Friday, May 20, 2016

Book 37: Previously, On "Briane":

This was another of the Xanth books I actually had read in the past. This one was published in 1991. I don't have much to say about it this time; Piers Anthony is Piers Anthony. As I was finishing it up last night, Sweetie asked why I liked these books. I said they were sort of escapist reading, a bit in between the more serious stuff I read; it's easy to read books that are just fun and simply written, and some days -- especially this past week -- I'm just not up for heavier reading.

One thing about this book: About the last 1/4 of it is simply a recapping of what's come before in the Xanth series. The book is essentially the history of Good Magician Humfrey, a major character in all the novels, and it tells why he disappeared several years ago.  The basic plot of the book is that Humfrey is telling his life story while waiting for the demon whose magic makes Xanth exist, so that he can bargain to get his wife out of Hell; Humfrey hopes that when he gets to the present, Xanth will have to come deal with him, to avoid Humfrey simply telling his story into the future and saying he got the demon to agree. The latter part of Humfrey's life recounts everything that's happened in Xanth so far, making the final part of the book essentially a "Previously, In Xanth..." that I mostly skipped through.  I suppose if you'd just picked up the series at book 14 it might be helpful, but does anyone do that? It felt like a way to pad out the book.

Anyway, I'm trying now to remember how many of these books I really did read. This one was even less familiar to me than the last couple, but I recalled having read it as I re-read it. Memory -- especially mine -- is a funny thing, although sometimes it bothers me how little I remember of some things; that, I guess, is what being 47 will do: make you worry about things that didn't used to worry you.

One of the things I like to do, though, is to think back to where I was, at a certain time, years ago.  Question Quest was published in October, 1991. I probably would have bought it right away? 1991 was a long time ago, more than half my life.  In October 1991, as near as I can recall, I was living at home, in between schooling for a while. I had gone to UW-Madison for a semester, done horribly, and dropped out because my parents didn't want to help pay for school if I wasn't going to study to be a doctor, and I didn't want to be a doctor.  Two years later, in 1989, I re-enrolled, this time at UW-Waukesha, to study political science. On the 2nd day of the semester I got hit by a drunk driver, and missed that semester because I had to stay in bed for 2 or 3 weeks. Then, the following September I had to have surgery to fuse some vertebrae, so I wouldn't have gone back to school until winter 1990 or fall 1991; I don't remember which it was.

So I'm pretty sure that in fall 1991 I was still living at home, but it was around then that I moved out of the house and moved into an apartment in Milwaukee with two friends. But I probably would have been taking political science classes, and working at a gas station in town, as well as being a college radio DJ on Saturday mornings. 1991 is when I became a Buffalo Bills fan, and started to really like watching football.

Five years later would be October 1996; by then I had moved to Madison and enrolled in law school. This would have been the start of my second year, and would have been about the time my temporary job at the Department of Revenue ended, and I started working at the law firm where Sweetie was a legal secretary.  1996 would be when I started slacking off a bit in my exercise program. I weighed 170 pounds in 1996, and could run 6 miles in about 40 minutes, even though I was still a smoker, back then.

Five years after that in October 2001, we were living in a duplex in Middleton (just outside of Madison), with just the three older kids, no Mr Bunches or Mr F yet. I would have been at my old law firm, having started there a year before. At that time, the Department of Homeland Security was just being set up and Apple had released the iPod.

By October 2006 I'd been a nonsmoker for 2 years. The boys were a month old; I was still at my old firm. Sweetie had just gone back to work at the law firm she'd started working at after moving to Madison, and we would have been getting up at 5 a.m. every day to get everyone ready for school and daycare, then dropped the boys off at 7 to get to work by 8 so that we could leave work by 4:50 to pick up the boys by 5:30 in order to get home at 6, make dinner, do homework, and collapse into bed.  After 6 months of that we decided Sweetie should quit her job and we'd make do.

We're still making do.

In October 2011, I was ending my first year as a partner at my old firm. I had an office on Capitol Square in Madison and had several lawyers working directly for me. I had the year before nearly died twice and had started to run for judge, but ended my campaign after Scott Walker got elected and being a judge became a terrible job.  (Nearly all the county judges who were on the bench when he was elected have since retired.)

In October 2016 I...

to be continued.

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Book 36: OK this got kind of grim at the end.

I think sometimes fiction is better at explaining history than nonfiction.

Nonfiction is concerned with facts.  Fiction is about meaning, and impact, and making sense of things. Or, to put it another way: nonfiction is science, but fiction is myth. The stories we tell help us explain the world we know (or don't.)

The Mark And The Void is the first fiction I've read about The Great Crash, as I think of it, that began back in 2007.  It's hard to write about something dramatic that you've lived through, even indirectly, as a general rule. A momentous event is simply, I think, too big to make much sense out of immediately.  That's one reason there's been no decent stories that in any measure take place on or around or about 9/11. Writing decently about something, at least in fiction, requires that the person be able to put it in perspective, and it's hard to do that without something so big and new as 9/11, or The Great Crash -- especially because we are, literally, still living through them.  The wars we are fighting now, as well as the privacy issues around cell phones and the indiscriminate drone killings authorized by the President, are all direct results of 9/11 and the Authorization For Use Of Military Force passed 15 years ago, a law so broad that it allowed the President to unilaterally act without Congressional approval in everything from Afghanistan to Seal Team 6's raid on bin Laden's compound to strikes against ISIS.

Similarly, The Great Crash has not ended.  In 2014 the number of unemployment benefit claims roughly equaled the number filed in 2007. Our unemployment rate is 50% higher -- 6.7% in 2014 -- than it was in 2007. Only 62.5% of Americans are in the workforce; that's the lowest it's been in 35 years.  Job openings are lower than they were in 2007. The 2007-2014 period of time was the worst period for job creation since the 1930s, during the Great Depression.   And so on.  I work in this mire: I spend great chunks of time every day helping people try to hold on to homes and stave off debt collectors, get out from under onerous student loans and away from subprime credit traps.

That's one reason I avoid stories about the events of 2007 and after; I (re)live them every day. Another reason, though, is, as I said, the lack of perspective, the lack of an ability to say something meaningful about the economic collapse we are still suffering.

The Mark And The Void takes place during the Crash, and is, essentially, about it, even when it seems as if it's not. The story focuses on Claude, a French banker who works in a global bank's Dublin headquarters; the bank has survived the initial wave of the collapse because it was stodgy and stable and the CEO wouldn't allow investments into risky and unusual financial tools.

The story is this: Claude is followed for a while by a 'man in black,' who turns out to be a writer named Paul. Paul, who had a very minor book released 7 years earlier, tells Claude he wants to write a modern-day Ulysses, and use Claude as his Leopold Bloom, and asks if he can shadow Claude for a while to get the details of his life.  Claude's bosses okay this, and Paul moves in to the bank. At the same time, the Bank (Bank of Torabundo, referred to as "BOT" throughout the book) has replaced its CEO with "Porter Blankly," a dashing sort of Richard-Branson-esque leader whose directives to his staff are couched in inspirational riddles and say things like "Think counterintuitive."

As it turns out, Paul is not a writer, really, and he is using Claude to get inside the bank to try to rob it; Paul doesn't know that investment banks, like BOT, don't have 'deposits,' and so there is no safe to rob. By the time Claude figures this out, he has been ensnared by Paul; Paul's attempts to convince Claude the book was real and describe some plot get Claude to start falling in love with a local waitress (Paul's twist in the book he proposes) and Claude decides he wants to help Paul write his book after all.

It's hard to boil everything that happens down to an explainable level; the book has several different plots going on and they overlap; Claude's history (raised by a blacksmith, in the 1980s, in Paris) is gone into, and subplots abound.

Then there are, too, the scenes that seem de rigeur for books like this, books like The Great Gatsby and Bonfire Of The Vanities (this book is the equal of both): bankers partying at strip clubs, bread lines, hedge fund offices opulent beyond measure, squalid apartments for middle class people.  Those are the trappings of a book like this and need to be there.

What really hits home in The Mark And The Void is the way it manages to capture all the problems that led to the Crash (and continue it) without being didactic.

Take the machinations of investment banks, the twists that lead governments to support them.  BOT under Porter Blankly begins buying risky venture after risky venture, leveraging itself beyond all respectability and taking on more and more bad debt, and it's finally revealed that Blankly plants to make the bank "too big to fail." The idea is that if the investments pay off, the Bank will profit insanely.  But if the investments go south, the various governments will have to bail out the bank to avoid further economic troubles.

It's both absurd and genius, the kind of thing that makes you think I don't want to believe this could actually be true but... Consider: after Iowa (!) became the state that first passed laws that led to megabanks, banks grew so large and so powerful that Citicorp in 1999 simply ignored federal law in merging with Travelers Group. As soon as the crash started, the current big banks -- JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America -- began purchasing all the banks that had just crashed.  Those banks then received $95,000,000,000 in bailout funds (with Citigroup getting another $45,000,000,000.)  (Meanwhile, 70% of applicants for the government's home mortgage modification program are denied.)

The absurd genius of that move is compared to Paul's efforts: throughout the book Paul tries one get-rich-quick scheme after another, giving various excuses as to why he simply won't write a book his publisher wants him to write: everything from the novel is dead to I have nobody who believes in me and so on. So Paul tries to start websites, bilks more money from Claude and comes up with an idea to steal a painting from the home of a banker boyfriend of a well-known author. The machinations of Porter Blankly and Paul are compared to each other, and in case there's any doubt about whether they're comparable, the characters mention that doing what Porter Blankly is doing at the track is gambling; do it with billions of dollars of other people's money and it's financial maneuvering. 

One of the subplots involves Howie, a coworker of Claude's.  Howie makes some shrewd moves and Blankly sets him up to run a hedge fund that is based on abstract Russian mathematics; Howie explains that the fund is premised on leveraging people's losses, and says that the more the fund loses the more money his investors make.  When Claude protests that that's impossible, Howie says Claude just doesn't understand how advanced maths work.

"Beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud," writer P.J. O'Rourke once said.  Consider the "credit default swap," a derivative invented in 1994. The basic idea is essentially interest against a loan default: a lender can purchase a 'Credit Default Swap," and if the loan defaults, the Swap seller pays the lender the value of the loan (usually) and takes over the asset.  Simple, right?

Right. Except that anyone can buy a Credit Default Swap, even someone who has no actual interest in the loan. Which is to say: anyone (who is a billionaire or multinational) can buy a financial instrument that will pay them a sum of money if a loan (which they did not make and will not receive proceeds from) defaults.  This feature led to there being more Credit Default Swaps in existence than actual loans they 'protected.' This is like several people having a life insurance policy on you, including people who you do not know and who do not know you; in the event that several people held a Swap on a defaulted loan, a system was invented to determine how much to pay each person -- less than face value but more than the cost of buying the Swap, one assumes. Credit Default Swaps were not tracked or monitored or reported. They still are not. Banks could buy Swaps on their own loans (although the instruments were FAR more sophisticated -- and complicated -- than this example) which meant that the Bank made money if you paid your loan, or if you defaulted.

So a bank might make you a loan of $100,000.  If you pay it back, with interest, you pay the bank, say $200,000 over time. The bank runs a risk though: if you don't pay it back, they have to foreclose or sue, and that costs money. But there's an asset behind many loans, a house, say, so the bank has less risk: it will recover some money. Under these circumstances, banks have to be careful of the risk of a loan: make a bad choice and it loses $100,000, at least until it hires a lawyer and gets title to the house and sells it (but because of the realities of real estate, the Bank is unlikely to recover even it's whole $100,000 original investment.)

With trading of mortgages, banks became less concerned if you defaulted. Banks were paid loan origination fees, then could sell the loan for face value or slightly less: if they lent you $100,000, a portion of that (say 7000) would be paid to the Bank as an origination fee, so you only get $93,000 (or the Bank only shells out $93,000.)  It can then sell the loan to another bank, for $94,000 or more, and make a quick $1000 on the deal -- without worrying about risk. Now banks can make riskier loans.

Swaps make that worse, because the bank can get a swap and pay (usually 1.5% of the loan's value per year) for protection. If your bank does that, for $1500 a year it gets insurance on the face value of the loan. If you default in year three, the Bank will have given you $93,000, paid $4500 in Swap fees, for total payouts of $97,500.  Most of your payments in those 3 years are interest, so the Bank's principal is probably still about $90,000. The Swap holder pays the Bank $90,000 and takes over your loan. The Swap holder's investment is $85,500 -- $90,000 to the bank, less the $4500 it received in premiums.  Assuming your house is worth $93,000 (100% financing was pretty common by 2007) the Swap holder could get a return of $8000 on its investment, less attorney's fees. (Most foreclosures are uncontested and the average attorney fee for such a case, at least in Wisconsin, would be under $1500.)

And this is just the surface of the complexity that exists, because Banks could buy Swaps in all sorts of loans. Suppose you know of 5 loans that are likely to default, each with face amounts of $100,000? Pay $1500 per loan -- $7500 -- and you have an interest in $500,000 worth of debt that, depending on how many other Swap holders there are, you will get a decent share of. Almost certainly more than $7500, it seems.

That's the system that we created, and is it any wonder nobody cared anymore if loans failed? Banks made more money if they did.

Against a backdrop like that, is stealing a priceless painting any less ethical, or ridiculous, as a method of earning money? Banks were too big to fail; homeowners were too small to succeed.

Like The Bonfire Of The Vanities, and like The Great Gatsby, The Mark And The Void perfectly captures the essence of an era, with an attention to detail and accuracy that is startling, but with a flair for the human, and the interesting, that makes the book less about what a hedge fund is than what kind of world did we create, and how will we live in it?  The scene of Gatsby floating in his pool, after night after night of staring at the green light is no less tragic than the picture of Sherman McCoy standing in a holding cell in a damp suit with styrofoam peanuts stuck to his legs, and those two scenes are no more or less remarkable than the episode where Paul's son Remington finds an ant at a park and asks if he can keep  him as a pet -- only to later have the ant escape, requiring the family to tear apart an apartment that is already falling to pieces and is half-finished.

For all that, it's a remarkably buoyant book, funny and fast-paced and somehow almost lighthearted.  It's a story within a story within a tragedy, as if two wrongs do make a right and enough tragedy somehow becomes comedy again.  Comedy is simply tragedy plus time, it's said.  The Crash isn't over yet, but it seems somehow not to have stuck.  The people of the Depression, of World War II, of Vietnam, were forever changed by their eras.  My grandmother saved paper bags until she was 90. My grandfather had PTSD and used to wake up screaming about the "Japs coming up the beach."

Somewhere along the way, tragedy stopped mattering. By the 1980s, scandals and wars and crashes seemed to not matter anymore.  There have been numerous financial bailouts, cuts in spending, recessions, bubbles, wars, and terrorism over the last 30 years.  We are not numbed to them; they have simply stopped existing in the same world as we do.  The world has grown so complex that even when we know where the trouble started, we never trace it back or address it. We simply shrug and make a sad joke about it and then let a new startup company move into the old space while trying to decide if we should vote to the millionaire or the billionaire to speak for the people.

Comedy is tragedy plus time? I think not.  Comedy is any effort to understand humanity, because if we laugh hard enough we don't have to notice that nothing is funny.

It's a good book. You should read it.

Monday, May 16, 2016

Here is another part of the problem with treating special-needs kids like circus attractions and safety hazards.

Following the incident on Saturday, there was another one on Sunday.

I'm not going to discuss the Sunday one yet because I am waiting to receive some information.

Instead, I'm going to discuss the effects of what happened on Saturday, and on Sunday.

Yesterday, after the ending of the second incident, I had to run to the grocery store to pick up some milk and bananas for the week. I took Mr F and Mr Bunches with me, as we usually do.

When we go to the grocery store, Mr F likes to ride in the cart, if he can. At one store, they have big carts with seats for kids. At this store, they don't. But they have big carts, and Mr F can fit into them comfortably.

There is no sign or other rule that I'm aware of that says a kid can't sit in the space of the cart where the food usually goes.

Mr F gets a ride. I, frankly, get a slightly easier time at the grocery store because, as I said, I have to hold Mr F's hand almost constantly. Getting 3 gallons of milk plus bananas is tough to do one-handed, and steering a cart of any size is also tough to do.

So when we got there, I put Mr F in the cart, and we went into the store in the produce section.  Mr Bunches wanted to buy a lemon (I don't know why, either) so we went over to the part of the produce department where there were lemons.

As we were going there, a store employee was mopping nearby.  He glanced over at us, then took a longer look.

That's not unusual; we get sort of inured to people looking at us, because generally I am accompanied by Mr Bunches, who is usually talking (he was, in this case, talking about lemons) and Mr F, who taps his forks and makes his sounds and, of course, is a 9-year-old in a shopping cart.  We get a lot of looks.

I'm fine with that.

Or I thought I was.

As soon as the kid looked a second time, I felt defensive. I thought the kid was going to tell us we had to take him out, or maybe that we had to leave. Or in some way get the manager or someone talking to us. I thought there was going to be a third scene in less than 24 hours, over something that we do all the time.

Mind you, nobody seems to think Mr F in the cart is a problem. Many of the employees at the grocery store we usually go to -- Woodman's, a fine store that deserves kudos-- know Sweetie and the boys on site. Whenever Mr F is there he rides in the cart, either in a seat or in the body of the cart.  I had Mr F in a cart at Sears when I talked to the manager there one day.  This day, later in the dairy section, a man waiting for us to get out of his way so he could get some milk said "I'd just like to be there when you run him over the scanner," and smiled as he nodded towards Mr F.

I have had no reason in my entire life with the boys -- nearly 10 years now-- to worry about Mr F being in the cart.

But I had no reason ever to worry that Mr F carried some forks or butter knives with him.  Until Saturday and again yesterday.

So the end result of this, no matter what comes of the Sunday incident (which I'll provide more details on eventually) is that for at least a while, everywhere I or Sweetie go with the boys, we will have to wonder if the surreptitious glances or outright stares are more than curiosity or rudeness.  We will have to worry that they will result in a scene of one kind or another.

I spent time this morning looking for new swimming pools we could take the boys to. They will not like the change, if we decide to change. But I will not willingly subject them to businesses that treat them like freaks.

Plenty of businesses are great. The Supercuts near us is so good with the boys that Mr F, who used to cry and howl through a haircut, now sits quietly in a chair by himself and lets them cut his hair.  He whimpers a little but that's all. The grocery stores, libraries, toy stores, Panera, plenty of places are very nice to the boys and even pay special attention to them, which is nice.

These businesses made it their mission to single the boys out because they have special needs.

I won't forget it.

I can't forget it.