Vic Socotra

10 June 2008

Think

'57 Chevy Birthday Cake

I am a little queasy this morning. I have to be in early to talk about the vagaries of the business world. Nothing unusual about that. Happens to everyone.

The Chairman of he Fed has the same job. Unemployment is up, but Ben Bernanke had to go in front of an audience of skeptics and tell them everything was OK, and that everything is fine, or at least if not fine, we are not on the brink of disaster.

I am hoping that is the outcome of the early meeting, which is that unemployment will not go up, at least in the micro sense.

That is good, I think, since the odometer on my heart has clicked over another digit, and I stand- or sit- 57 years downstream from the moment I was expelled into this world. I am not sure that I can handle any more ambiguous tidings, at least today.

I think the Chairman is fibbing. I have no mathematical basis for that feeling, only the sense of the gut. But I am comforted that he continues to put a bold face on things. That has always got me through times of trouble, and perhaps it will for the Good Ole’ United States of America.

They say that God takes care of drunks, sailors and the USA, but perhaps I am being redundant.

I last took the micro-macro string of economics classes in 1997-98. There were some odd things happening at the time, the tech bubble and the Internet both swelling with promise. I realized pretty early that I had no knack for the art. The graphs required something that looked suspiciously like statistical analysis or algebra, and the subtlety quickly eluded me.

It probably has something to do with my attention deficit disorder. I mean, look at the way we act. One cold winter and the climatic change argument is as dead as coverage of Iraq. Pay no attention to the intensity of the storms that are raking us.

The tech bubble saved my grade, since our professor could not explain what was going on either. The basic rules of his discipline appeared to have been suspended, and he essentially threw up his academic hands and allowed us, as a class, to simply marvel at what was going on.

It was all simple enough. It actually did not make sense, and the economic times reflected a mass delusion, encouraged by the markets and the regulators. Escaping the consequences of that foolishness laid the groundwork for the low interest rates that spawned this little moment of confusion, not that our sense of entitlement to cheap Chinese goods and low-cost oil didn’t help.

Mr. Bernanke gets to preside on this one, and God bless him. I wish him a happy birthday, whenever it is.

Birthdays ought to be good places to take stock. I don’t have time today, and as a nation, that would come on the 4th of July, when we are all preoccupied with something else. We have days designated for celebration of the nation-state, days of national Thanksgiving.

We ought to have one dedicated to the proposition to Think.

I doubt if we have space on the calendar for it.

Gotta run. Happy birthday, if you share this one, and happy unbirthday, if you don’t.

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