Tonight’s quote comes from one of my favorite songs of the year, “Peyote” by Minnesota rapper Atmosphere.

She goes by the nickname peyote,

Her real name is Iris

Appearance doesn’t matter so I’m not gonna describe it

She was a dancer down at edit this portion

I cant name the spot they don’t merit the promotion

But I been there look like any strip club

Everybody slicked up trying to get they dick sucked

Smoke and mirrors you know fake magic tricks

Like these people didn’t come here just for ass and tits

But this one in particular was popular with midlife ballers

And white collar out of towners

Plus it attracted athletic individuals that came here to play against

The twins and the timber wolves

Safe to say she made the rent good

Twenty years of age a spot up in Kentwood

She had the car, the dog, and the kitchen sink

She had a drug free body didn’t even drink

She had a sister who wouldn’t stop giving her shit

For dropping out of art school to be a stripper

Iris was sick and tired of the questions

But big sis didn’t understand the perspective

She knows her little sister isn’t a slut

But she objectifies herself and contributes to the gluttony

Now here’s Iris stealin’ from the devil to buy some time

To make life something special

Where did you go? When did you fall?

That little one, you all grown up

Oh how they’ve grown, those days are done

Under the gun, now you are dealt

Where did you go? When did you fall?

That little one, you all grown up

Oh how they’ve grown, those days are done

Look at us, who you to judge?

Her oldest sisters name was Jocelyn

Awfully slim, on a diet of bottled water and oxygen

She lives on higher water by the Target

And she dates a photographer, that’s how she started modeling

She ain’t no supermodel, this is Minneap for that you’d have to move to Chicago

Or maybe move LA or NY

Now she does what she does here and she gets by

And her boyfriend gets a little currency

Taking photos for advertising agencies

Now he’s gonna steal from the devil

Stick it to the man, revolutionary rebel

One afternoon after work he went to the strip club

Just to loosen up that shirt

He and a couple job associates are gonna sink them drinks

Like they about to be extinct

Never met his girlfriends little sister

But she recognized him from cell phone pictures

Any other circumstances she’d have hollered

But topless in heels is a little bit awkward

Eventually his friends leave

And when he gets up, she grabs him by the coat sleeve

Too drunk to catch what she said

But he did offer her three hundred on some head, like

Where did you go? When did you fall?

That little one, you all grown up

Oh how they’ve grown, those days are done

Under the gun, now you are dealt

Where did you go? When did you fall?

That little one, you all grown up

Oh how they’ve grown, those days are done

Look at us, who you to judge?

When you do wrong it makes me want to do right

It also cancels out the guilt that makes the load feel light

It also gives some leverage to the morally impaired

So make mistakes for us to hold over your hair

Part Two: John Meriwether and the rise of Arbitrage

In the first entry of this narrative, we paid attention to the story of Lewis Ranieri and the Salomon Brothers mortgage desk in the 1980s.  We will now focus on another major player at Salomon in the 1980s, one whose fame and influence is even greater than Ranieri’s, and who is as different from Ranieri as could possibly be.  That man is John Meriwether.

Ranieri was a loud, fat, New York-born Italian who started in the Salomon mail room and had never gone to college.  Meriwether, on the other hand, was famous for his quiet and reserve.  Michael Lewis, in his book Liar’s Poker, opens with a famous story about Meriwether that even he has admitted is probably apocryphal: the game of Liar’s Poker, a modified game of poker played using the serial numbers on dollar bills, was vastly popular at Salomon at the time, and the inscrutable Meriwether was the firm’s best player.  The story goes that Salomon’s managing partner, John Gutfreund, challenged Meriwether to a single hand of liar’s poker for the sum of one million dollars, and Meriwether responded that he would only play if the sum for the hand was ten million (Gutfreund turned him down, which Lewis says was the intent).  

His first notable trade at Salomon was a classic bit of arbitrage; a trader named J.F. Eckstein’s firm was failing in 1979, and tried to get Meriwether to buy out his position.  Eckstein had sold millions in US Treasury bills, while buying millions in Treasury bill futures (futures are a contract where two parties agree to the sale of a commodity at a set price at a predetermined moment in the future).  At the time, treasury futures were selling at a discount compared to the actual bills.  What Eckstein had done was place a two hundred million dollar bet that the prices of the bills and the futures would eventually converge, but the longer that took, the more his equity value was disappearing.  If he didn’t sell his position, he would be ruined long before the prices converged.

Most people, and most experts, tend to feel that the US economy is in trouble.  Many news stories are a significant part of this: the subprime mortgage “crisis”, the falling value of the dollar, the restatements of financial earnings from Wall Street.  But the actual narrative of how this happened is very poorly understood, and rarely explained in its entirety.  And much information which contradicts what we think we know exists as well: that subprime mortgages represent less than 2% of the equity market, for example, or that over half of subprime borrowers are still making timely payments.

Due to the failure of most Americans to understand the narrative of how we got here, most of us don’t understand what the problems actually are, nor do the politicians vying to “solve” the problems feel the need to address the actual underlying issues.  It is my feeling that it is therefore important to try to tell the story of how we got here in a narrative fashion.

It is that time of year when people start making their “Best of XXXX” lists, and to continue acting as if this was a personal blog, I felt I ought to be no exception.

Those of you who  know me at all know I am extremely passionate about music.  One of my greatest joys is “discovering” a great new band or song.  I spend a lamentable amount of my time indulging this passion – combing mp3 blogs, going to live shows, and so on.  So I thought I might compile a list of the ten songs that I felt most needed to be heard by a lot more people from 2007.  I’m happy to email any of these to anyone, or if anyone would be willing to host them, to upload them and provide the links.

And by all means, please share in my indulgence, and post your best of 2007 lists in the comments.

This post is inspired by previous posts regarding anarchism and government services, in particular the fire department.  My thanks once again to all for the interesting and thought provoking responses.

It is among many of us an article of faith that equality is a good thing, and in particular that government services should be granted either equally or with the intention of creating greater general equality.  Yet, this is almost always not the case.  Most of us believe that fire departments serve to offer all citizens equal protection from fire, and that this is a right that should be extended to all citizens equally.  But this is an excellent example of how government services indeed create inequality rather than decreasing it.  

Take the example of New York City.  Ought Bed-Stuy receive the same level of service from the FDNY as the Upper East Side?  The conventional answer is yes, naturally.  But it doesn’t work out that way, does it?  But why?

The Bush administration is laying out a new secrecy defense in an effort to end a court battle about the White House visits of now-imprisoned lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

The administration agreed last year to produce all responsive records about the visits ”without redactions or claims of exemption,” according to a court order.

But in a court filing Friday night, administration lawyers said that the Secret Service has identified a category of highly sensitive documents that might contain information sought in a lawsuit about Abramoff’s trips to the White House.

Does this look like government “of and by the people” to you?

This speaks to me, and for me.

These guys are Sudanese. They won’t have the British embassy clucking with modulated concern over their fate. The Western press will lose interest in their own fates as soon as, oh – that already happened. They’ll keep doing what they’ve been doing – peacefully opposing tyranny; trying to save a few individuals from it – until they’re jailed or killed or they finally lose hope, or (let’s tell them a happy story to keep them going) Sudan actually turns itself into a better country.

I thought we could all use a bit of a pick-me-up, so here’s some entertaining quotes.  The following are personal ads compiled by the editors of America’s Best Non-Essential Writing 2007.  I find these both to be funny as hell, and also rather insightful into the romantic lives of people today.

American Man, 57.  I just want a girlfriend.  What the hell is going on here?

Angry trollop, 37.  Offers?

Meet the new me.  Like the old me, only less nice after three months without any sexual intercourse.  42 year old fruitcake (F).

Nihilist seeks nothing.

Woman, 43, would like to meet a man – any man – whose evolutionary path isn’t that of Homer Simpson.  Suspecting that’s too difficult, I may go lesbian.

Hello girls of Mumbai and beyond!  I am looking for an obnoxious girlfriend of one week to restore my glee in being single.

The following questions are theoretical questions.  They resemble real-life situations, but are not presumed to be correct in their analysis of actual events.  The purpose of this is to view our reactions to situations in isolation, free of the fuller picture that incorporates all truths.   By doing so, we can break complex reactions down to their components, to better understand the complicated layers of analysis we all use, and to recognize how fallacies in one component of our reaction can cause fallacies to be accepted by the whole of our reaction.

Also by doing so, we can free ourselves to answer the actual question, rather than ask a different question which allows us to give the answers we would prefer.  In the interest of that, and of getting actual answers to the question, I ask that readers consider the information in the questions to the exclusion of real-life matters which are not considered.  If you believe that the questions excluding unasked issues are meaningless, then of course, so would any potential answer to them be.  If those are your feelings, then do yourself a favor and spend your time considering other things you feel are less stupid.