, none that this correspondent ever saw. The Exchange is already an anachronism, like Broadway. Everything is done by computer today. Hanging out on the Floor of the Exchange is like hanging out at OTB. Broadway and the Exchange are like the first thing you see when you enter Disneyland in California. You find yourself in a turn-of-the-last-century town with a trolley and an apothecary and a barber shop. That’s Broadway and Wall Street today.

It may dash your hopes for that nice warm feeling called Schadenfreude, but the Masters of the Universe are smarter than the people they left behind at the investment banks. Their hedge funds have blown up here and there, but unlike the investment banks, they are still very much in business. They have hurriedly pulled themselves into defensive positions inside their shells, like turtles. Their Armageddon, if any, will not come for two more days, which is to say, Tuesday, Sept. 30.

Most hedge funds open up a crack on Sept. 30, Dec. 31, March 31 and June 30 to give investors the chance to “redeem” their investments, meaning take their money out. These moments are called gates, like a series of gates in a prison. The gate is the limit, the fixed percentage of your money, that the fund will allow you to take out at one time. Even with these strict caps on withdrawals, some funds may end up nothing but shells.

Shed no tears for the Masters of the Universe, however, not that your correspondent actually thought you might. Most of the young Masters already have their own personal nut free and clear. “Nut” is the term for the amount of money you need salted away in weather-proof investments in order to generate enough interest to live comfortably in Greenwich on Round Hill Road, Pecksland Road or Field Point Road in a house built before the First World War in an enchanting European style, preferably made of stone featuring the odd turret, with a minimum of five acres around it and big enough to be called a manor. Every Master of the Universe knows the number.

Well, thanks Mr. Wolfe. Now I look toward the end of the month with dread, knowing that this could be The Day The Hedge Funds Die. But that is what writers should do-inform us. And leaders should lead us. Which means someone, please, anyone, step up to a podium this week and, damn the election year, tell us where we are going. I would have much more faith for this bailout if those representatives of ours who have pushed for it could tell us where we will be afterwards with confidence. Scaring people is not leadership. It's fraud.

Sarah Silverman for Obama

I'm not a big Sarah Silverman fan. Much of what I find transgressive about her material is so bound up in the fact that she's a LoooonnngIsland (all one word when pronounced) Jewish Princess...and I don't find that all too transgressive. Yes, when it comes to female comedians I'm a misogynist. Send the complaints to the email at the top.

Sarah has made a video promoting old Jews in Florida to vote for Obama. I further can't stand celebrity endorsements for any candidate. One, who cares? Two, it further emboldens the cavemen that Democrats are all celebrities. But this one is pretty damn funny. Here's the link. Enjoy.

Raiders Of The Lost Ark: The Adaptation

OK, everybody needs a lift today. Too much serious news! Combine the economic mess with the Metrodome massacre my White Sox just endured in Minneapolis, and I, in particular, need a solid smile-maker.

Four or five years ago, I read where Quentin Tarantino planned on showing a fan film of Raiders Of The Lost Ark at his theater in Austin. The film was created by teenagers at the time of the film's release, and it took them eight years to complete their shot-for-shot remake. What a story! I thought to myself. Raiders Of The Lost Ark is one of a small number of works of art that have, no doubt about it, changed my life. It is my favorite film of all time. I selected the location of my honeymoon-Egypt-in part because of the film. For a nerd, the character of a heroic scholar was absolutely intoxicating. I still want to be Indiana Jones.

Well, I've shared the story about the fan film with my fellow Raiders geeks. No one had ever heard of a copy that they could get. It seemed to me like the Ark itself.

Until yesterday. RetroThing found a clip of the film on YouTube and tells more of the behind-the-scenes story. Without further ado, fans. Your guaranteed weekend smile-maker- Raiders Of The Lost Ark- The Adaptation.



I know, only the beginning. I will try to find the whole thing yet, and then we will have a Shambollocks viewing party. Promise.

The Libor And Why You Should Know It

I don't know much about economics. I never took Econ 101, and most of what I know I've gleaned from reading Adam Smith or listening to my father. Not very contemporary or altogether reliable sources, those. I've always wondered what the banks take into account when they set their rates. I know they take the Fed's exchange rate into account, but that does not change on a daily basis. International banking must use a more precise indicator.

They do. It's called the Libor (British Bankers’ Association’s London Interbank Offered Rate). The Libor is the rate at which British money traders make their transactions. You can find all of this out and more in this week's London Review of Books.

Brokers in major money-market currencies don’t work as individuals, but in teams of up to a dozen or more, sitting close together in subsections of large, open-plan offices. Good eyesight is useful – trainees still sometimes called ‘board boys’ write unfilled bids to borrow and offers to lend on whiteboards surrounding clusters of brokers’ desks, and you can occasionally see a broker using binoculars to read a distant whiteboard or screen – but a more crucial skill is ‘broker’s ear’: the capacity to monitor what is being said by all the other brokers at nearby desks, despite the noise and while at the same time holding a voicebox conversation with a client. As one broker put it to me: ‘When you’re on the desk you’re expected to hear everyone else’s conversations as well, because they’re all relevant to you, and if you’re on the phone speaking to someone about what’s going on in the market there could be a hot piece of information coming in with one of your colleagues that you would want to tell your clients, so you’ve got to be able to hear it coming in as you’re speaking to the person.’

When you first encounter it, broker’s ear is disconcerting. You’ll be sitting beside a broker at his desk, thinking he’s fully engaged in his conversation with you, when suddenly he’ll respond to a question or comment, from several desks away, that you simply hadn’t registered. It’s an embodied skill that affects the way Libor is calculated. The inputs to the calculation are provided daily by the money-market traders from banks that are on panels established by the British Bankers’ Association. There is one panel for each currency, and those for the main currencies each have 16 banks on them. What each bank has to provide is the rate at which it could borrow funds (‘unsecured’ – that is, backed only by the bank’s creditworthiness, not more specific collateral – and ‘governed by the laws of England and Wales’), ‘were it to do so by asking for and then accepting interbank offers in reasonable market size just prior to 11.00’ in the currency and for the time period in question.

Fascinating. One benefit of entering the New Depression is that you get to learn all this quirky knowledge about how things worked before the fall. Kind of like learning how to do a post-mortem during a post-mortem.

Hank Paulson Spam Letter

I don't know if you have seen this. I caught it at Boing Boing. Somebody came up with a satiric letter from Henry Paulson which reads like the Nigerian spam I'm sure you've received. Pretty hilarious and to the point notwithstanding.

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson

It is a scam, people. Our money is now going to bailout arrogant gamblers who wouldn't loan you a dime to save their own life. Watch the way your congressmen vote on this.

What Taxes We Will Pay

John McCain keeps stating in ads that under President Obama Americans will pay more taxes. We at Shambollocks actually believe that there should be a tax increase to bring down the sky-high national debt, but that is another issue. We have posted before that McCain's statements are lies. But we also know that most of our readers are, like ourselves, visual learners. The blog chartjunk gives us an exact diagram of how the tax policies of each candidate will effect us:



As you can see from the chart, Obama will actually give bigger tax breaks to most of us. McCain, as per Republican usual, plans on cutting taxes more for the rich. Like I've asked before, when was the last time a rich person did anything for you? So, why would you vote to give them a break?