coincidence and the Times

Two memes in today's New York Times echo recent blogposts.

One blog post was on how DeLong compared the London Whale and the hedge funds who bet against him with the hedge funds who get angry about losing bets to the greatest hedge fund in history, the Fed, which can literally print money. I noted Warren Buffet gave a speech at Georgetown where he called the Fed the greatest hedge fund in history. Maureen Dowd noted Buffet's observation in her column today on Buffet's speech:

He calls the Fed “the greatest hedge fund in history,” and observed of the moment America nearly went off the cliff: “I give enormous credit to Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner and frankly, even though I didn’t vote for him, President Bush.”  

W.’s “great insight,” one worthy of Adam Smith, he said, was expressed in 10 words in September 2008: “He went out there from the White House and he said, ‘If money doesn’t loosen up this sucker could go down.’ ”

The other blogpost dwelled on the lack of a viable socialist movement.

In the Times, two authors wrote about novelists and radical movements.

Confronted with the facts of mass politics and ideological fervor, John Updike and Martin Amis psychologized them away as symptoms of sexual frustration. Presumably free of male anxieties, fiction by women — Deborah Eisenberg, Jennifer Egan, Susan Choi, Barbara Kingsolver, Ann Patchett, Dana Spiotta — has seemed much more sensitive to the variety, ambiguities and contradictions of radical thought and action. (Depicting Robespierre in “A Place of Greater Safety,” Hilary Mantel may have given us contemporary fiction’s richest portrait of a revolutionary.) Remarkably, almost all events and characters in these works are drawn from the past. But then the few people pushed to radical gestures in our own era of unparalleled conformity and political passivity are more likely to be scorned than admired.

More ominously, the future holds none of the possibilities of far-reaching transformation that galvanized a writer like Bolaño. Indeed, his example shows that Trotsky, unreasonably doctrinaire with Malraux, was right in one respect: The writer chronicling political events in fiction is most effective when participating in a historical process or movement. No such tonic immersion is available to most contemporary writers, who, as sequestered as ever, must strive alone to transcend the general impoverishment of the political imagination.