“More women needing cash go from jobless to topless“
—Associated Press
And the article’s best (though not in a good way) quote?
Makers of adult films cautioned that women shouldn’t rush into the decision to make adult movies without considering the effect on their lives….
We’ve learned in recent months that the smartest people in the room are really the dumbest…and they just keep showing it, again and again and again….
The blogger suggests that the two of them can not long coexist.
I’m pretty certain that Noam Scheiber is dead right about one thing: an ensemble cast of economic advisers simply won’t work in the current circumstances. Tim Geithner? Larry Summers? My bet is that one or the other will be gone by the first of June.
Two things.
First, why is it that everyone instinctively believes that Summers is enjoying Geithner’s current twisting-in-the-wind status?
And two, could an ensemble team of economic advisers work if Summers weren’t part of it?
Because there seems nothing about this situation that would automatically rule out a team of advisers working to solve the nation’s economic problems. Perhaps one would have to rise to the top, yes. But given the magnitude of the issues involved, wouldn’t a strong team be a good thing?
It seems to me a subtle but important success of Larry Summers to have defined the terms of this conversation: If there is to be one main economics guy, and the choice is between Summers, Geithner, Paul Volker, and Christie Romer, then it’s going to be Summers.
_________________________________________________________________________________
P.S. Warsh describes himself as a “long-time enthusiast” of Larry Summers. But judging from this column, “erstwhile enthusiast” seems more accurate.
The Harvard prof is quoted in yesterday’s Alex Beam column, which discussed academic approaches to Bob Dylan.
Harvard classics professor Richard Thomas sent me his fascinating article “The Streets of Rome: The Classical Dylan,” which documents Dylan’s reliance on Virgil and on Ovid’s “Tristia” and “Black Sea Letters” (!) in his songs. Dylan spent two years in his high school Latin club, though Thomas admits that Dylan probably came across Ovid in translation later in life. Thomas argues that Dylan, who changes his songs from performance to performance, is a modern rhapshode, the Homeric, storytelling bard of the fifth century B.C., “a poet on the cusp of oral and literary cultures.”
I’ll buy it; for me, Dylan has always appealed much more to the mind than to the heart.
The Times says C.C. Sabathia is becoming a team leader…while the Daily News says A-Rod is a-whoring around.
Yesterday in the Times “Styles” section there were two references to Twitter that were so embarrassingly—well, just bad, really—that it made me wonder if Twitter as a cultural phenomenon hasn’t peaked.
In an article about four female screenwriters in Hollywood, the writer said,
The two women, both 30, both screenwriters at the top of their game, both gorgeous, looked as if they were about to crack up. Ms. Scafaria turned to the audience.
“This is weird because we hang out a lot,” she said. “We’ve seen each other naked.”
Some in the room tittered — maybe even Twittered.
Because, you know, tittered and Twittered, like, rhyme?
To paraphrase a set of New Yorker editing guidelines my father once gave me, Block that pun!
Then, in a profile of Mariel Hemingway’s model daughter, “Dree“, the young autodidact says that her current obsession is Twitter.
My mother turned me on to it. I had no idea what it was, but it’s so fun. You just update your status constantly. I enjoy reading P. Diddy’s. He has the funniest updates. Like: “Women are God’s gift to earth. What are you doing?” I love it.
Funny stuff, indeed.*
I’m sure the number of Twitter users will keep growing, but when a trend starts popping up in the Times Styles section, you know it’s basically over….
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
* Here is the (unintentionally) funniest bit from that piece about the four female screenwriters, by the way:
Then came Ms. Meriwether, a successful playwright in New York. Her agent, Cliff Roberts of William Morris, sent her first television pilot, “Sluts” — about a group of recent college graduates who move to New York — to Ms. Scafaria and Ms. Fox about a year ago. While the series was never picked up by a network…
As the former owner of a 1985 Saab 900, previously owned by a priest who only drove it to church on Sundays—I swear to God (who would know), that’s what the salesman said—I know that the good people of Cambridge will join me in urging the government of Sweden to save Saab.
But so far, they’re not stepping up to the plate of meatballs.
Swedish officials have condemned what they see as protectionism by other European countries that have pledged to prop up their own failing car industries. They have also been scathing about General Motors, Saab’s owner, and the last thing they want is to seemto be bailing out a despised foreign company.
Thanks a lot, GM. You had to go ruin a great car company, didn’t you?
I’ll always fondly remember my Saab stories, from the time I was housesitting and drove the family’s Saab against their instructions, then panicked when I couldn’t get the ignition key out (you had to have the standard shift in reverse), to a nighttime escapade in Roussillon, to the adventures I had in my own Saab (powder-blue, but I preferred to call it battleship-gray). And, yes, it had a Grateful Dead sticker on the bumper. Dancing bears, I think it was.
The car broke down constantly—breaks brakes, clutch, air conditioning, that priest must have really abused it—and eventually I sold it to my friend Eric for $1600 and then he gave it to his girlfriend (no air conditioning in LA!) and then they passed it along to someone else. Who knows where it is now? Resting piece-fully in car heaven, I suppose.
Still, it had character (the ignition between the front seats!), and it was a blast to drive on back-country roads, and handled great in snow, and you could fit about eight people in it, and I knew that GM would destroy Saab, which of course it did, what does Detroit know about making cars with character, so that was grim then.
But wouldn’t it be great if somehow Saab survived and returned to its former glory?
Since Saabs were basically the official car of 02138, perhaps the Harvard community could take some action here?
In today’s Times, Frank Rich lays into Larry Summers like a kid playing Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots against a double amputee.
Summers is so tone-deaf that he makes Geithner seem like Bobby Kennedy. Bob Schieffer of CBS asked Summers the simple question that has haunted the American public since the bailouts began last fall: “Do you know, Dr. Summers, what the banks have done with all of this money that has been funneled to them through these bailouts?” What followed was a monologue of evasion that, translated into English, amounted to: Not really, but you little folk needn’t worry about it.
Well…yes.
Here’s the transcript:
SCHIEFFER: All right. Let me — let’s turn to this whole situation at the banks. When — do you know, Dr. Summers, what the banks have done with all of this money that has been funneled to them through these bailouts?
SUMMERS: We certainly have a picture of what’s going on in the banks. And we’re getting a much closer and better reading on the situation of the banks through the stress tests that are an integral part of Secretary Geithner’s financial plan.
And we’re certainly monitoring very closely the funds that go into — the — all the financial activities of the banks. The reason I’m hesitating with respect to your question, Bob, is not to be evasive but it’s because these banks, in a year, take in $1 trillion dollars, of which the government’s $25 billion, or $10 billion, or whatever it is, is one component. And then they lend out on a very large scale.
So it’s not really possible to take a particular dollar that came from the government and say where that particular dollar went.
But what I can say is that it is a crucial focus of what is a very close and intense relationship, now, between the supervisors and the banks, following these capital infusions, that there be increased lending; that there be increased lending to small businesses, that there be the kind of constructive steps that the president announced, which all the major banks are participating in, to provide mortgage relief for homeowners; that there be enhanced activities with respect to consumer credit.
It’s going to take — it’s going to take time.
Who knew it took so long to say (or not) a single word? “No.”
As in, “No, I don’t know what’s happening with all the billions of dollars we’re giving to the banks. How could I? I’m too busy studying the physics behind digital TV.”
Rich argues that the Obama administration, and Summers in particular, are wildly out of touch with the anger that Americans feel about the bank bailouts. But how could they not be? Tim Geithner is Goldman’s bitch lap dog. Until recently, Larry Summers worked for a mammoth hedge fund. Meanwhile, Bob Rubin lurks in the background like the ghost of Christmas future.
And, as readers of Harvard Rules will know, neither Summers nor Rubin showed much concern for the little people when dealing with the currency crises of the 1990s. Then, as now, they looked out for the banks.
Page 31: Ensuring the payback of loans punished the world’s poor while rewarding wealthy and irresponsible investors…. Why should the IMF bail out Wall Street banks who’d made reckless loans or hedge funds who’d invested in a bubble? “I think it’s a mistake to blame the doctor instead of the disease,” Summers responded...
As Rich points out:
The “dirty little secret,” Obama told Leno on Thursday, is that “most of the stuff that got us into trouble was perfectly legal.” An even dirtier secret is that a prime mover in keeping that stuff legal was Summers, who helped torpedo the regulation of derivatives while in the Clinton administration. His mentor Robert Rubin, no less, wrote in his 2003 memoir that Summers underestimated how the risk of derivatives might multiply “under extraordinary circumstances.”
Given that Summers worked for a secretive hedge fund, D. E. Shaw, after he was pushed out of Harvard’s presidency at the bubble’s height, you have to wonder how he can now sell the administration’s plan for buying up toxic assets with the help of hedge funds….
You know, God bless Frank Rich. Why does it take a former theater critic to say what no one else in the mainstream media will?
As for Geithner, people might take him more seriously if he gave a credible account of why, while at the New York Fed, he and the Goldman alumnus Hank Paulson let Lehman Brothers fail but saved the Goldman-trading ally A.I.G….
[I saw Tim Geithner on CNN’s “Your Money” today—an “exclusive interview,” CNN boasted. So far as I could tell—I was on a Stairmaster, so I can’t swear that my recollection is perfect—the words “Goldman Sachs” were never uttered by interviewer Ali Velshi. Instead, Geithner spoke about how he learned how great the US is by growing up in other countries. Whatever.]
The point is, people are beginning to smell a rat here, and that’s the fact that while Barack Obama campaigned on making things better for regular folks, he hired economic advisers who are part and parcel of the Wall Street class. They broke the economy. Who can trust them to fix it?
And with that, Rock ’em Sock ‘Em Robots.
(Or, as they call it in the UK, “Raving Bonkers.”)
It’s March…and the Globe online has a special section called “Notable Deaths of 2009.”
“Scroll through this gallery to see who has died in 2009,” the paper urges.
I can’t quite put my finger on why this seems so tawdry, but it does….
Then-president Bill Clinton on the 1995 death of Jerry Garcia….(that’s Tabitha Soren, former MTV reporter, now wife of Michael Lewis, conducting the interview, by the way).
