I’ll let the courts sort out whether Mr. Killinger will become the rare banker to be penalized for making disastrously bad loans. But I am fascinated by how his bank came to make those loans despite his foresight.
Answers are available, or at least suggested, in the mass of documents collected and released by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which held hearings on WaMu last year. Mr. Killinger wanted both the loan book and profits to rise rapidly, and saw risky loans as a means to those ends.
Moreover, this was a market in which a bank that did not reduce lending standards would lose a lot of business. A decision to publicly decry the spread of high-risk lending and walk away from it -- something Mr. Vanasek proposed before he retired at the end of 2005 -- might have saved the bank in the long run. In the short run, it would have devastated profits.
Mr. Stanley, the [Grateful] Dead’s former financial backer, pharmaceutical supplier and sound engineer, was in recent decades a reclusive, almost mythically enigmatic figure. He moved to Australia in the 1980s, as he explained in his rare interviews, so he might survive what he believed to be a coming Ice Age that would annihilate the Northern Hemisphere.
Once renowned as an artisan of acid, Mr. Stanley turned out LSD said to be purer and finer than any other. He was also among the first individuals (in many accounts, the very first) to mass-produce the drug; its resulting wide availability provided the chemical underpinnings of an era of love, music, grooviness and much else.
His was the acid behind the Acid Tests conducted by the novelist Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, the group of psychedelic adherents whose exploits were chronicled by Tom Wolfe in his 1968 book "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test."
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In 1965, he met Mr. Kesey, and through him the Dead. Enraptured, he became their sound man, early underwriter, principal acolyte, sometime housemate and frequent touring companion. With Bob Thomas, he designed the band’s highly recognizable skull-and-lightning-bolt logo. Mr. Stanley also made many recordings of the Dead in performance, now considered valuable documentary records of the band’s early years. Many have been released commercially.
Mr. Stanley remained with the band off and on through the early ’70s, when, according to Rolling Stone, his habits became too much even for the Grateful Dead and they parted company. (He had insisted, among other things, that the band eat meat -- nothing but meat -- a dietary regimen he followed until the end of his life.)
PARIS -- As a hero of the French Resistance, Stéphane Hessel was in exile with Charles de Gaulle in London, imprisoned in concentration camps, waterboarded in Nazi torture sessions and saved from hanging by swapping identities with an inmate who had died of typhus.
Now, at 93, he is the author of a best seller that has become a publishing phenomenon in France. It is not the story of his life (he wrote his autobiography years ago), but a thin, impressionistic pamphlet called "Indignez-Vous!," held together by two staples and released by a two-person publishing house run out of the attic of their home. It urges young people to revive the ideal of resistance to the Nazis by peacefully resisting the "international dictatorship of the financial markets" and defending the "values of modern democracy."
In particular Mr. Hessel protests France’s treatment of illegal immigrants, the influence on the media by the rich, cuts to the social welfare system, French educational reforms and, most strongly, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
"When something outrages you, as Nazism did me, that is when you become a militant, strong and engaged," he writes. "You join the movement of history, and the great current of history continues to flow only thanks to each and every one of us"
Since its publication in October "Indignez-Vous!" has sold almost 1.5 million copies in France and has been translated into Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Greek. Editions are planned in Slovenian, Korean, Japanese, Swedish and other languages. In the United States, The Nation magazine published the entire English text last month.
Though this world's essentially an absurd place to be living in
It doesn't call for (bubble withdrawal)
It said human existence is pointless
As acts of rebellious solidarity
Can bring sense in this world
On the positive side, exports and consumer spending are up, and the job market finally seems to be improving. If anything, last week’s jobs report probably undercounted recent gains. That often happens early in an economic recovery because the Labor Department has a hard time keeping track of newly started businesses.
On the negative side, oil prices have risen more than 40 percent since September, and every level of government is considering spending cuts and layoffs.
All in all, the situation is uncomfortably reminiscent of last spring. Back then, companies were just starting to hire again, before a combination of events -- including Europe’s debt crisis and the fading of the stimulus program here -- spooked them and cut short the recovery. It’s easy to imagine how energy costs and government cuts could do the same this year.
NEWS bulletin from the spirit world: The specter of Edward Gorey, who died in 2000 at the age of 75, is haunting our collective unconscious.
In a sense that’s as it should be; Gorey was born to be posthumous. His poisonously funny little picture books -- deadpan accounts of murder, disaster and discreet depravity, narrated in a voice that affects the world-weary tone of British novelists like Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett -- established him as the master of high-camp macabre. Told in verse and illustrated in a style that crosses Surrealism with the Victorian true-crime gazette, Gorey stories are set in some unmistakably British place, in a time that is vaguely Victorian, Edwardian and Jazz Age all at once.
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Gorey illustrations are even becoming voguish as tattoos. Last year the ninth-season "American Idol" finalist Siobhan Magnus had a biceps tattoo of Death playing nanny to a flock of soon-to-be-doomed children, from "The Gashlycrumb Tinies," Gorey’s grimly funny alphabet book.
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Attendance has been climbing steadily at the Edward Gorey House in Yarmouth Port, Mass., and curators of the first major traveling exhibition of Gorey’s original art, "Elegant Enigmas" -- originally shown at the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pa., and now on view at the Boston Athenaeum -- have been stunned by the enthusiasm surrounding the show.
"I knew Gorey had a wide following, but I had no idea of the mania," said David Dearinger, an Athenaeum curator, before the exhibition opened there in February. News media inquiries and calls from the public had been coming in for months, he said then, "and the show isn’t even here yet." Since the opening, he said last month, "the response has been phenomenal."
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Undoubtedly such romanticized visions of a more decorous, dapper past, which also inform the neo-Victorian and neo-Edwardian street styles of goths and steampunks, have as much to do with escapism as historical fact.
By 1933, short-term interest rates were near zero -- just as they are today. As I described in a 1992 academic article, Franklin D. Roosevelt took the United States off the gold standard in April 1933, and rapid devaluation led to huge gold inflows and a large increase in the money supply. Roosevelt also made it clear that the monetary expansion would not be reversed. Expectations of deflation, which had been enormous, abated quickly. As a result, with nominal rates at zero, real interest rates (the nominal rate less expected inflation) plummeted.
The first types of demand to recover were ones that were sensitive to interest rates. Automobile production, for example, jumped 42 percent from March to April in 1933. Inflation did pick up somewhat in the mid-1930s, in part because of other New Deal measures like the National Industrial Recovery Act. But the inflation was modest, and after the crushing deflation of the early 1930s, widely celebrated.
THE triumph of hawkish views on inflation means that there is no appetite today for a Roosevelt-style, inflationary monetary policy.
The collapse of the bubble in 2000-2002 gave the country what was at the time the longest period without job growth since the Great Depression. The economy only recovered from that slump as a result of the growth generated by the housing bubble.
Foreign direct investment in India fell more than 31 percent, to $24 billion, in 2010 even as investors flocked to developing nations as a group.
And in the last two months, foreign investors took $1.4 billion out of the Indian stock market, helping drive the country’s Nifty 50 stock index down 17 percent from the record high it set in early November.
