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Because eyes aren’t enough to tell you anything. Eyes are just blobs of colored gel, they aren’t as revealing as I used to think. That whole idea that eyes are windows to the soul and tell you something important had been a matter of projection on my part.
Amelia had been born and raised in Grants Pass, Oregon, and because of that she loved New York passionately, more than any of the natives ever knew enough to feel. The real locals were like fish in water, unaware and unimpressed.
Where Taylor's Farm, White Okak Farm is in Grants Pass, & Dad and Bobby's home in Manhattan : )
Charlotte was coming to believe that arrogance was a quality not just correlated with but a manifestation of stupidity, a result of stupidity.
“But gambling smart. Figuring out trades that outsmart even the other smart traders. That’s the game. If you didn’t have that, it would just be, what, I don’t know. Data analysis? Desk job in front of a screen?” “It is a desk job in front of a screen.” “It’s a game. And besides the screen is interesting, don’t you think? All those different genres and temporalities, all running at once … it’s the best movie ever, live every day.” “See, you are a quant!” “But it isn’t math, it’s literature. Or like being a detective.”
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. Money, n. A blessing that is of no advantage to us excepting when we part with it. —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
So people loved the index and its numbers, and did not examine its underlying logic too closely. New paper was valuable in itself, especially when rated high by the rating agencies, who had such usefully short memories, like everyone else in finance, when it came to their own absurdly terrible judgment, so the ratings still mattered as a rubber stamp of legitimacy, ridiculous though that was given their history as a service bought by the very people they were rating. So now as always you could get AAA ratings, not for subprime mortgages, obviously bad, but for submarine mortgages, clearly much
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“Tell me again what your tap was going to do.” Jeff dismisses it with the back of his hand: “I was gonna introduce a meta-tap, where every transaction made over the CME sent a point to the SEC’s operating fund.” Mutt stares at him. “A point per transaction?” “Did I say a point? Maybe it was a hundredth of a point.” “Well, even so. Suddenly the SEC has a trillion dollars it can’t identify in its operating accounts?” “It wasn’t that much. Only a few billion.” “Per day?” “Well, per hour.”
“It wasn’t stealing, it was redirecting. To the SEC no less. I’m not sure that kind of thing isn’t happening all the time. If it was, who would know? Would the SEC know? These are fictional trillions, they’re derivatives and securities and the nth tranche of a jumble bond. If someone had a tap in, if there were taps all over, no one would be able to know.
“Why did you do it, then?” “To alert the SEC as to what can happen. Maybe also give them the funding to be able to deal with some of this shit. Hire some people away from the hedge funds, put some muscle into the laws. Create a fucking sheriff, for God’s sake!”
Because the bailout of banks following the Second Pulse crash was huge. They always are. The bailout of the 2008 crash, which served as the model for the two that followed it, was calculated by historians at somewhere between 5 and 15 trillion dollars. One careful guess said it was 7.7 trillion dollars, another 13 trillion; both added that this was more than the cost (adjusted for inflation) of the Louisiana Purchase, the New Deal, the Marshall Plan, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the 1980s savings and loan bailout, the Iraq wars, and the entire NASA space program, combined. Conclusion: wars
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When Radio City was first opened they dosed its air with ozone with the idea that this would make people happier. The developer, Samuel Rothafel, had wanted it to be laughing gas, but he couldn’t get the city to approve it.
They have all come back like the tide, like poetry—in fact, please take over, O ghost of glorious Walt: Because life is robust, Because life is bigger than equations, stronger than money, stronger than guns and poison and bad zoning policy, stronger than capitalism, Because Mother Nature bats last, and Mother Ocean is strong, and we live inside our mothers forever, and Life is tenacious and you can never kill it, you can never buy it,
“It was a dark pool version of front-running,” he said. “Say you get an order for something at 100. Immediately you go out and buy it for yourself at 100, in the hope that that will drive up the price, meanwhile not fulfilling the first order. If the price then goes up to 103, you sell what you bought, while telling the person who made the order that you couldn’t find a buyer. If on the other hand it goes down to 98, you fulfill the order at 100. Either way you’re good. There’s no way to lose.”
“Capital,” Jeff clarified. “It will always win. It will eat your brain.” “Not my brain,” Charlotte declared. “You say that now, but you’re not a billionaire. Not yet.” “I hate that shit,” Charlotte said. “I’d like to crash it.” “Me too,” Amelia interjected. “I want it for the animals.” “I want it for this building,” Charlotte said grimly. Mutt regarded her. “So to save your co-op from a takeover you would destroy the entire global economic system?” “Yes.”
“Right. Several trillion dollars changes hands every day. Or every second.” They all gaped except for the two quants. The smaller of them said, “It’s fictional money, but still.” “Fictional money?” Charlotte asked him. “Paper,” he explained. “Loans beyond actual assets. Futures and derivatives and instruments of all kinds. Lots of paper that supposedly would convert to money, but that couldn’t happen if everyone tried to do it at once.”
“You could pop the bubble on purpose, having arranged a different response to the crash that would follow.” I pointed the raised finger over my shoulder, at uptown. “If liquidity relies on a steady payment stream from ordinary people, which it does, then you could crash the system any time you wanted, by people stopping their payments. Mortgages, rents, utilities, student debt, health insurance. Stop paying, everyone at once. Call it Odious Debt Default Day, or a financial general strike, or get the pope to declare it the Jubilee, he can do that anytime he wants.” “But wouldn’t people get in
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Pöpper called that monocausotaxophilia, the love of single causes that explain everything. It
Cement itself was mostly replaced by the various graphenated composites, in the so-called Anderson Trifecta, very elegant: carbon was sucked out of the air and turned into graphene, which was fixed into composites by 3-D printing and used in building materials, thus sequestering it and keeping it from returning to the atmosphere. So now even building infrastructure could be carbon negative (meaning more carbon removed from the atmosphere than added, for those of you wondering).
The strangest is that which, being in many particulars most like, is in some essential particular most unlike. —Thoreau discovers the uncanny valley, 1846
“Yes. But look, if you were to do that, you would want to have a government in place that was ready for it. Because when the crash comes, the government needs to nationalize the banks. No more bailing them out and forcing taxpayers to foot the bill. You would gather all the big banks and investment firms. They’ll be panicked but they’ll also be saying, give us all the money we’ve lost or the whole economy crashes. They’ll demand it. But this time the feds have to say, Yeah sure, we’ll save your ass, we’ll reboot finance with a giant infusion of public money, but now we own you. You’re now
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In the 2008 collapse, Bernanke had studied the Great Depression and knew he couldn’t just hunker down. He threw money into the breach and they crawled back from the brink. It was only a recession rather than a crash.” Larry was nodding. “And remember, one of the things they did then was nationalize GM. They let Lehman Brothers go down without saving it, and then watched the whole financial world follow it down, and they realized they couldn’t do that with the real economy, so they nationalized GM, took it over, got it back on its feet, sold it back to its shareholders later, and pretty much
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You know that. It’s a fragile system, based on mutual trust that it’s sane, and as soon as that fiction breaks down, everyone sees it’s crazy and no one can trust anyone.
“So then you go to the president and explain that once again the American taxpayer has to bail out these fucking idiots, to the tune of maybe twenty trillion dollars this time. She won’t like that news, right?” “Right.” “She might not just go catatonic, like Bush did with Bernanke, but she will freak out, and she’ll want you to have a plan. So that’s when you tell her to nationalize the biggest banks and investment firms. Bail them out by buying them out. At that point the American people are in control of global finance. In the cosmic battle between people and your oligarchy over
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The Met was now around 230 years old, although to Vlade this meant little. The cathedrals of Europe were a thousand years old, the Acropolis was twenty-six hundred years old, the pyramids four thousand years old, and so on. Age was not a factor when it came to structural integrity. That was a matter first of design, second of materials. In both cases the Met had been fortunate. Vlade had no fear that anything could bring the tower down, it was foursquare and massively reinforced. Unlike the Chopsticks, the ridiculous glass splinters immediately to the south of them.
North’s original design as the foundation for a tower taller than the Empire State Building meant it was immensely strong. It would be fine.
He looked at her with exaggerated amazement. He was a man who really looked at you when he looked. Like you were a marvel.
Finance had once again frozen, as confidence died and trust disappeared, and no one knew what paper out there was good anymore—no one knew what was money and what was dust. The house of cards had fallen again, and the whole world was left standing in the rubble of a crashed economy, looking again at the hapless people running finance and saying Just who the fuck are these guys anyway.
Do you remember Paulson, Larry? He’s remembered as a chicken and a sleaze, because when the whole system was going down he ran up to New York and told his friends he was going to nationalize Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, right after he told everyone else he wasn’t going to. So his friends sold their shares while they were still worth something, and everyone else lost big-time. What? Yes, it would have been insider trading if he had had any investments in that stuff himself, but as it was he was just helping his friends. And now that’s all he’s remembered for. All. Nothing else.
Same as always! But a new Congress arrived in January 2143, riding a wave of feeling that this crash should be different. Plans were in the air, hot words were in the air. Thus in February 2143, Federal Reserve chair Lawrence Jackman and the secretary of the treasury, both of course veterans of Wall Street, met with the big banks and investment firms, all massively overleveraged, all crashing, and they outlined a bailout offer amounting to four trillion dollars, to be given on condition that the recipients issue shares to the Treasury equivalent in value to whatever aid they accepted. The
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Finally Citibank took the deal offered by Treasury and Fed, and in rapid order all the other banks and investment firms also took the deal. Finance was now for the most part a privately operated public utility.
Asset tax levels ranged from zero for assets less than ten million dollars to twenty percent on assets of one billion or more. To prevent capital from fleeing to tax havens, a capital flight penalty was also made law, with a top rate set at the famous Eisenhower-era ninety-one percent. Capital flight stopped, the law held, and nation-states everywhere
These new taxes and the nationalization of finance meant the U.S. government would soon be dealing with a healthy budget surplus. Universal health care, free public education through college, a living wage, guaranteed full employment, a year of mandatory national service, all these were not only made law but funded.
