The Financial Lives Of the Poets

CHAPTER 13

THIS ONE ADMITS TO being a lifetime

proponent of deregulation

but now, on NPR, he doesn’t know what to think-

I however, think of Mother Teresa, who at the end of her life

admitted she’d had a crisis and had stopped hearing God’s voice

decades earlier, which had to be a bit of a relief, I’d think-

hard enough to live a perfect life without

being hectored about it

– give away everything, feed the poor, don’t forget to love

the lepers!-but back to this disillusioned expert who says

you could go to any business school in the country and learn

the same lousy things he believed during those wasted years

– those Brooks Brothers days of strippers and Town Cars-

which is that financial systems are equilibrium-producing

engines and it takes random or external forces to derail them

that our entire economy is based on this simple principle-

that left alone markets will chug mostly in a straight line

that they will mostly do what is in their own best interest-

Balance risk with reward.

Throw out bad paper.

Make money.

But this crisis, the broken expert sadly explains

belies all of that, defies everything everyone ever

believed because it wasn’t caused by famine or hurricane or

by war, by OPEC raising prices or by some third-world country

bailing on billions in loans while its epaulet-happy despot

bags the humanitarian aid and raids the banks-no

the ultimate cause of this global crisis

in our financial system

is our financial system.

This problem is endemic to the faulty machine it exposed

and contrary to the news, it wasn’t caused by poor people

being allowed to borrow one hundred percent

of inflated home prices with nothing down, not really-

and it wasn’t even caused by traders inventing questionable

derivative side bets against those same bad loans, not really-

(that’s like saying a cold is caused by a cough

that your pneumonia came from a sneeze)-

no, the root cause of this global crisis

in our financial system

is our financial system.

And here is my real issue with financial experts

the whole time they’re advising you what to do

with your retirement accounts, or your kids’

college funds, or when you happen to catch them

on TV (all fancy cuffs and high collars)-

they all sound so smart. They all sound so right.

Their true currency is surety and they’re so sure

of their surety-but wait, the bull and the bear

can’t both be right, how can the liquidity position

and the long-term hold both be sure bets, and yet

these guys are always so sure-and this sure expert

says if there’s a flaw in the mechanics, dare I say-

his voice begins to quaver-there’s surely a flaw in our

entire system of lightly regulated capital generation

and investment, which would mean there’s surely a flaw

in nothing less than humanity itself-and here

the financial expert’s voice breaks even more

and he has to clear his throat and-surely he is crying,

surely we’ve let him down, we humans, and he’s

sure sobbing, devolving into a socialist, a fiscal atheist

right before our Dolby-sure-sound public radio ears.

And that’s when I hear the unsure voice of Mother Teresa

praying to the God Who So Selfishly Refused To Speak

To Her (the god of angry middle school girls

the deity of ladies who get stuck with lunch bills

the lord of stubborn brothers and jilted lovers

the petty pouting feuding god of hurt feelings)

and I say, in Teresa’s rat-infested, leper-loving lilt

this wise, weary prayer-Dear Father, if you’re out there

and if you can hear me, protect us from harm and by all means

comfort the weak and the poor, the wageless and

homeless, hungry, foreclosed, wandering, woefully

afflicted, but if you get just a minute after that

could you please please please

spite the living fuck out of this asshole-I mean it

go old-school Job on this rich fat fuck

this expert who apparently slept through

history class, through every relationship

anyone was ever in, and through the entire

twentieth century, this sure dickhead who

has only now discovered that there is

a goddamned flaw in us all.”