THE PERFECT HEIST

"We denounce the international and national economists as complete frauds, crooks and liars who have only their own interests at heart and screw you out of your money any way they can.

We denounce the private bankers as a bunch of crooks, liars, scumbags and frauds.

We denounce the international economic institutions to be the instigators of this whole fraud scheme, and we think they should ALL go to jail."

Interesting opinion from The Guatemala News...

A TOUCH OF AMUSEMENT

I had never seen a funnier waiting room in my life.

The expression on the walls, the look on the door combined to drive me into shrieks of laughter.

I was rolling on the floor, my sides aching, tears streaming from my eyes when the secretary called my name, announcing my turn for the job interview.

I straightened myself as best I could and brushed the floor dust off my suit, still chuckling at the color of the carpet and stifling guffaws at the lamps on the hilarious stands at the ends of the outrageous couch, as I gathered my papers together and wiped my eyes with my tie.

By the time I opened the door to the inner office, overcoming a new surge of laughter at the sight of the ludicrous doorknob, I had gained sufficient control over myself to present a reasonably staid appearance, suited to the position for which I was applying, that of bank manager.

The board of interviewers, however, was seated around such a side-splitting table that I lost control at once and doubled over roaring, dropping my briefcase onto a carpet even funnier than the one I'd just left, and going into absolute convulsions at each boffo question the comical crew asked me.

It was too much; I nearly crack up even now, just thinking about it.

Anyway, I howled all the way through the interview-- you should have seen their ties! I simply couldn't contain myself!

At the end of it, they had the secretary help me out of there - I was absolute jelly by then - and later I was informed that I had gotten the job.

As you can see, I don't laugh at all any more. Now that I actually manage money, it isn't the least bit funny.

Used to read this at the Kyoto Connection, over 20 years ago,
perhaps anticipating our current surreal global financial comedy;
a slightly different version was published later, in Kyoto Journal #19...
w/thanks to Ken Rodgers.

MY CENTRAL BANK

I go to an American ATM for the first time and all the instructions are in plain English, so helpful and direct for the newbie, no overload of boilerplate politeness, just the familiar minimalism of step A, step B etc.

I put in my card, zip through the procedure and to my strange surprise real, old-fashioned money comes out, that the core of me reflexively realizes it can buy stuff with, the bills looking just the way real money still looks in the central bank of my mind even after all these years, with pictures on it of people I learned about long ago in school-- iconic revolutionaries and generals, presidents and other members of that permanent psychopantheon, with historic buildings on the back, every denomination impractically pale green and uniform in size, the ones and hundreds differentiated only by the zeros and the portraits of George and Ben, each bill mythically charged by particulars deeply interwoven with my own history, unlike multicolored and varisized Japanese money, which, though artier, more practical and (at the moment) economically stronger, is nevertheless not fully accepted by my central bank, where it has no historic heft and does not viscerally impress me; only my intellect knows I can actually buy stuff with those pretty pieces of paper.

Ever surprising, all the insitutional minutiae the traveler never leaves behind...

JAPAN BANKS ODDLY UNWILLING TO FLING GOOD MONEY AFTER BAD

This is fascinating. If this were you or me asking for money on these terms we'd be laughed out of the bank.

Citigroup, Bank of America and JPMorganChase, holders of major quantities of derivatives in which, one way or another, your bank account/pension fund may be invested, and who are losing big time as a result (right now we're only feeling the spray of the tsunami), are calling upon other banks around the world to put money into a fund to rescue whichever poor banks that in their mastery of financial acumen threw big money (i.e., yours) onto these mountains of derivatives and then sold them on, all the way to the last fool, just ahead.

Now they want everybody to chip in and rescue them. Though the proposed fund would comprise but one droplet in the tsunami of derivative-linked debt that is now looming over the world, you gotta admire the chutzpah, the sheer, imitation brass of it. The biggest holders of derivatives? Citigroup, Bank of America and JPMorganChase. ("Today, more than ever before in the short history of derivatives, one leading United States institution effectively IS the derivatives market. This company, as we will explore in this essay, is the American giant superbank JPMorganChase (www.JPMorganChase.com)."

But for reasons to do with the economic vision and loss-avoidance generally associated with financial institutions, big Japanese banks are saying: do we really want to throw this much more money out the window?

A good explanation of derivatives

Krugman's take

The coming collapse of the modern banking system
"The banks don't have the reserves to cover their downgraded assets and the Federal Reserve cannot simply monetize their bad bets. There's no way out."

Dec 22 update: Banks Decide Not to Go Ahead With Super-SIV Fund, WSJ Reports...
They'll make the Scrooge announcement on Christmas eve, to take advantage of extended holiday amnesia... Mortgage holders, fund investors and pensioners should be this crafty...