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Imagine the fright
mask that the Sofitel Hotel maid's face turned into when a black swan in the
form of an international banking poobah waddled out
of the suite's bathroom with wings rampant. Black swans appear now in the
unlikeliest places. I bet you a million Euros that Dominque
Strauss-Kahn's lawyer will say that his client was driven mad by relentless,
revolving, unresolvable thoughts of Greece, Portugal, Ireland, and Spain, and
that he mistook the hotel maid for Greek finance minister George Papaconstantinou. Wasn't it poor Karl Marx, driven mad
first by capital and then by boils, who said, "History repeats itself,
first as tragedy, then as farce."
Conveniently,
the bedroom farce is something at which the French excel. So much dignity, so
little impulse control. Not to go overboard with quotations right off top,
but cuddly ole T.S. Eliot famously informed us that "...this is the way
the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper." I suspect the
whimper was emitted by DSK in his Harlem jail cell when he discovered that
the standard Sunday morning breakfast issued by the New York City Department
of Corrections is a baloney sandwich. Quelle horreur! A French convict serving thirty years for
tunneling into a Toulon bank gets a brioche, at least!
The
question all this raises is: can you think of any other high-up officials,
say in American finance or banking, who have tried
to jam their generative member someplace it was not exactly invited? I can
think of a few, starting with, oh, Hank Paulson. He stuck it to a couple
hundred million US taxpayers and is now scott-free
in the marshes of Maryland pursuing his beloved wild birds with the Swarovski
EL 8x32 binoculars ($1,879.00, retail w/discount) and the excellent Sibley
field guide. Only a week or so ago Senator Carl Levin's Permanent
Subcommittee on Investigations sent a bill of particulars to the US
Department of Justice outlining the spectacular misdeeds of Goldman Sachs
executives Lloyd Blankfein and Daniel Sparks, et.
al, alleged to have performed a kind anal rape
on customers who did not have that kind of "yield" in mind when
they came through the door at 200 West Street. Sources tell me that Attorney
General Eric Holder has been using the report as a cocktail coaster.
One
poor slob, Raj Rajaratnam of the Galleon Group
hedge fund was convicted in a federal court last week for plain old insider
trading, something a child of seven could understand. With a little luck, Raj
will join Bernie Madoff's round-robin ping-pong
caucus at the federal penitentiary in Butner, NC,
and the days will seem to fly by. Apparently the scams that went down at
Goldman Sachs and lots of other so-called banks were too complex for rafts of
regulators and federal attorneys to figure out. But you never know. If DSK
was too dim to hire a nice discreet $1500-an-hour hooker prior to his
unspeakably tedious business-class flight back to Paris, then maybe Lloyd Blankfein will fly out of a broom closet in Jackson Hole
this summer dressed like Norman Bates's mother and
commence to paddle Ben Bernanke with a 10-inch chef's knife. One can only
hope.
You
can't blame regular folks for not knowing what the heck to pay attention to
these days. Most of the US public is not preoccupied with the doings of the
Greek finance ministry, the IMF, foreign bond spreads, CDS ratios, and the
spooky action in the commodities pits. Especially not with Big Muddy rising
and all those oil refineries waiting downstream like so many cypress stumps,
not to mention two nuke plants at River Bend and Waterford, Louisiana. Wouldn't that make some
hot gumbo?
While
I feel for the people fleeing their homes down there, I have a feeling that
this week's action will be set in the more abstruse precincts around European
finance. With DSK on ice in Harlem, who will coordinate the beating out of
brushfires that could burn down the European banking system? Remember, it's
not about the countries. They'll still be there. The goats will still be
grazing in wild thyme on the Greek hillsides no matter what happens in some
Frankfurt board room. The layabouts will still be
at their tables in the Lisbon café. But the Société
Générale and Commerzbank AG could go
up in a vapor faster than you can say Dominque
Strauss-Kahn. The great rattling fear that lives within European business
minds is that the whole bloody system is flat broke and any interruption to
the daisy-chain of revolving obligations will reveal the awful naked truth -
perhaps like seeing DSK fly out of the hotel bathroom with his florid organ
aloft and a wicked gleam in his eyes.
Anyway
you cut it, it can't be a good week for the Euro.
But with all currencies spiraling towards worthlessness, and even gold and
silver hemorrhaging value, what is the world of money coming to? Maybe the
stuff is obsolete. If you wait three weeks, you'll be able to walk into any
Wal-Mart and just pick up the stuff you want for free. Until it's all gone.
James
Howard Kunstler
James
Howard Kunstler’s new novel of the post-oil future, World
Made By Hand, is available at all booksellers.
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