Lookin' Around, Cursing

Am I the only person who sees the Federal 'bailout' of the financial sector as the not-funny equivalent of Harold and Lloyd in Dumb and Dumber replacing a million dollars in ransom money with IOUs? Just because you say you'll pay back every penny doesn't mean there's any realistic chance of it.

And by bailout, do they mean to bail water from a sinking boat? Or do they mean to jump from an airplane and let it crash? Isn't that 'bail out,' two words?

If you want the unlimited rewards of taking great risks, you have to be the one taking the risks. If you're so big the taxpayer comes in on your failed behalf, how are you in any way entitled to any rewards? This whole problem evolves from unhealthy assumptions about what government oversight means. More government involvement is probably not the answer.

When a CEO fucks the dog and gets a huge severance, it's because he negotiated what his good-bye package would be back when he was hired, when the board was still in love with him. But, in my opinion, if you fuck that dog so hard the Fed has to take over the business, you don't get the money no matter what your contract says. What you should get is a life sentence at hard labor.



In fact, not just the CEO. All principals of a corporation, and all their vice presidents, along with every member of the board that hired them would all be sentenced to the chain gang for life. I'm totally serious. Because if those were the stakes, board members and executives would have a reason to police their own in a big, big way.



This wouldn't prevent all greedy assholes from committing assholery, but it would deter a lot. And we'd get some handmade gravel, and a satisfying sense of vengeance, out of the undeterred after the fact.

I don't want the little guy to suffer the way he did in the Great Depression, don't get me wrong. I'm one of those little guys, and I already suffer enough, thank you. More on that in a minute.



But without the bailout, these evil and inept executives might at least have the courtesy to fatally defenestrate themselves. I mean really, can't we rush in with the bailout after a few hundred of these jerks have taken the easy way out?



Sorry for giving my 'If I were king' Jack Cade rant. Consider it my payback to having to put up with McCain's and Obama's idiotic versions of the same. It's truly appalling that either one of those jackass reprobates thinks he could lead a one-float parade. I wouldn't trust either one of them with an unlit cigar, let alone the global financial system.

But anyway:

I've been trying to come up with some ways to cut my expenses, my minimum nut every month. Dave Ramsey seems to give good advice, including that your house payment should be 25% of your take home pay or less. This would make it possible to save money instead of going into debt, which is as sane a notion as there is.

So sane, in fact, that if he worked on Wall Street, they might burn Dave at the stake for heresy.



Trouble is, after the divorce when I refi'd the house and stayed, I took on a payment that is well outside that boundary, over a third of my 'take home,' and that 'take home' isn't even really my take home pay because that's before I pay child support. At which point you're getting to the 50% mark. And with a long commute on expensive gas to boot. Plus some fairly expensive maintenance meds I take as a heart attack survivor. Throw in a lack of restraint over Hawaiian shirts here or model rocketry stuff there, that debt can get menacing.

Even with perfect restraint, the occasional car repair or need for a competent repairman at the house can sink any chance of even treading water, let alone making progress.



My first house was in the city, in a neighborhood that looked, at first, like a nice enough place to live. And grand, old, large-ish houses full of charm and termites were practically being given away. We paid $29,000 for a two story shirtwaist sans termites. It lacked off-street parking, but made up for it with gorgeous hardwood floors and yellow pine trim that had not been painted over by jerks.



So anyway, that neighborhood did turn out to be more of an adventure than I bargained for. Though a lot of the stress of living there, really was second-hand smoke. My then wife was incredibly stressed out living there, and we were still close enough that her unhappiness tended to become my unhappiness.



Still, gunshots in the night freaked me out plenty. And the helicopter searchlight between the houses that followed. This was more or less a weekly event. And on New Year's Eve, the entire neighborhood took leave of its senses, with morons shooting guns in the air as if the bullets didn't have to come down for a full quarter hour on each side of midnight.



Still, that $300 house payment was sweet. The house was near a century old, so it was impossibly drafty, but even with excrementally high utilities, it was cheap living.

I didn't have any illusions I'd find a $30,000 house, but it occurred to me that property values don't just precipitously fall at one street. The overpriced but charming gingerbreads of Brookside and the $11,000 five-bedroom in the 'hood have a lot of houses in between them. And funky little commercial buildings I like even better than houses stuck conveniently on streets of single-family homes. Commercial buildings that haven't been the corner store for at least 75 years.



A friend had suggested (when I'd been talking about the Crossroads) that I look around the Art Institute if I 'want to live in the city and around artists.' Fair enough. And walking distance to the Nelson would be pretty cool.

So I commenced to look. I drove in an entirely unsystematic manner all over the area between Gillham Park and Main, between the Nelson and Amrour Blvd. I worked my way west into the Valentine neighborhood.

As I drove, I listened to NPR. I know better, because I get so damn mad.



I heard a story yesterday about how AIG didn't understand what they were doing when they got into the bond insurance business (default swaps). I'm sorry, but my bro is an actuary at an insurance company, and it's hard for me to believe that he would get his company into a business he didn't understand. It's not in his nature. And he's a relative peon, as this is a relatively recent career change and he's still studying and taking tests on his way to full actuarial-ness. So either the world's biggest insurance company is run by boobies who didn't study as hard as rookie bean counter at a much smaller company, or they saw all those zeroes and got greedy.

Hmmmm. Lemme think about which one of those alternatives sounds plausible.

Then I hear about how some of Lehman's troubles came from their involvement in securities that nobody really understood.

Come again?

Nobody understands it, so billions of dollars are naturally invested in it. Warren Buffet wouldn't buy Microsoft stock because he didn't understand their business. Who are these fund managers and whatnot who will invest billions in something they can't understand???

Dust off your sledgehammers, boys. You need to get to your manacle fitting.

Sorry, but all this stuff put me in a terrible mood as I drove about looking at houses. Few had fliers on their for-sale signs. I grabbed those few. And almost as shocking as the notion of Harvard MBAs with impeccable pedigrees who have less financial sense than Paris Hilton on a cocaine binge, I couldn't find a house in midtown I could afford.



Sure, some of these places are huge. I took their pictures because they were grand structures, not because I deluded myself that I'd be moving in. Others were off the menu because they needed serious amounts of work and I'm no Bob Villa or my present residence wouldn't be such a distressing sight. But even when I'd find a bungalow with no curb appeal, no central air, no off-street parking, jammed up against a seedy-looking four-plex of low rent apartments, the asking price would turn out to be more than the over-valued appraisal on the house I'm in.

Seems a lot of folks want to be centrally located, no matter what they're next door to or across the street from.



Of course, this wasn't really the 'hood. When young women walk down the street at twilight without an obvious sign they're ready to mace an attacker, you're really not in an area where housing prices are going to get depressed, I don't suppose. Meaning it's plenty safe for me and my daughters in all likelihood, probably as safe as the place I'm in now.

I found one neat commercial building, but it wasn't for sale. It's not occupied, but a neighbor told me she'd heard a professor had bought it, and she said she'd seen some signs he was doing work on it here and there.



Oh, and there was the gas station on Westport Road. Not exactly a family-friendly location with all that traffic, and not really the sort of big-ass gas station I think of when I picture my dream conversion.



As for the geniuses who invaded Iraq over non-existent WMDs rushing in to save our financial system, I am not hopeful. As for the suits who inspired them to think their dubious help is required, if you want to make millions of dollars while harming society, you should go into show biz, not work on Wall Street.

I tried looking on YouTube for the scene from Dumb and Dumber the so-called 'bailout' makes me think of, but failed. So here's one that might be appropriate on a more Zippy level.