The Great Comeback

 

I always slept soundly.  From reviewing medical records, I know some people do not.  Physicians felt sleep history was important.  It made up a fair percentage of life.

      

I read a few paragraphs this morning on the idea of life after death, which was a controversial idea 2,000 years ago. 

 

I attributed my ability to sleep to a security in my personal history.  Nothing had ever happened to me in the night.  No break-ins.  I was never sent to a war zone.  I had not been exposed to any trauma affecting the pysche.  My faith had never been shaken in the course of human events.  I was exposed at an early age to Scripture. 

 

Scripture was history and genealogy.  Scripture is nothing but stories of those who went before us, who learned how to pray in the stories of their life.  Real stories.  Real people, as the people who are related to me were real and were now gone. 

  

Sunday my sister leaves for Israel.  It is shocking to see how little accent is giving in the itinerary to the events of the Torah, the Old Testament.  I think it is fair to say that the Old Testament is being ignored.  She was going with a number of Catholics, mainly from Norfolk, Nebraska.  The people of Norfolk did not set this agenda.  It was the travel agent who did and who was ignoring half the story.  The beauty of the New Testament could only be found with a knowledge of the history and genealogy of Scripture of the time before the Messiah. 

 

Scripture is nothing but the history of how people who went before us learned how to pray.  Abraham.  Isaac.  Sacrifice.  A bizarre idea, to sacrifice the future, a son.  And so began Abraham’s dialogue with God, asking questions, seeking answers if he was doing the right thing.  Questioning.  Really, learning how to pray. 

 

I spent time over the weekend with a friend who announced in April 1974 that he was becoming a Jesuit.  He started telling a story of the reaction of one of his college classmates.  I filled in the details.  I was standing between the two of them at the time of the announcement in the story.  He did not recall that I was there.  My witness of what happened was a bit more vivid, the emotions expressed something he did not remember.  That Jesuit had slept soundly, although not at first, over the years since.  There had been two years of severe questioning.  He had quit and come back. 

 

Comebacks.  Scripture was all about the Resurrection, comebacks.  It was why I loved baseball and following the markets.  And my faith.  Comebacks.  Mystery.  God, in His ending as a writer, coming back to the first chapter.  As the Messiah died and then rose, I believed I would.  I had no real doubt.

 

But to see the development of a feeling that Abraham had to sacrifice the future, a son.  To see the Author comeback to a theme a long time thereafter, after all the doubts between a lover and His betrothed were demonstrated, the same doubts experienced by any true lover.  God comes back to the story of Abraham, years later.  He provides the final chapter in Oh God, Book II.  It was the last time a sequel was better than the original.  Through Him, with Him, and in Him, I slept soundly.   As a result, I had no real fear of death.  It was inevitable.  So I slept soundly.  So far anyway.   

Mystery: Being Able to Question

The mystery: of baseball, of markets, of the opposite sex, of God. 

Why did you bunt, with a man on second and no one out?  All of the questions of the press conference, there were actually two managers giving honest answers.  We now live in an age where candidates, coaches, managers answered less questions.  They arranged and spun events, setting the tone.  So it was refreshing to see Joe Maddon and Charlie Manuel in action.      

The loss of access to question was followed by people who quit questioning.  It was the environment we lived in, dominated by former journalists turned public relation specialists.  The environment, the moral one, had changed.  It was a result of moral relativism, decried by agnostics like George Orwell or Christian Evelyn Waugh.   Maybe no one would notice.  But the old-timers did.  They saw limited access in press rooms and locker rooms.  Young journalists took all of this loss of access as the norm. 

The loss of access was part of the the daily llfe of a new generation.  Voice messages, e-mail, might increase communication in one way, but it was one dimensional.  I could manipulate people and time to my advantage.  But did it make people, candidates, less authentic?     

Did anyone else see the irony in lower interest rates, announced by the Fed yesterday?  Wasn’t that easy credit what created this mess in the first place?   Washington was going to be compelling banks to lend, in a new form of fascism?  The Associated Press actually ran this story:

October 28, 2008…..WASHINGTON (AP) — An impatient White House served notice Tuesday on banks and other financial companies receiving billions of dollars in federal help to quit hoarding the money and start making more loans.

“We’re trying to do is get banks to do what they are supposed to do, which is support the system that we have in America. And banks exist to lend money,” White House press secretary Dana Perino said.

Though there are limits on how much Washington can pressure banks, she noted that banks are regulated by the federal government.  “They will be watching very closely, and they’re working with the banks,” she said.  She said that Anthony Ryan, Treasury’s acting undersecretary for domestic finance, delivered a speech in New York on Tuesday that made this point. Ryan spoke to the annual meeting of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.” 

It also was reported, “As the crisis that began in the mortgage market spreads through the economy, policy makers are redoubling their efforts to contain the damage. Even as the Fed reduced rates on Wednesday, the Bush administration was weighing a plan to slow the foreclosure epidemic in the nation’s housing market. Details of the initiative were in flux, but the plan could involve the government guaranteeing the mortgages of as many as three million at-risk homeowners, a step that could cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars, people briefed on the plan said.”

The “why me, Lord?” refrain.  A lot of people sang it in tough times.  Few sang it in good times.  In an affluent time, too many of use just ate, drank, and were married without realizing all of the ingredients put into the food, and from where those ingredients had come.

At some point in a budding relationship, there was hope to find out and put an end to the wonder of what was behind this body.   To see someone naked was move to the next step.  But the real mystery involved responding to a fidelity, to the wonder of nakedness.  It seemed nothing but attempting to feel a lover’s soul. 

 

With all of the questioning, there are promises made, tested, and kept. In the end, maybe at a funeral, maybe at the end of a season, you see how God has proven faithful.  And for those who survive a deadly illness, an addiction, there is a question of response.  As in any loving relationship, there is a necessity of laying down the proper way to respond to this fidelity.  

 

With mysteries, it was all about the daily questioning. 

Trick or Treat?

Trick or treat.  Who is that?  Identity!  Halloween was all about identity. 

 

I went to bed 6 hours ago reading a bit from Elie Wiesal’s book.  Wiesal discusses God in the the story of Noah, finding God in the developing story asking Himself, “Who am I?”  We were here to provide the answer.  People were.  If God was love, it was the lover who helped identify and provide the answer.  The story of Noah showed God’s struggle to establish His own identity, just as His people struggled in the same way with their identity.  And it was heartening to know that my struggle was God’s struggle. 

 

The story of Noah:  God still fully engaged in the world, in those days before he bowed out to a seat in the audience to watch His creation.  Fully conscious in this story of the goings-on in His world.  The divorced man or woman could fully identify with this story of a love gone bad.  God set out only to save His relationship with Noah and, what is unstated, Noah’s wife.   

 

There was a younger Jesuit, under 35, at the Jesuit Retreat House this year.  He spoke to us only at the morning prayer service at 7:30 am on the final morning.  He made a comment that stuck in my throat.  “God does not need us.”  He must have gotten the line out of a book or from some theology instructor.  And I thought he was so wrong.  The struggle in identity, in God’s, in mine, was the search for a lover, and once selected to continue developing with that other human.  To suggest that God did not really need love, was a developmental  blindness of either youth or his celibacy.

 

I went to bed 6 hours ago reading a bit from Elie Wiesal’s book.  Elie was always asking questions, like a little kid in Hebrew School.  It struck me that this questioning was the beauty of Judaism.  This was the original whodunit.  The answer was of course, God.  The joy was reading the mystery.  People kept buying the Agatha Christie novels, the Nancy Drew Mysteries, the Hardy Boys.  Year after year.  It was all in the questioning, the search for answers.  Men and women never could have enough of these mystery novels, in their own search, as a guide.  Just as from age to age, from east to west, men and women went in search of a lover. 

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Ultimately, Halloween was all about the identity of someone else.  The someone else we aspired to be.  It originally seemed based on the notion of a saint, or the spirit of a saint.   Life’s lesson, the answer to the question (Trick or treat?), was one of identity, and  ultimately the mystery was about finding out who I was meant to be.   And God did need me, in all of this.  Otherwise the world was going to be a worse mess.

Lifesavers Over Time

 

Image & likeness: it all started with intimacy, whatever intimacy meant in the modern age.  In a way, I thought that God had spent a lot of time since the days of creation on image and likeness of this humanity.  From one generation to the next, it was through the intimacy of the family that God did his creational magic, or better put, left His mystery. 

 

Yesterday during lunch with a president of an university, when asked about the number of priests that I had had as teachers during my academic experience at a Catholic high school, I mentioned the five priests I had had for instructors, at a school that now has one priest on staff.  One of those former instructors was a current university presidnt.  Twenty-four hours later, this windy morning the rationale struck me that one specific instructor who I mentioned, a freshman instructor whose friendship continued over 4 years, had taught my father at the same school.  Thirty–plus years later, I now connected the concern of a creator, this teacher, and his satisfaction in his pupils, in seeing what was passed from one generation to the next.  Just as God had spent a lot of time in the days since His creation first started on image and likeness, so had this priest on a small part of humanity. 

 

In the last twelve years, I had met a Jesuit at a near-by retreat house where he had been stationed since the 1950s.  The first time I met him, he had made reference to my dad who he once had met here on retreat.  This Jesuit also bore a strong resemblence to that freshman religon instructor.  It struck me today that for this eighty-something Jesuit or my deceased freshman religion teacher, they were both there throwing life-savers in the ocean of life in the course of some wicked storms.  And some to the sons of students they had known.        

 

God had spent a lot of time since the days of creation on image and likeness of this humanity, beginning with the the sons and daughters of Abraham.  The rejection of God and His law by the world, not only throughout the time described in the Torah by the Chosen People, as told, but at the beginning of the common era, from age to age, from East to West.  Now, I was in the number that considered themselves chosen. 

 

Real intimacy was a generational thing that came through family.  At Mass this morning, the sight of all these other families hit me like never before.  Real intimacy, which began with sex between two people, resulted in new creations, developed in kids over the years.  In the indiviual process of creation, these kids were sent to school to work on being formed in this image and likeness of God.  And that formation part wasn’t easy. 

 

This generational thing on my mind, having shared common high school instructors with my father, really came home twice during some words spoken on the altar.  The readings today were about the greatest commandment, to know God.  And the final reading was about the application of the Shema to the world after Jesus, now, to our neighbor.  The priest talked about how a child learns growing up.  He cited the day he first rode away under his own balance riding a bike, from his dad who had been walking along.  He spoke about how a youngster learns how to hit with a parent standing alongside, holding a bat.  Real intimacy, real love, was found in family.  Later, in the Preface, this generational thing on my mind really hit my heart from words spoken on the altar.  “Lord, our God, who gave Your only son, Jesus, the Messiah, to redeem the world.”  It was the generational thing from above.  This God had sent in ‘this generational thing’ a message to us, most intimately.  And that best and final gift to us on earth, from this God of love, was a generational thing.  This formation of a child was all about the gift of knowledge, of those created in the Image and formed in the likeness of Yaweh.  It was in every child.  All the gifts had been provided for the future, in the prophets, outlining right from wrong.  And the world, using capital punishment, executed His son under the power of the state.  The cross symbolizes the rejection, the capital punishment.  And in a course of 7 days since last here in church, I certainly had done my share of rejecting.   Suddenly, my wrong-doing seemed much more personal. 

 

The Chosen People, with their special gift of Knowledge, had received their deliverance in the Holy Land.  But the pursuit really had not ended the challenge of deliverance for them.  We were all on in search of the destination, of deliverance, of knowledge.  In the meantime, there was a lot of conflict, intra and inter family, about what was true intimacy, how to share it, and who had discovered the proper degree.  The basic human condition was the same, from age to age, from East to West.   It started with two people sharing intimacy, and then the Truth of the intimacy was passed along to the next generation. 

But true intimacy was an artform. 

 

I lived in a country formed on the belief that “the pursuit” of happiness was a fundamental human right.  As I heard a women say this morning on the radio, it was “the pursuit” which was the destination.  It was “the pursuit” that was important.  Whether it was bike-riding or playing baseball, formation took exercise which was an ongoing challenge before those muscles, the physcial one and the spiritual ones, turned to flab.  Reaching a destination on a bike, burning those spiritual calories along the way, contemplating those lifesavers, from one generation to the next, was all part of the mystery.  This weekend had been all about forty mile an hour gusts of wind, wondering if the wind diminished or just was always there, elsewhere, a lot like the pursuit of this God.  Always.  And everywhere.  From age to age.  From east to west. 

The Motion of the Ocean

 

 

I never thought it would come down to this.  I had to announce, no thongs in class, girls.  Not that anyone would be checking. Or should I say, I would not be checking. 

 

For the Jewish world, a new year has begun and people have returned to their everyday lives.  The Day of Atonement is over for now.  Seldom are the results ever published but most of us have resumed the activities that separate us from God.  In dramatic circumstances, they are called addictions and require treatment.  In less critical matters, everyday life continues.  Aristotle said the unexamined life was not worth living.  If he was a Jew or a Roman Catholic, he might suggest a closer examination, investigating for the causes of our sins.  

 

There was a temperature of the ocean created by the American public school system, without God, called moral relativism.  The consequences were some kind of inner global warming, affecting the body temperature of everyone.  How were the consequences gauged?   Was it how much an individual woman felt needed.  The soul-searching at middle age by a woman, and the resulting depression?  What was missing?  What was it about in this newly urban world that had changed in 100 years?  If a study was ever conducted, I would expect the findings to conclude it was all about love, about feeling needed in this very urban world.  It was about the changing roles in modern life. 

 

The temperature of the sea of morality had changed, with moral relativism.  What happened when kids did not believe in their ideals, and the self-worth to maintain those ideals?  My hypothesis was the resulting depression was one result of moral relativism, what the French called malaise.  What was missing?  Was it a result of a restlessness within?  Is this what?  Were people really looking for God, even without belief, but they did not know it? 

 

It was all about the mystery found between the lines of the Torah, and an interest in that mystery.  One sign of moral relativism was a lost interest in things, one of the indicators of clinical depression.     

 

By now scientists had discovered that the ocean had an effect on the air.  Both had an effect on beachware.  They were all connected.  So were we. 

 

In one sense, those thongs were all about love, about feeling needed in this very urban world.  It was all about global warming.  

To Know God: The Syllabus

His character explodes around us every day.

 

To know God.  It is not possible to like, to love anyone unless you first know them. The greatest gift passed down by a mother, a father, a teacher, is about this God.  In the secular world, only the luckiest of us got to attend parochial schools. 

 

The New Millennium was so much fear based.  If I read the newspapers correctly, there had been no cease fire declared in the War on Terror.  So this was like it was to live in the North of Ireland for all those years. 

 

Fear.  If I overcame fear, there then was heroism.  Fear only froze me to inaction.  Knowledge made me act.  In the secular world, in the information age of digital television, of soccer moms and remote control, fear was everywhere.  And the hell with freedom.      

 

To know God.  If I would ever sign up to teach a class on God, what they called the rites of initiation in the church I belonged, I would have a fairly simple syllabus.  It would be an introduction to God.  And it would involve a combination of a literature with a theology class.

  

To know someone well certainly erases a lot of fear.  So class, read just the Book of Genesis.  Acquire 3 books.  We will begin with one chapter from Writers on Writing.  The first assignment involves the one chapter in this book called “reading” written by Richard Ford.  Yes, he is the Ford who later wrote Independence Day and won the Pulitzer Prize.   Writers on Writing was written in 1991 and was published by Bread Loaf Anthology.  Ford begins by stating that he really learned to read at the age of 25 as he prepared to teach English in college.  He had to teach and explain to his students, who demanded relevancy in everything, how to read carefully. After all, young people are in the relevancy business.  Ford’s problem was teaching about character, point of view, to a bunch of people who were as excited to be in his class as they might be visiting the dentist.  Such is the challenge of a theology professor.  

 

That syllabus, class, also includes God: A Biography.  The author is Jack Miles.  He too won a Pulitzer Prize, but for this book.  He approaches God, as presented in those 30 foot scrolls of the Torah, the Old Testament, as one developing character.  He shows the growth and change of the character, God, from the story in the Book of Genesis through the Book of Job.  Both of the cited authors present characters by having you answer for yourselves the questions:  How did he affect you?  Did he frighten you?  Did you love him?  What was he after?   Did he change much during the time that you knew him?  What most impressed you about him?

 

And maybe, class, you will have to have had a bit of Hamlet by William Shakespeare, or seen the movie, to appreciate the dilemma presented in the famous soliloquy, “To be, or not to be.” About the conflict between a public life and a personal life.  About the inheritance of the family business by a prince.

 

And finally, in the final weeks we will concentrate on the story of Noah, in the days before God becomes half conscious of the goings on in the world. You will need to acquire the book Sages and Dreamers by Elie Wiesal.  Yes.  Wiesal.  He, too, a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for the novel, Night, and a Nobel Prize winner.  Yes.  Noah, swimming in the polluted air of the earth that had occurred over 10 generations.  This is the account of the second creation.  Ford, Miles, and Wiesal will show that it is not so much the answers as the questions that help lead you to God in your personal life. 

 

Noah, living in wicked times.  Noah, who is all that others are not.  All others die, yet he lives.  The crimes of humanity, the corruption, which Noah was above, are never explained in the lines.  Who did what to whom?  Not one crime is cited, not one criminal.  It was like reading ancient history, the story of Noah, and kids have little interest in ancient history.  But the mystery was, the questions were between the lines.  How could God resent the lack of faith when it had yet to have been passed down?  It was thought that Noah was the just man of his generation.  Jewish commentary often cites the Just Man.  If Noah lived in other times, would he have attained this leadership role?  What did he do to deserve this role?  Little is ever said.  All that the Good Book says is that Noah submits to God’s will and nothing more.  God has chosen to talk to him.  Creation had become chaos.    

    

Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, wrote that an unanswered question is a fine traveling companion which sharpens the eye for a journey.  Too often an answer is an invitation to stop thinking about something, to stop wondering. The mystery was in the questions.  The mystery of the Torah was to be found in the questions between the lines, much like in the lives you set off to live.  The Torah, where the past is connected to the present and to the future life as a process whose every event is connected to the moment that just went by, has no such stopping places.  

 

Free will, children of soccer moms, and its application come from God and are explained in the stories of the Torah.  You might want to get to know the stories and the main character.  Before the questions on the final exam.  

Changing Color

That tree outside my bedroom window was turning a glorious red.  And it only became evident, was witnessed, in the morning.  Births. Joy.  Deaths. Fear.  Why? 

 

Sunrise. Sunset. Asian markets. Highs and lows.  Spring.  Autumn.  The gods of government trying to control everything, even things that cannot be controlled.  Global warming.  Market meltdowns. 

 

Eyes: Just walking views.  Where did you go?  What did you see?  Today!  Imagine life without vision of this world which changes each day. 

 

The age of 18—the O. Henry story.  Hunting.  Survival.  Intertwined with the 18-year old near the end of formation when attractions are there…..wine, women.  Jobs.  Drawn to someone after you are formed.  The excitement.  The wonder.  To never lose the sense of excitement of a child over the world.  Whether it was nature or the the things associated with the animal kingdom. 

 

“You bear witness.”  You carry your witness from one generation to the next.  What did you see? 

 

Sunrise. Sunset. The beginning.  The end. 

 

“I am the Alpha and the Omega.”  God was there.  Always. 

Night Noise

Seeing God in all things.

Listening to a good priest who had found his God, his own place in the world, and once again how the world was all related to these sacred stories. 

Iceland.  Redeemed by Russia yesterday. 

The library.  The stories of the war in Asia.  Heroism.  Survival in the Phillipines.  Good verssus bad.  Suffering.  Redemption. 

The simple part of Grace.  Sunday night dinner.  Not just the food.  This day.  Every day.  The morning shower, when so many did not have one.  Soldiers.  The simple things that I had taken so much for granted that are there each day.  Love.  Food.  Me.  God. 

Garbage disposals.  This would be the week to finally call a plumber.  Movements of garbage disposal covers.  News at 11.  Fear at 11:30.

Elie Wiesel on the story of Noah.

Sleep.  Noise. Crash.  Fear in the night.   Garbage disposals?  Mice?  Rats?  The unknown.  Rolling over to sleep.  Tripping over golf clubs at 7 am.  It was only golf clubs at the end of another season.  Seeing God in all things, in the morning.

God Bless America

In the modern world, a blessing had become only symbolic. But it still involved the traditions of a family. In the past, in the world before television, the blessing WAS the legacy. It had involved a moral vision.

In the televised world with sponsors, with 120 channels to choose from, the world had come apart. Children of television saw the needs that generations of people who went before us never knew existed.

This week there would be the last televised debate, uninterrupted. America was looking for a leader who had been blessed by a spirit of the past that involved a moral vision. In my view, neither candidate showed much to date that they could carry on a tradition. While in the Senate, these two senators, both who employed a staff that was paid to help them see things, had missed a lot. They both were 2 leader who failed to guide the country with a moral vision. They might be forgiven for time restraints that involved gathering the funding to participate in this $1 billion presidential campaign.

At the last debate we heard one candidate speak of a crisis of confidence. Today there is a story about the crisis on Wall Street which has become the issue of Election 2008. There was a quote from Kevin Giddis, head of fixed-income trading at Morgan Keegan, who was trying to explain what had happened. He said. “I think we’re dealing with more confidence than substance.” With $560 trillion that was written by the 5 investment banking houses, Mr. Giddis, the confidence in people like you has been lost and is not coming back.

It was the derivative, market, stupid. Wall Street has with campaign 2008 stained everyone. It was no longer subprime mortgages, Mr. Giddis. What don’t you get Mr. Giddis?

The financial media has finally explained the goings-on in Washington and Wall Street since September 15th. Here are the Cliff Notes, Mr. Giddis, Mr. Obama, Mr. McCain. There were 5 investment banking houses not being regulated by the Securities Exchange Comminssion. The parties were Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs. The current Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, as well as the former Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, were CEOs at Goldman Sachs. During their reign at Goldman Sachs, the derivative market exploded. Paulson’s background includes rising through the ranks of Goldman Sachs since 1974, becoming a partner in 1982, co-head of investment banking in 1990, chief operating officer in 1994, and forcing out his co-chairman Jon Corzine in 1998, in what Floyd Norris of the New York Times termed a “coup,” taking over the post of CEO. (In 1970, Paulson entered the Nixon administration fresh from Harvard Business School Masters program, working first as staff assistant to the assistant secretary of defense and then as office assistant to John Erlichman in 1972-73.) Paulson is a Republican. Rubin is a Democrat advising Obama.

There now is a battle of ideology going on between the credit markets and the equity markets. In the current envirnment, no matter the moves put on by Henry Paulson, a son of Wall Street, banks were not buying in. That was why credit markets froze. Bankers have always been conservatives. They were not buying into the social engineering on capitalism. It was not, Mr. Giddis, an issue “more confidence than substance.” Bankers neither trust the balance sheet of another bank nor the government. Nor do I.

Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, apparently thinks the Fed lower interest rates, exactly what created this mess, was going to send the equity markets up. The truth was there really any not arrows left in the quiver to policy makers, as they had all been used, apparently for political purposes.

Those traditions of a family: Read again the story of Isaac as he tried to pass on his tradition, his moral vision, to one of his sons. The question was which son.

A blessing was about making ME holy. Isaaac knew that. The meaning was not a wish. It was not an expression of astonishment or surprise like with a sneeze, as my unabridged dictionary suggested.

This crisis was not just about a failure of leadership. It was the system that was televised. The televised world with its 120 channels, all dominated by political ads, used to provide a place where one soap company could argue with another which could remove the stains the best , which could wash your hair the best. Now there were 50 feet rows of shampoos and 50 foot rows of laundry detergent. And in the end there really was not much difference, only a brand name, and issues of soap bubbles. Only some brands charged more for it brand name and soap bubbles. The cost of those commercials had been passed along, and many soap companies paid stores for preferential placement.

The 2 presidential candidates never had a vision of the developing problem as they focused on taxing power. Both had been in Washington for all of this, watching. Maybe like most of us, they just watched on television. They might have been too busy to realize that there is not enough money to fund health care with the recent crash. There is not enough money for tax cuts. There is not enough money to be waging war.

It was a new age for soap, with old ideas, old arguements. But plenty of shelf space. Those soap bubbles had burst too. It was time to come clean. God bless America.

A Spoon Full of Sugar Makes the Medicine Go Down

Who was it that said, “A British bank is run with precision”? 

 

Money is the medium of exchange.  ”Valuation is in people’s minds,” Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale, explained. ”Prices just record a measure of what people think the stock market is worth.  What the people who are willing to trade today are actually trading at.  So we’re just extrapolating that and thinking, well, maybe that’s what everyone thinks it’s worth.”  The notion is a “fallacy” that you lose a pile of money whenever a market tanks.  He says that a stock price, a home value, has never been the same thing as money.  It is simply the ”best guess” of what a stock, a home, is worth.  There is no real money from a savings account in a bank.  Modern humanity knows it is loaned out.  We have always lived a life of illusion. 

 

Clearly the message of the markets in 2008 is that there was too much credit around.  George Soros was on television last night.  He is a financial wizard who, it is said in one 24 hour period, made more than $1 billion in the currency exchange markets when the pound sterling was falling, I think, in the early 1980s.  He commented that prevailng moods, in any times, are unsustainable.  He was talking about optimism.  He was talking about pessism.

 

This weekend there was a meeting of the G7.  What you do not hear clearly explained is the battle of ideology going on between the credit markets and the equity markets.  If the credit markets unfreeze, reflected in the LIBOR rates that banks loan money to  banks, then inflation will soon return.  Money loaned at low interest promoted that public policy.  In the current envirnment, no matter the moves put on by Henry Paulson, a son of Wall Street, banks were not buying in.  That was why credit markets froze.  Bankers have always been conservatives.  They were not buying into the social engineering on capitalism.  They neither trusted another bank’s balance sheet nor the government.  “In short, you’ve got a ghastly mess!”      

 

This month in Minnesota, Tom Petters, one of our own, has been in the news.  For more than 13 years he has been in the business of taking over liquidated companies –it would seem that he was ready to thrive in current times –and selling their products.  If the allegations which have been made, his was a business that was based all on illusion.  The timing of his indictment seems ironic. 

             

A study is out today, that life expectancies are so high—this is as good as it gets.  Life expectancies can not go much higher.  Why did I feel this way all week?

           

In the markets, if the G7 nations somehow nationalize banks to free up money, monetizing this bad debt, then inflation will return as never before seen.  Ultimately, the affect would be deflation if the LIBOR rate holds, or alternatively hyperinflation.  That was the ongoing battle. What will it be?     

           

Nationalizing banks was one solution to Wall Streets battle with the credit markets.  Governments could then start loaning money, competing with those bankers of a different ideology about capitalism and trustworthiness.  In the current campaign for president in the United States, those old-time bankers had no dog in the fight.  At this point I trusted them a lot more than the people pulling the puppet strings. 

           

The lesson of this month is that true value lies in the heart of those you know, when you cannot trust the leaders of government, the leaders of Wall Street, the ideology of both, which has been about as transparent as the lobbyists and the motives that support them.

          

Those credit makets seem to finally be saying it was all about real relationships. 

                                   

In the mean time I was feeling a lot like George Banks when he was singing “A Man Has Dreams,” in the closing scene of ‘Mary Poppins.’