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The Room

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Have You Seen This?

Have You Seen This?

  • The Room - 01/30/2009

    Like most people, I occasionally find myself overwhelmed by the tasks involved with everyday life. This week, I have been, to use the old adage, 'working like a dog.' Though, now that I think about it, I have a hard time imagining the origin of the term. Even in his youth, my now elderly companion General Beauregard Piddle didn't seem to take on anything more rigorous than climbing up on an unattended couch for a nice nap. In any event, it's been one of 'those' weeks. And so today, as I prepared to write this weekly missive, I found myself groaning, 'Arrgh, I've got to write The Room,' to my ever patient and entirely wonderful wife. 'But,' she said, misunderstanding the nature of my apparent complaint, 'I can't see how that's a problem. There's so much to write about.' 'Exactly!' I said, 'That's the problem!' In actual fact, I almost always look forward to these weekly writings as a form of personal reflection and even entertainment... and as a usual way to keep myself in the flow of the passing parade. But some weeks – most weeks, it seems of late – the sheer volume of important news that I should comment on, at least if I were trying to be a good correspondent, is so staggering in dimension, it is a real challenge to know where to begin. So, instead, I start by writing about old dogs and wonderful wives. Go figure....
  • The Room - 10/24/2008

    I have woken in the pre-dawn to find our direst predictions coming true, with global stock markets taking yet another pounding and U.S. stock futures limit down. Serving as a proxy for the mindset now gripping governments around the world, French President Sarkozy has announced that the French government will, henceforth, buy shares in important French companies in an attempt to prop them up. 'We will intervene massively whenever a strategic enterprise needs our money,' said Sarkozy, a supposed economic conservative, as he pounded the table on behalf of nationalizing industry. The New Age of big government is upon us. Armed with Harry Potter-like magical monetary wands, they are wildly conjuring a deluge of money from thin air to bind the free market and keep it from facilitating the resolution of economic and investment dislocations created over decades. Bud Conrad tells me he is having a hard time adding up all the fiat money that has been committed to the battle for economic - and, by extension, political - survival over the past couple of months. The numbers rolling off the lips of officialdumb have progressed well past the hundreds of millions, or even hundreds of billions, and have now reached the trillions. In that theme, the Fed announced this week that it would drop over half a trillion - $540 billion, to be exact - on the purchase of suspect commercial paper now clogging the portfolios of 'safe harbor' money market funds. Given that there is a total of $3.4 trillion of your money resting in those very same funds, the commitment of $540 billion - about 16% of the total - should be taken as an indicator of just how bad the problem really is....