Waiting for an Assignment: A Purdue 1st Week

As you probably guessed, I am an impatient sort. Waiting is not something I do well - it leaves me too much time to think, to mull, or otherwise, to wish things otherwise. (Can't imagine why.) Living in the moment is something I am still discovering anew without my mom's presence in this world.

That said, I have been relatively patient at the start of my first semester in 16 years. While I do the readings, and work better to do note-taking this time, I have been pressing to do something more active.

So I did.

I wrote a 3,000+ word research paper on mortgage-backed securities and the impending cycle of recession to hit China soon over the last few days. I explain the history of the American growth in housing, the hurricane that swallowed a few investment banks (Lehman, Bear, Merrill Lynch) and the investment boom that will shatter China's economic dreams very soon. The parallels are there - shadow banking, overconfidence, a need to make numbers (profits) - but the differences are present too: top-down China edicts and local corruption versus bottom-up hyper-driven consumerism in the USA with politicians buying votes; a growing and flexing of the muscles in China versus the stagnating perils of middle-class America. The long cultural desire to renew the power of traditional China versus the America whining that we were once (a very short while ago) number one, but now, are reaching for mediocrity.

This is a very informal analysis of the paper. I will post the link to the actual one later, after the prof offers a grade, or tells me to cut 1,000 words so she will not have to read too much. Or reorganize the thesis to be a very specific instance - which is a part of writing to satisfy a college template. Not much can be said in 1,500 words where you cannot delve into the back history. (Which I did exceedingly too much of, I presume in this paper, but cutting is easier than adding too.)

For my bet, pros and cons or for-against papers can be sliced and diced anyway you want them. Whether you take an economic, social norms, or ethical path, the audience can ignore it, no matter how fluidly you frame the argument. Long papers give you challenges of finding more data, supporting a pronged argument, and the quest for what is to come. Because, really, if you cannot surmise, or give an example of the destiny of humanity via the present problem discussed, what does it matter?

I write this too to satisfy the requirement of blogging. Not that it has ever been hard to put something down for me. Life misadventures, book reviews, movies, sports, economics, history, and whatever catches my wandering eye shows up in the blog over the past six to seven years.

But the real assignments will come soon enough. And I'll ferret out the details; flush out the crap I suppose still lives inside my ho-hum life; and determine what angle is appropriate given the templates that are a college writing.

Just be patient...

Working Paper: The Real Color of Money

If vulgarity and vice are not your cup of tea, then reading on will not be a fruitful exercise. But if you drawn like a moth to the flame - time to burn!

At the end of the day, when all the work and play is done, you’ve either given a handjob or sucked someone off to a better end (you hope) to improve the next day of sucking and jerking the purple-headed yogurt slinger. Most do this act without a direction or decision to the party involved. You tell the boss, “yeah, I’m on it,” thus jerking him off. The creditor that calls – you give them the handy handjob excuse: “the checks in the mail.” Or you give a current boyfriend a hummer to keep him less suspicious of your backdoor dalliance with that rich old fart that you’ll give handjobs to, for now, in the dreams of the money honey flow. It goes around like this, males and females alike, taken to the task of pulling on someone’s frank in the fiction or perceived escape hatch that we don’t wind up like Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes quipped: “In the long run, we are all dead.”

Leaders of the world give blows to their fellow leaders. POTUS has called up Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi, Robert Mugabe, or maybe Charles Taylor in some woe-is-always-me African nation in crisis, to say, “get it together or get the hell out.” But really, the Prez was just jacking them around or paying “international lip service” – because these dictatorial dudes have all existed for thirty years plus, and will suck on the large financial cock of aid long after the current POTUS leaves for a cushy retirement financed by their own handjob-providing American constituents. (Even as this handjob went seriously awry in the African Spring of 2011. Hey, the Arabs got tired of the blue balls...)

Financial power sucks and jerks Jimmy well too. When ponzi and handjob master Bernie Madoff supposedly sucked the New Yorks Mets owner Fred Wilpon dry of his wealth, the owner dutifully went to the local congressman, or in this case, a former NY governor, tugged on their Johnsons until more liquidity flowed than a thousand pornstars in a congressional circle jerk. Thus, the ‘cock’ ring was complete: a bunch of horny guys participating in a reminiscing frat house elephant walk with money, pussy, and drugs as the usual spank bank enablers. Yet, a lawyer (need I say more?) stepped in to add more sperm to this dish: a trustee for the victims of the ponzi scheme wants Wilpon to pony up some of his returns (about $700 million into the load cycle of this $60 billion plus spermicidal drama.)

The key for these last two groups: they get to pick the size of the pecker and load they will likely handle. It started early on – as general ass kissing – then evolved into well-directed schmoozing, reached mastery as professional lobbying (jerking loads of pertinent knowledge and bullshit and money onto someone-thinks-he’s-important desk or really is the HNIC), then culminated as massaging multiple peckers for multiple ends to get multiple massive loads. It’s a skill to master quickly – as it takes on an importance to the way the Earth revolves. Not enough jerking off going on – the Earth will stop.

Chaos will result.

It happened with Lehman Brothers. One leveraged-to-the-hilt bank failure caused money to freeze up like a frigid old bitty on an Antarctic sperm whaling trip without a dildo to be found for a thousand fucking miles. Why? The merry-go-round of credit cumshots (bankers throwing loads of money around the globe) stopped – no one wanted to pull on Jimmy anymore – afraid they’d be stuck with a steamy load all over their financially fucked faces.

Happen too in the 1920s. Those pesky war reparations were an international jerk off. Germans paid in Papiermarks to England and France. The Hundred Years’ War participants paid American bankers (in real gold, a major cumshot) who then, in jerking off unison, rolled this into greenback paper to shift back to our German cousins. But that ended (someone got wise to the handjob nature of it) – hyperinflation, Reichsmark issued as the new currency in 1924, and a guy name Hitler rose up to jerk three billion or so people off for a decade plus – and John Maynard Keynes was too right about all of it. (As he wrote presciently about the dangers after quitting the Treaty of Versailles conference. The Economic Consequence of the Peace (1919))

Adam Smith, the Wealth of Nations dude, spoke of the “invisible hand” of the market. Wasn’t he just talking about the “invisible handjob?” One – that left to its own devices – will make us all wealthier, happier, and free?

But this all came from the mind of a guy that was ugly as original sin, perpetually buried in books, and made his last lot in life working for the Scottish government in customs – a jerkoff post if ever there was. No, our friend Adam, going back to the bible here, was just as oddly enchanted and slavishly hopeless with women as the next dude, and just never got off enough to make any offspring that we know of. Undoubtedly, Adam split his seed; but to no avail.

While the commoner jerkmaster too can blow hard to the four corners of the Earth, hoping to change his behavior or his stars, he’s sowing the proverbial seeds of his own kind and kin. With the expressed hope that by blowing someone right, he might too wind

up with more stuff to leverage and get more and better opportunities to handjob the right people for the right price, as his lot will surely increase many fold.

He or she will find religion – praise Jesus or Mohamed or Buddha – and keep failing at controlling his or her urges, thus violating his/her own belief system. We do it because someone else wants us to suck them off – give a favor – or jerk them – give them a lie to satiate their human needs for knowing the universe actually supports their little narcissistic plans. Then too we divide along some ideological lines to make this into another game of: “Jerkoff, I win – Jerkoff, you lose.”

Conservatives, for example, adore Mr. Smith – the invisible hand or the “creative destruction” principle – is likened to a sexual experience to them. And what is jerking off or blowing a guy off but creative destruction? (The split seed analogy.)

Not to be outdone, liberal/Commie Keynes likened the economic forces to the “animal spirits” being unleashed. The Great Depression was the abject taming of those spirits. Reminds me of a Bloodhound Gang song, The Bad Touch: “So lets do it like they do on the Discovery channel…”

Another misogynist (note: Keynes detested teaching women, yet engaged in homosexual relationships), Napoleon Hill noticed men of great power must garner such drive from having an intense, ever present, and urgent sexual appetite. The necessity to throw ones dick around to be handled regularly by women, by hook or by crook, is apart of the instincts to success, Mr. Hill supports in his classic tome: Think and Grow Rich (pg 184.)

And Wall Street is full of these swinging dicks. The military too has a swinging dick private, or general, or two. (Tailhook scandal, anyone?)

All ideologies stem from this pattern – someone has to be jerked or blown. It’s inevitable; even God himself is known for blowing hard to part seas or giving us 40 days of rain and flood. (A metaphor is to be had here – but I’ll leave it to you sick and saintly minds to come up with it.)

Our ancestors knew these things – partook of the vile and vulgar such as we do – and whatever principles were, indeed, damned. Nope, these behaviors will go on…and the jerking off story only gets better from here.

(Just don’t get caught on tape doing it. The visual is a visceral no-no if you want to achieve more than any sinful commoner.)

Cross Post: McCain’s judgment in economics is inherently flawed

As the markets spin out of control, with wild swings based on calamitous events such as Countrywide, MBIA, Ambac, Bear Stearnes, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, IndyMac, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and AIG, why do many insist that Bush’s administration, or his party’s nominee, John McCain, have gotten anything right at all?

John McCain’s former top economic advisor, ex-U.S. Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, had a primary hand in the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 that eliminated the firewall protections made by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 between investment, commercial banking, and insurance services during the Great Depression when so many banks failed. As a result of this deregulation, we are now seeing the enormous problems of integrated services spread like a plague throughout the market as many of these financial players mixed investments and savings and high-risk loans together and across various business entities.

McCain’s economic proclamations and company kept should be an albatross around his neck. You cannot expect change from a man that hires people that called Americans, “a nation of whiners,” during an economic crisis of their making. Meaning: Phil Gramm had his hand in your misery and now blames you for it.

Phil Gramm continues to be major cog in McCain’s campaign.

How is that change we can believe in?

Late Addition: (WaMu, another bank, is headed for sale....Yahoo Business)
A quote from the link:

But TPG agreed to waive the clause after concluding WaMu needs all the help
it can get.
"It became clear that it would be in the best interests of
Washington Mutual and our investors to waive the ... provisions," Fort
Worth, Texas-based TPG said in a statement. "Our goal is to maximize the
bank's flexibility in this difficult market environment."
The efforts to
find a buyer, though, were being complicated by uncertainty about the magnitude
of losses still lurking in Washington Mutual's home loan portfolio.
"No
one knows what's in their books," said a person briefed on the talks
between regulators and banks, speaking Wednesday on the condition of anonymity
because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Citing unidentified sources, the New York Post said the potential
buyers include JPMorgan Chase & Co. and HSBC Holdings PLC., as well as Wells
Fargo. The banks all declined to comment.

Nice to see the whole financial system is in scared rabbit mode. Hopping up and down the road, looking for a way out while a Mack truck bears down on their position.

It won't be long now people. Look out below minimum wage workers. Get prepared for calamity you lower-middle class (under $50,000) per year people. Cut back considerably you upper middle class wannabes. The Rich: you'll go to your pile of bricks, lock you doors and come out when the getting is good again.

Good Luck All!